Hi, it's Peter Ricchiuti. I’ve got a scenario I want to run by you, and I want your opinion.

Here’s the situation: It’s morning. I get ready to leave the house. I pick out an outfit, get dressed, I look great. Then my wife says, “You can’t go out looking like that. That shirt doesn’t go with those pants. That tie is hideous. And 1998 called and wants its jacket back.”

So, here’s my question. If I think I look great, do I look great? Or is there such a thing as objective, universally agreed style, and could I, in that case, actually look terrible? Not just to my wife, but to everybody. What do you think?

On this edition of Out to Lunch, I put that question to Tracee Dundas. 

Tracee is founder and Executive Producer of New Orleans Fashion Week. She’s the Fashion Correspondent at WVUE-TV, Fox 8, she’s the Program Coordinator at Dress For Success, and for the past 22 years has worked as a freelance fashion writer and editor at Renaissance Publishing. Tracee also produces fashion shows and other fashion events for regional clients, including Essence Festival.

If you’re a woman of color with larger breasts, and you want to wear certain fashion-forward clothes you see in stores, or on Instagram, you might run into a snag. And that is, getting your breasts to work with that dress. You can do it - but a bra is not going to work. You’re going to need something called boob tape.

There’s a good chance you already know what boob tape is. If you don’t – it’s tape. That holds breasts in place. It looks a bit like duct tape. But when you’re done with it, it peels off your breasts without peeling your skin off with it.

When Kaelin Bass went looking for boob tape, all she could find was tape that was too small to do the job for her breasts. And it was all made to match skin tones that weren’t hers. So Kaelin created her own boob tape. And in 2020 she started her own company, KM Boobies. Today you can find KM Boobies Boob Tape all over, including on Amazon and at Walmart. Kaelin is selling up to 4,000 rolls of boob tape a month.

In business – like pretty much everything in life – you enjoy the greatest security when things are predictable. When you know what’s coming around the corner, when you know what tomorrow’s going to look like, you can plan for a known future.

Well, fashion is the exact opposite of that. The only way fashion moves forward is by changing. And the only way to stay relevant in the fashion business is to stay ahead of the trend and embrace the unpredictable. It's not a business lifestyle for the faint of heart.

Tracee and Kaelin are both carving out successful careers in this world: they're both creating businesses and products that weren’t there before they came along. And they're both doing it from here in New Orleans.

Out to Lunch was recorded live over lunch at Columns in Uptown New Orleans. You can find photos from this show by Jill Lafleur at itsneworleans.com.

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