i'm back on blogger. i've been back and forth about utilizing another google-owned tool but wordpress didn't cut it. tumblr didn't fit quite right for this need. and paying for a personal website in order to blog is not in the budget right now. and honestly, there's this janky kitschy vibe that i love about a blogspot. and then there's a bit of nostalgia. i admit that i am using the same blog theme that i used as a teenager! so, there's a familiar feeling i'm tapping back into, one i didn't expect to come back to in my mid-20s.
i talk a bit more about my fashion—>personal style blogging origins on my about page. so this post will elaborate a bit more and gift you a few images from the vault aka my original fashion blog :)
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out of all the blogs i started in the late 2000s/early 2010s, my fashion blog lasted the longest—for about 6 years. it's not surprising because i have always been a bit obsessed with creative expression in the form of styling myself. around 4 years old, my mom says i asked her if i could start picking out my own clothes. then, my look was majorly sequins on glitter on sequins on hot pink. playing dress up was also one of my favorite activities. my mom says that from a young age, i was always in "princess clothes" while playing like a "tomboy." and she says that all i had were "the type of clothes you might wear to church on sunday" and things like "jeans with pink fur cuffs and a matching vest" and "other clothes that might seem like they're for a special occasion." when she had me, people gifted her so much of that stuff—so why not use it?
as an adult, one of my core philosophies is that being alive is a special occasion. i still love to "dress up" for ordinary and mundane tasks. plus, i feel like that's one way i can reflect and celebrate how inherently creative and magical reality—the ordinary and mundane—is. expressing myself through style, especially as both a shy but creatively expressive child, was/has been an oasis as i continue on the rollercoaster ride that is the human experience and a life of evolution. there are many times where being able to assert myself through my style helped me begin to assert myself in other ways.
all that to say, this *gestures to the blog* is an inner child delight. once upon a time, i used to be so disciplined about blogging, coming up with ideas, reading other blogs, becoming mutuals with other bloggers, and sharing reflections on evolving & little peeks into my world. ((in hindsight, the launch of instagram really changed everything about how i interacted with the internet as a social space and with blogging.)) now, a lot of my reflections on evolving have other outlets in my art & poetry practice. but there's some things that i still can only express through how i style myself.
on my about page, i say i was a Fashion™ blogger before i became a person style blogger. i was one of those teenagers that was reading all there was to read on fashion; looking at fashion shows on style.com, asking for books on fashion history for christmas, buying tons of magazines, watching interviews—you name it. i spent a lot of time on polyvore, i had a lookbook.nu (and all the other versions of that), and found the world of fashion to be just the respite i needed from all things drudgery. i especially loved street style. i still have the satorialist book and it's one of my favorite archives/time capsules. everyone in that book looks so themselves, that's what i love about it. i still get excited to see how people communicate through how they get dressed. personal style is a beautiful language to express oneself through and personal style choices still intrigue me, maybe even more now that i'm older.
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as my teenage years went on, the rose colored glasses came off. it quickly became clearer that the fashion industry was explicitly elitist, centered around beauty standards i didn't value, was as capitalist as any industry, and a major polluter of the planet. out everything my exploration of fashion taught me, i was always most inspired by punk values so the value of personal style was never lost but capital "F" Fashion™? as the years went on i couldn't really enjoy it anymore.
still, i majored in fiber (on a whim—originally i was going for graphic design), studied more about textiles; techniques, the history, the impacts, and i was lucky to be a part of a new natural dye program that began at the same time i was joined the fiber department. being in that mode kept me in the loop re: Fashion™ even as my interest in it faded more and more. at some point a a few years ago, i finally let any last attachments to Fashion™ go. i think i realized that my exploration of my personal style didn't require me to perform "being in the know" about contemporary Fashion™. still, studying fiber created a deepened love for independent designers and all the labor that goes into making a garment or accessory. designers create dreams through their garments.
i recently found a book from the beginning of the Fashion™ era of my life and it made me reflect on why my younger selves were attracted to the fashion world: there is a certain commitment to beauty, on a lifestyle level, that the fashion world proposes and asks its participants to partake in.
it's a sentiment expressed well by Andre Leon Talley: "Ever since Talley described the landscape of American fashion as a “famine of beauty” during the 2009 documentary, The September Issue, the refrain has rung in the ears of fashion editors worldwide. Dramatic though it may be, Talley truly did live his life as if it depended on being inspired and nourished by beautiful things....He believed that dressing well was a moral duty...For Talley, life was challenging but it was gorgeous, too."
sans elitism et al., i love this influence the fashion world has had on my life philosophies. as the book i found says, "fashion people are creatures of habit...like a family, they share a strict code for a 'stylish experience': fun characters, unpretentious luxe, impeccable professionalism, outsize punch, authenticity." the fashion world taught me to have standards, to stand on them, and to explore what a beautiful life is to me. it validated my innate sense that beauty is worth attending to, growing, and sustaining in one's life. on some level, it reflected my core belief that everything is a miracle and a wonder and that daily life is indeed filled with magic and strange earth aliens who express themselves in all sorts of ways. personal style choices reflect and communicate so much. how we get dressed reflects what we have inherited both collectively and individually. it reflects how we feel about this inheritance and what we've decided to do with it.
(please click image for a larger and clearer view)
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here is the gift i've promised you. these are some of my favorite outfits from 2014 (14/15 years old). if you've read my post about having a capricorn MC, then ou konn deja that i was on my dapper behavior. by this point, i was fully indulging my minimalism arc:
and here are some of my favorite blog photos from 2013 (13/14 years old). i promise i've tried to wear more colors many times over the past decade... each time has been a flop... it never feels like me...still, even i am surprised at how long i've been wearing this much black lol:
se sa, orevwa
mwah
thanks for reading!
<3
