Most Important Ugly: A Retrospective

In October, it'll be a year since I started on Most Important Ugly with my partner-in-crime Tayler. So much has happened since then, the opening and the exhibition seem so far away now. I'm incredibly grateful to all of the people who ended up going to see the show -- our first ever -- who bought the zine, who shared it with their friends and family, and also the the press who covered it. I just wrapped up the last entry for the Autostraddle series dedicated to MIU, where I detailed the process behind all of the shots we released. I thought it would be useful to have a space to link to all those posts and offer some final details about the products I used.

1. Most Important Ugly: I Believe Makeup is Magic  (Mars & Melissa)
2. Most Important Ugly: Becca, Bekah, Angels and Masks 
3. Most Important Ugly: Brandon, Tyler, and Gendered Makeup
4. Most Important Ugly: Massiel, Coco, and Meta-Human Experiments 
5. Most Important Ugly: My Chemical Romance and Other Majestic Monsters
6. Most Important Ugly: The Final Monsters 

For details about the shoots, I suggest going to those individual posts. For specific product details and why I like them, hop through the read more. 

Mars & Melissa, ph. by Tayler Smith

mermaid princesses and tartan queens

Pretty much every Saturday now is dedicated to artmaking with Tayler now, it's my only free day of the week really but I spend most of it working on my girlmonstering photo series. These snaps aren't part of it, they're just pictures we decided to snap at the end of our shoots today to commemorate our working together and our excellent outfits. I've had a rough past month or two and so I decided to wear Scott's dress throw myself into things I love and not look back. It's working and I'm really grateful and inspired by my friends and the work we're doing. 

Tayler and I dyed each other's hair impulsively last weekend and watched My Mad Fat Diary together as a bonding ritual before our photoshoot the next day. I let her do what she wanted with it really, we couldn't find my regular dye in stores (it was the weekend before Halloween also, so venturing into Ricky's was similar to a gauntlet in Hell) so she just used a bunch. 

What I would give to go back in time and run some dry shampoo through my hair before these photos, oh my god. Oh well, these were shot in like twenty minutes, you can't expect perfection. I put my makeup on real fast and didn't bother to wash the product off my hands from when I was doing other girl's makeup. That's all black lip tar on my hands by the way. Tayler's wearing a CDG skirt she spied at Tokio 7 when she went shopping with me (she went back and bought it cause it haunted her....I'm a good influence), you can see why we're friends. 

I think this snap was just to adjust the lighting but I like it the best, I think. Anyway, I hope you're all having a rad weekend. If you're located in or around NYC and you're queer and/or a WOC and down to be a model for our photo series just drop me an email, we're always looking for models. Here's kind of a moodboard and general idea of what we're focusing on if you want to know more. We're keeping all the photos under wraps which is so hard! We want to show them SO BADLY but I think keeping it close until it's ready and more finished is the right thing to do. I'm excited and proud of what we're doing though. I think you will be too once you see. 

politics of presentation

“There is never a sudden revelation, a complete and tidy explanation for why it happened, or why it ends, or why or who you are. You want one and I want one, but there isn’t one. It comes in bits and pieces, and you stitch them together wherever they fit, and when you are done you hold yourself up, and still there are holes and you are a rag doll, invented, Imperfect. And yet you are all that you have, so you must be Enough.” - Marya Hornbacher 

I just want to seriously say that my blogging is probably going to change. Post-CatLadySoul tumblr actualities means more about me and less about dealing with bullshit. I gave a lot of myself in every medium and made myself really approachable and now I want it to be more about me now. And by that I mean like, not about an image I present, not all outfits.... my personal style is kind of whatever now anyway. I want to talk about fashion. The things about fashion that make me fall in love with aesthetics. The things that influence me and ground me and elevate me, and not the surface effects. My personal aesthetics can go whatever somewhere else. It's more about the ritual of it to me right now than the outcome. I am obsessed with rituals.

Take for example, the ritual of getting dressed to go out. Since depression, I have cute clothes and wonderful things to share, but I mostly wear all black, cashmere, big sweaters, Whatever Outfits, and just focus on my makeup. I can pull together a nice outfit blindfolded simply because my closet at my dorm is well edited to the point that it's kind of impossible to fuck up (unless you really insist on wearing slob clothes, which I do, and which is why they have their own drawer so I don't have to face my Cute Clothes) but I usually only have the energy to do so much before I wanna just crawl back to bed and watch Breaking Bad, and lipstick is easier to put on than Comme des Garcons. Privileged Depression Fashion Problems, but you know, I work hard for my money when I'm not depressed. Anyway. When I get dressed now, I zero in on my face and hair because they are the things I see first and most in reflective surfaces, and my black outfits are just there for mood. I just want to see Me now. Remind myself I'm still here.

So this weekend I had my webcam running pretty much all the time as I got ready to go out, just because #narcissism. My makeup process can take anywhere from 5 minutes and out the door to 3 hours, depending on glitter, and effort, and change in plans, and also my Netflix queue. I am just endlessly amused at the fact that I can change my appearance so thoroughly using mica and powder and lighting, you know? I find pleasure in the transformation and the exploration of myself. Clothes don't hold much interest to me in the transformation category at the moment because I don't have the money to spend on the clothes I want anyway, and I'm just Bored, so now my obsession has gone straight to makeup. And it's more fun, because you can do a lot with so little, and it's easier to fuck up, which also means it's easier to discover new things. And I enjoy that a lot. The concentration and skill required to get a perfectly even cat eye, the artistry of blending scarily dark pigmented shadows so you don't look like a clown, obsessively checking for fallout, for unblended areas, for bleeding of lip color, for symmetry. You're constantly busy creating this image, and it makes everything else fall away and that is just such a nice safe haven you know? 

“Busy the body, so the mind can be free” - Wade

 I especially like, though, going through this ritual of conventional beauty but fucking it up a little. Making it wrong and awkward and taking possession of it so instead of hiding behind something pretty, but ultimately hollow, making it raw and exposed and melodramatic. I like developing myself as a character in my head and then releasing it into something else. The process of creating something very pretty and then fucking it up is something I've always been obsessed with, which is why I feel such a kinship to Comme des Garcons & co. I don't want everything perfect and in place, I want everything slightly off kilter. I want it personalized. I want things to serve me. I want the experience of being able to take what hurts me or makes me anxious and turning it against itself and utilizing all the ugly feelings and making them into something I see home in. It doesn't matter what the other people see as long as I see something that gets me through. Consequences come after my process and the eventuality of a process being over means it did it's job, and I'm still here, and that is all I can really ask for.

Jean-Paul Sarte, No Exit

Peter Greenaway, The Pillow Book, 1996.

Things I feel a real connection with at the moment:

• Brian Eno 1996, A Year of Swollen Appendixes. My favorite excerpt: "Art is something that happens,  a process not a quality, and all sorts of things can make it happen."
• This poem by Shinji Moon.  
• This playlist. 
• This movie.

Ben Vautier

This is primarily a continuation of a text post I did on girlmonstering you can still read here. 

The storm is making the lights flicker so I've got to go pack an evacuation bag. Hope you're all safe and whole. - Arabelle