if it's good it's worth it, or, a long ramble about fashion feels.

 Note: This is a long blog post and I know the text of my blog is small, you might want to enlarge it. Also, read the actual paragraphs first and captions second, I only included images so you wouldn't die of boredom. I CARE. 

One of my favorite things to do is visit stores where I can't really afford stuff and obsess over my favorite designers. I try to only buy investment pieces now, which means I spend more, but also, (ideally) less often. The idea of the investment piece to me used to be a super statement piece, usually runway -- because most of my investment pieces are runway Comme des Garcons, haha. Investment pieces don't have to be expensive, just high quality, something you know you would wear for years to come, something that hopefully means something to you, made with quality craftsmanship. This eliminates most fast fashion but also, if you think about it some high end products too. I mean, just because it's expensive doesn't mean it's good.

JW. Anderson Min Skirt, $665. Proenza Schouler Leather Woven Skirt, $648.

There is an inevitable markup for it being a label of repute, but putting that aside, it just might not be made well enough if you look at the stitching, it might not have lining (or be lined properly), it might not fit just so, the fabric might be totally average (why the hell would you spend hundreds on a 100% polyester dress, I truly do not know). I think there is a lot of value in actually going into a store and looking at clothes before you plonk money down. It's not always possible, but it's important. Physical interaction with clothes is the only reason I bother going to events anymore. I don't care about your DJ. I don't care about your catering (unless it's yummy and open bar, let's be real ok), if you're trying to get me out of my hermit cave you better present something worth the trip. Seeing friends is awesome and luckily part of the job since so many of them work in fashion for a living, but I want to be impressed and inspired by the clothes in the industry -- because people revolve in and out of their jobs in New York like musical chairs, but the clothes will stay for years.

The fact CDG used this quote is funny because Rei adamantly doesn't align her work as art, she is a businesswoman. To align herself with Ai WeiWei, a political artist and dissident, is great/funny/strange, just like her. The method in which she does business and brands her company is as political and paradoxical as her designers, and so I love her endlessly not just for the designs her house produces but the method in which they are represented. It's this rebellious, masters-tools-to-fuck-with-the-master's-system approach to things that I look for in all of the brands I admire.

 That being said, there are a few brands that over the years, I've grown to totally obsess over and admire almost as much as CDG. Their craftsmanship totally blows everyone out of the water and it's clear even in a 2D landscape the internet is, but in person, I literally cannot help myself from petting their work hypnotically. It just kind of shouts at you and is utterly impossible to ignore, because it's so good. Literally perfect seams, perfect cuts, perfect lining, the fabric is beautiful, supple, and often intricate. And when you do a little research and realize they source the highest quality products from all around the world just to weave in layers to form the perfect basket weave or the most luxurious, strangely psychedelic brocade, you kind of get overwhelmed. Or at least I do. Because it's really the end result of a long process of a lot of communication between multiple factories around the world (or even the now rare local garment industry), a lot of testing, probably a lot of failing, and all of that work went into every yard of fabric and every button and now it's in your hands. That's so fucking cool to me. That's the perfect balance of art and commerce. That's the fashion system in the purest form.

Ann D. is a fashion saint when it comes to her method to design which is why I'm including her. You should read the quote that goes with this image here.

 It gets muddled with diffusion, with knockoffs, etc -- though it's clear those are parts of the system as a whole now too of course -- and the quality is lost for easy profit margins the farther down the line it goes. But when you see the original, pure end result of a small label's work, it's something I can't help but appreciate and be in awe of. Because yeah, J.W Anderson and Proenza Schouler might be now international fashion names but they still have a very small workforce. Actually, Anderson and his small team (I think maybe 11 others work with/for him?) produce every piece. The name might be big but the workforce is small, and it took so much to get here. And it takes very little to reproduce the material idea and the profits are disgusting, and sometimes the knockoffs are weirdly good, but you know, I'm a romantic and I want the real thing, I want a connection and I want to pay my respect to all of the people. All of the people, not just the famous designer name but their workers, and the factory workers they get their source materials from that often have shitty working conditions. Paying it forward helps sustain so many relationships that are the backbone of practices that make every beautiful piece of clothing we see on the runway, and those practices are dying out or being bought up by LVMH etc in an effort to survive.

Chanel Couture. It is absolutely gobsmacking how stupid expensive a single piece of couture can run you, but also, how much labor goes into it -- hundreds, no, thousands of hours of manual labor and so many people contribute to every hard of embroidery. Feathers from one part of the world, beads from another, buttons from another, fabric woven somewhere else with materials from 3 places.....etc.

Sustainability is a difficult practice to get down even theoretically and as such we don't discuss it a lot in fashion, we're more focused on immediacy and we're suffering for it. I think Karl Lagerfeld is leading the pack in terms of keeping small, high quality fashion manufacturers alive actually, and that is because LVMH gives him free reign and essentially endless spending money. But the details of that deal are pretty vague to me, and I wonder if the places they save are working exclusively for LVMH now or are able to work with small independent designers., ones in the margin. I think if we're going to discuss sustainability we need to find responsibility within ourselves to contribute to that and not expect big corporations to buy up small ones to have them survive. Personal relationships as a consumer seem to be diminishing, and it's a little scary, you know? Because fashion as an industry based on hierarchies means that somebody somewhere is getting screwed over really badly and I want people to care. At the root of it all, my interest in fashion is a feminist one.

Jesus. I didn't expect to write that much. I mean, I think about this stuff all the time but I never really write about it, outfit posts are """""easier"""". But, I don't like being seen as purely a personal style blogger because what I'm really interested and what got me interested in blogging was actual FASHION. Blogging weekly about "look at the cool stuff I'm wearing" is not fashion so much as a personal statement of brand and identity. That's good and all but it's not as interesting to me. I pretty much stopped caring about what I wear anyway because everything I own is nice and goes together because I have a method and it leaves me room to think about stuff I care about. And I care deeply about fashion as a system, as a process to study, as something with theory behind it. So I'm gonna write a lot about actual FASHION because I think if people know more about it as a system that participates in capitalism they will maybe think more critically about what it means on a personal level. By that, I mean as in how its related to personal style blogging, and how that relates to their purchasing power, and the visibility of people in consumer culture, and how that is linked to systems of oppression, and maybe that will bring some change.

This is my version of activism, this is what I have knowledge of and what I know I can provide, and this is something I don't see talked about much in the fashion blogosphere by "popular" fashion bloggers which I guess I am considered a member of. But I want to talk about things that matter in any way that I can. And well, I guess this is how. I hope you actually ended up reading this whole thing and wanna talk about it with me too.

Much love,

Arabelle

 

hope springs eternal

"Never forget what you are, for surely the world will not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armour yourself in it, and it will never be used to hurt you." (x)

Nan Goldin, Amanda in the Mirror (1992)

some notes on napkins.

Visionaire / Comme des Garcons via  rifles @ tumblr

“…the female narcissist is dangerous to patriarchy because she obviates the desiring male subject (loving herself, she needs no confirmation of her desirability from him). in the case of an artistic practice that performs female narcissism (such as wilke’s), the threat lies in its making superfluous the arbiters of artistic value. already presuming her desirability, wilke obviates the modernist critical system; loving herself, she needs no confirmation of her artistic “value.” 

—	amelia jones, body art: performing the subject

“Those who subvert social norms are, ostensibly, people who have forgotten that they can be seen, publicly, at any time. Therefore, when they transgress social norms—by expressing physical affection for a person not visibly coded as the opposite sex, for example, or by being fat and rejecting social and bodily invisibility—they need to be reminded of this omniscient social gaze, and in the absence of institutional discipline, must be punished so they do not transgress again. This is the mechanism by which a dude who sees me in a vividly-colored dress, walking alone as though I either don’t know or don’t care that I am defying bodily norms, feels compelled to scream “UGLY FAT BITCH” at me. He is applying social discipline and teaching me a lesson: Everyone can see you, and your body and/or behavior are unacceptable.”

—	So Michel Foucault and Jeremy Bentham walk into an elementary school cafeteria*

Cindy Sherman Untitled #479, 1975

I have been very very happy lately, friends and parties and Beyonce do that to a person. That doesn't mean I haven't been thinking critically though... and thinking critically makes me feel sad in kind of a detached way. I wrote this the other night on my tumblr, and I collected all of these things on Tumblr too, but I need the conciseness of a blog post with all of them together to understand what I want from art / critique / myself. Anyway, here goes.

I want ridiculousness in fashion. I want ugly. I want destruction, I want imperfection, flaws, ripped seams, extra armholes, mutated glory that when people walk by me they whisper that they just don’t get it. I want to confuse you. I don’t want timelessness. I want everything, right here, right now, no regard for looking regal or rich or calm and collected. Why do I have to be classy anyway? Why do I need to impress you? When I slip on something I love I’m not doing it for you, I am doing it to feel good about myself, I am doing it to be transported into a place in my mind where I am safe and powerful and the cracks in my existence are filled with gold and diamonds and chocolate and goodness. I want to be able to change what I’m wearing mid walk — flip my jacket inside out, upside down, endless options, I want to tear apart what I’m wearing and what I represent and build back up again. I want you to have to think about what I represent, the space I take up. I want you running scared because you don’t understand and I don’t want you to. Every fucking seam of my jacket represents something you can’t have because I don’t want you to. 

This is mine. 

All mine.

 You can’t have it. 

if the clothes fit

Someone asked me if I consider myself a fashion blogger or makeup blogger or what. At first I was offended (I get defensive easily LET IT BE KNOWN) but then I thought about it. It's a perfectly reasonable question to ask, considering the state of this blog. I'm not as interested in "fashion" as I once was, let's start there. As in, I don't spend hours trolling thru style.com archives anymore, taking notes on each and every collection in a Google Doc when I'm supposed to be paying attention in class. It's not as though I'm ignoring fashion, but rather, my focus in the industry is very finely tuned -- now more than ever. I know what I want out of fashion and I'm focusing all my personal style and creativity on attaining what I want out of the industry -- nothing more, nothing less. I think that is what makes fashion empowering to me, as a feminist. I use fashion as a tool of power/personal identity as much as I am used by fashion as an influencer thru my voice in social media. When people ask me about how I can possibly be feminist and be into fashion I feel like the answer should be obvious: it lets me do what I want. The end.  Minh-Ha T. Pham says it pretty wonderfully in this Ms. article:

If feminists ignore fashion, we are ceding our power to influence it.

 I mean, I get why people don't 'get' the fashion industry, I get that the representations of it can make it seem like a totally shallow, soul sucking industry. It can be. The parodies and satire are funny because they are sadly, woefully, true, in a lot of cases. Fashion isn't deep unless you give it depth. Once you put power and thought behind it, put meaning, it becomes something else: agency. Now, this agency can sometimes be at odds with privilege. It can be hard to like fashion when the only versions of fashion we see in popular culture are the ones modeled by skinny young white girls whose bodies don't resemble ours, who're wearing $500 tshirts and $798 skirts and $1000 worth of jewelry on each wrist. Make no mistake: I'm not hating on the people who can afford these things. Because rich people who see themselves in the popular representations, they might be using fashion as a means of identity, too -- it might just be easier for them to do it. There is nothing wrong with being rich, it's what you do with the money that counts. People read designer clothes and see what they want to see, you know? People see expensive clothes and think, "That person has it easy. That person is probably not like me." And it's easy to hate someone for it. I've done it before and I'll probably do it again in the future, I'm not perfect.  But you also have to take into consideration that fashion can't be equivocated to designer clothes -- it's bigger than that and it's smaller than that. Essentializing it into a scene for rich white girls is selling it short. You're dismissing the power it can give you, and that power is one of the most pervasive and widely used forms of communication you can have as a person. I mean, yeah. I think it's really stupid and fucked up that fashion designers don't make space for larger sizes -- I think it's unforgivable, really. And I think there needs to be a change. There is a lot wrong with the industry, but I think at heart fashion can be good, too.

 I think it's weird that people hate on fashion and in the same breath encourage people to "be themselves" and be unqiue. Girls are told we should "maintain ourselves" and in the same breath it's apparently uncool to be girly because being girly means we're dramatic and troublemakers and guys have 'so much less drama' and blah blah blah. All the mixed messages can really fuck with a girl. And I think a lot of the resentment towards fashion can be grounded in self-hate & the special snowflake complex.There's another blogger that said it pretty succinctly:

Jenny Holzer, Source

“Fashion is one of the very few forms of expression in which women have more freedom than men. And I don’t think it’s an accident that it’s typically seen as shallow, trivial, and vain. It is the height of irony that women are valued for our looks, encouraged to make ourselves beautiful and ornamental… and are then derided as shallow and vain for doing so. 

I love fashion. I hate fashion. I can't really live without fashion, because I can't escape clothes. I can claim defeat and pull on sweatpants and keds or jeans and a hoodie, but it's like slipping into someone else's skin, it doesn't feel like me. Fashion gets me into my own space, it's like I can breathe properly. I know that fashion can make people feel really bad about themselves but I think if you subvert it and use it and make it work for you and not the other way around it can be more than you'd ever expect......use the power it has and you get stronger because of it. I wrote a post about agency and fashion a little while ago, if you remember. The words are as relevant as ever:

I always return to the sentiment that my favorite clothes are my armor and my friends. They will never fail me. . . Clothes give me agency where talking often fails. . . I can be a feminist and also love fashion because I believe that your style and how you approach the industry and dissect and create the media can give you agency, give you a voice, give you strength. Passion in any form, like getting dressed (even if that is a simple form), just says that I am here and that I exist and I am not ashamed.

this is my armor and you can't chip it

 Sooo a change in scenery seems to be in order! I love the basement but the lighting completely sucks and the dorm maintenence crew likes to creep by and judge me a lot so I moved for today. I like it! Reminds me of my bedroom back home but I have way more room here. I noticed how much my last couple of outfits on the blog kind of blend together, and IRL they don't, but my favorite outfits usually are in this palette and with variations of this jacket or that skirt and that top. My roommate has more clothing than me in the dorm! No one understands it but it's because I have narrowed down my clothes. I mean I have an obscene amount of clothing, like, 4 closets technically, but I decided to only bring what I love and can't live without and it's surprisingly very little. And I haven't been compelled to buy anything recently, because what I want is very specific and I don't want to buy anything less than my dream items.




I actually get into arguments with my roommate (in a good way, we're very good friends from High School. I think she was one of the first people I bothered telling I was homo? I was never in the closet I guess if you were to think about it, because I never realized being straight meant you couldn't think about girls....derp) about clothes a lot. Like, she has so much more of it at our dorm -- her closet is twice as full as mine -- but she dislikes it more and doesn't wear probably 80% of it. The way she gets dressed is a lot different from mine, and the way she approaches clothing is much different than how I approach it. Granted, I approach style, fashion, and just getting dressed differently every day because I don't feel like the same person on a day by day basis. I used to use it as a means to purposely differentiate myself and have fun and get around my school dress code and just revel in direct translations of my inspirations, but now I don't think so much about it.



 For the first few years that I got into fashion I used to scorn people who wore really basic, black outfits, etc, and swore I'd always "be ~unique~" and whatever that shit but now I think I feel most myself in simpler compositions and palettes. I mean, I am totally happy wearing colorful outfits (I am a color queen, let there be NO DOUBT) but whenever I feel very unsure of myself or even just very happy, just in general very something -- I always return to the sentiment that my favorite clothes are my armor and my friends. They will never fail me. And most of my favorite clothes just happen to be darker and have richer textures and are very delicate and strange. Clothes give me agency where talking often fails. I've become very introverted and introspective in the past few years and my favorite films and my favorite songs and my favorite clothes got me through. I can be a feminist and also love fashion because I believe that your style and how you approach the industry and dissect and create the media can give you agency, give you a voice, give you strength. Passion in any form, like getting dressed (even if that is a simple form), just says that I am here and that I exist and I am not ashamed.

there is no magic word for how i feel

Thrifted Shirt, Vintage Leather Shorts, c/o Rebecca Minkoff Bag, c/o Steve Madden Silver Oxfords, Zana Bayne Harness. It looks like I have a weird rash on my leg but IT'S THE PHOTO FILTER I SWEAR OK

 I was initially reluctant to talk about it (uhm, my being queer) on FP.... it's not that I was ever in the closet, or hiding it from the internet, but FP is a personal style blog and most of my random talking falls into my tumblr. But I have been getting dozens of tumblr asks and emails talking about femme invisibility lately and lesbian self doubt, being uncomfortable with labels, et all and I guess the short of it all is that I've been there too, and I am still there. Being un-straight is hard. For anyone who doesn't identify as strictly heterosexual, we constantly deal with labels, with coming out, with finding others like us, with presentation, with whatever. It is kind of like falling over yourself in the dark, over and over again. Everyone deals with wondering who they like, I guess, but for a lot of queer kids it's not just wondering who they like, but how to translate your feelings about people into a word. Just like, a single word.

Straight kids won't ever have to do that, because their sexuality is normal, represented everywhere, all the time. That is their privilege. They are lucky to have that. Good for them.

Privilege is not something to be ashamed of, and I don't hate straight people, or anyone with privilege.....not on the basis of them having privilege, anyway. It is just imperative that those with privilege acknowledge it. That, of course, is the funny thing about privilege: it's privilege because you don't notice it. It's just there. You don't wonder about it. You don't question it. You dismiss it as the way the world works. Queer kids will never have straight privilege, not in this system, not in this society, not how it is right now, but I mean, it's getting better. But we're still operating under a system where there is one normal, and everyone else is just that: someone else. The other. Queer kids fall into that category.

Now I don't mind being the 'other', and that is perhaps because I don't "look" gay. I don't "look" gay enough to get bullied, I am too femme for people to be like, "look at that dyke," or for people to come up to me and say they've always wanted a gay best friend, or any of that stuff. In fact, lots of people don't realize I'm queer at all. That, you could say, is it's own form of privilege.

I didn't realize there was a word that fit me for a long, long, time. And sometimes there are days that I feel alienated all over again, and I sit lost in thought shuffling through the words that are available: queer, fairy, lesbian, gay, homo, dyke, fag, etc trying to find something that has a ring of meaning to me in it and I can't find anything and I just give up. I do! And I think that is ok. It's scary and weird sometimes, not having a magic word that encompasses who I like, how much I like them, how I like them, and all that stuff the word "heterosexual" or "homosexual" entails, but that doesn't mean it's bad. It's different.

 I think we fear that if there isn't a word to describe us, that it means we don't exist or that something is wrong with us as functioning human beings. But there isn't anything wrong with us, it's the system that is fucked. We're changing it though, by talking about it, by acknowledging that it's fucked, that is has to be better, because we have got so much to lose and so much more to gain.

There are so many more things I'd like to talk to you about, and I will, but for now I just wanted to get this out first. I was at my college QSA meeting the other night and we all discussed this exact topic and I wanted to write down my thoughts, so that people who weren't there but want to talk about these things know they are being talked about, and we can talk about it together if you want. This is so, so long, sorry!!!! Anyway. Thank you, love you, bye.

on complexes and vibes and moods and "trends"

http://aacgoddard.blogspot.com/

The internet is boring me. Since most of my days are spent on the internet in some form or another -- tweeting, watching Netflix Instant, blogging, whatever -- it's not really a surprise, but it's more about actually being tired of seeing the same things over and over again. I am tired of saccharine sweet. I am tired of being drowned in nostalgia everywhere I look.  I am, simply, tired. I want something new, fresh, angrier, more passionate, something -- anything -- than what I am seeing everywhere, all the time. Because to be honest, everyone is doing the same thing and it's boring the shit out of me. Real talk.

I hate everything in my closet right now. Everything. Nothing is simple enough, pure enough, clean enough, enough enough. Do you understand what I'm saying? I don't even know what I'm saying. I probably sound puritanical or something. Basically what I mean is that I am seeing the same vibe everywhere on the internet and where before I was inspired by it, now I feel stifled by it, like I can't escape it or even know how to escape it, and it's seriously infringing on my fashion and style boner.

Summer dressing is always dreadful for me because I am obsessed with layers, but in a way I am thankful to have to deal with the summer heat because it has forced me to look at my style differently. I don't feel like it's progressed much this year, I dunno if it's obvious to you guys since I hardly do outfit posts but I haven't been impressed by it recently because it isn't challenging enough.

I'm at this point where I don't know what I want in terms of style: simplicity? Hardly. I yawn at "effortless American chic" and ridiculously embroidered dresses and strange deconstructed works of art are still my favorite things. Do I want edgy? Ohmigod, if there is one thing I have never been it's 'edgy' or 'sexy'. I feel stupid and uncomfortable trying out those adjectives. That's the thing: it's me trying. When it comes to personal style, I never try. I don't understand when people ask me how I put outfits together. It's not rocket science, I just pick things instinctively. There is no great and complicated process. It happens in less than a minute. I remember times where I used to plan my outfits days in advance and would daydream about inspiration and it would be a thrill, but my life has changed and my processes have changed in response to that.

Maybe that is why I'm so bored right now. Everything is both homogenized and comfortable; I'm not being challenged, I'm not having to think, everything is just so and the pool of inspiration is just like a big pool of nostalgic glitter and lace and frilly over the top patterns and melted candles and cobwebs. That is fine. I get it, and I still like it -- it's just not for me anymore. It's still pretty and dreamy, but it's feeling a bit stale to me lately, you know? It's like when you listen to a song you love one too many times and it instead becomes a song you skip over on shuffle. I don't want to constantly be reminiscing about the past. The past never moves, never changed. It  isn't romantic to me anymore. It's just the past. You already know the past; it's nostalgic because you edit your memories of it to make is something you want to cherish. If we focus too much on it and model our present on it, then what have we created? Nothing. It's a copy of a copy of a copy. The total sum is zero. Nothing has been gained.

There's this thing Raf Simons said that has been lurking in my head for awhile now, I think it's pretty on point:

“The future, for me, is romantic. I don’t understand people who say the past is romantic. Romantic, for me, is something you don’t know yet, something you can dream about, something unknown and mystical. That I find fascinating.”

I want something else for myself right now. I'm not sure what, but I'll let you know when I've found it. Wish me luck.

i let you call me beautiful

“You Don’t Have to Be Pretty. You don’t owe prettiness to anyone. Not to your boyfriend/spouse/partner, not to your co-workers, especially not to random men on the street. You don’t owe it to your mother, you don’t owe it to your children, you don’t owe it to civilization in general. Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked “female”.”

 - Erin

James Franco for Candy Magazine.

I caught myself putting on makeup today even though I was running late to a presentation (unfortunately I was too late to enter, because of traffic, and so I ended up siting on the train reading a comic book for three cycles between the first and last stop just to make the trip worth it). Anyway, I was doing my makeup, and doing an incredibly pain in the ass kind of braid because my hair is particularly troubling this week and you know, it wasn't very enjoyable but I felt like I needed to do it because it was expected to me because of what I do for work and play: fashion fashion. Somewhere along the way I decided to make what I love, what I do. Even if I'm going to be poor indefinitely and be unsure of my security for quite awhile and you know, get those looks of both sympathy and pity when parents ask me, "What do I do?"

You know, that look. Sometimes I switch up my major when I'm telling parents of friends what I'm in college for, just to fuck with them. "Philosophy and Cinema Studies." And I see their horror, imagining their children proposing those possibilities to them and I cackle inside, I know it's not nice but well, whatever. I mean, I'm majoring in Gender Studies and Journalism, (so honestly I can just tell the truth and still get that reaction of horror) which are two of the lowest paying majors out of all of them. Fun. Promising. Dirt poor. But, you know, I find the future romantic and I am a dreamer, I like to get lost in my own brain and plan and plan and plan and plan, because the future has every possibility of being better than the past and the present, and I bank everything on those possibilities. 

But anyway. Being pretty. Too often it's just a ritual, sometimes I have to yank myself from habit and intentionally dress ugly to make myself comfortable. Because feeling socially acceptable and 'pretty' is different than feeling like yourself, you know? People have to 'put their face on'. People have to 'get ready to face the world' in the morning. There is that old tale, I think it might actually be in the original Alice in Wonderland (or maybe it was a Grimm fairytale? I love those) that the protagonist stumbles upon a princess, who has a collection of faces but no actual face of her own. And I would just stare at the illustrations of the faces for ever, longer than I would even read the story. We're like that sometimes, aren't we? We don't like showing our faces. 

Sophia Wallace and her series on Gendered  Beauty. 

I guess I could make the point of this post the fact we sometimes rely on makeup to approach the world, but that's done and stale. I mean, yes, but it's certainly not all we rely on. Everything we present ourselves as is a point of presentation and construct and our assumed reality. What we want people to see as us. That can mean anything, boy or girl or genderqueer or nongendered or what have you. I am lucky enough to identify as a girl, and so I am a girl, and most of the time because I am a girl I make myself 'pretty' even if I hate the stares and catcalling and honks. But I don't want to have to do that. I don't think I owe anyone anything when it comes to being pretty. I want to do it for me, not someone else, you know? What I present myself as isn't for someone else's benefit. 

I started playing with my gender when I was visiting someone in an elderly home, I have this hat, my black fedora, and whenever I wear it I want to be a boy and wear Dior Homme suits and slouch even more than I do and not be pretty. I feel like it's an act of rebellion just to wear a dudes hat and ill fitting jeans I stole from a boy I used to know. Everything you wear, everything you chose or chose not to do, can be an important choice. You can be pretty if you want to be, or you can not be, but I think, the important thing is that you make yourself aware of the reasons you are doing so, and hopefully you can also step outside your comfort zone and shake shit up. 

Because a dude wearing a skirt shouldn't be sacrilege (!! Andrej!!), a person who doesn't want to be manly but feel beautiful should feel safe to do so, you know, just these small but important things should be allowed to happen. Right? Right. I don't want future children to be beaten or disowned because we're scared of people who aren't like us, or didn't follow the unspoken rules about dudes wearing certain colors or wearing certain clothing or whatever. I hope one day it's just common sense, not abnormal. 

I let You Call Me Beautiful by Marty McConnell (my favorite poet)

the pursuit

 I cannot understand the desire to be normal. Normal is the starting point. You go through things to make you who you are. Different. Something else. Normal means you did everything as expected, you didn’t take any chances, you did what was expected of you in the situation, you didn’t do something away from average, you shed away from the spectacular, the scary, the weird, the awesome, the frightening. why would you do that? why would you want to be average? Average is to conform. I mean literally, the definition of normal is conforming to a standard; usual, typical, or expected. WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT? WHAT IS THE ALLURE OF BEING TYPICAL? I am terrified of the typical. I am in a constant race with myself to become different from what I once was, I go through stages of myself, I metamorphose into different caricatures of myself constantly to make sure i am never quite the same as i was before. If i change at least it means i have done something. Sometimes this fear of sameness paralyzes me and I sit in my bathtub with the water too hot and the lights turned off and pretend I am lava and I am melting everything away because then I am nature and I am an unstoppable change and everything is better and I can breathe. 

I relish the thrill of being afraid of my own self, like when I put on an outfit that I know is really strange and I know people will look at me funny or that time I chopped all my hair off and dyed it a thousand colors and everyone looked at me like I was too scary and stopped talking to me. I liked it because it meant I had become the idea of me that I had In my head. I don’t know if i can really explain, but, you know, when you look into the mirror and you see someone and it doesn’t match up to who you are really in your head? My life is a pursuit to figure out who that person in my head is, really. When I was little I think in my head I wanted to be like megan fox, only megan fox didn’t exist yet to me. but I wanted to be normal. And the fact that I didnt look like me, that in reality, in the mirror I was just a skinny as fuck chinese girl with a square face and bad acne... that fact felt unfair to me so I decided if I couldn’t become perfect then I would rebel against it and wreak revenge upon the mirror and the fact it betrayed me and thats what I did. I guess I escaped the mirror and I am glad I did but now i feel sad because i cannot relate to people who still want to be normal.

Normal is losing to me. I don’t want people to understand me, I think, because that means we are the same, and that means I am normal when i’d like not to be. 

Purity Ring- Lofticries from David Dean Burkhart on Vimeo.

I am in a really contemplative mood right now, just cleansing myself of the fear and negativity and resentment I've built up at school over the year. I think I'm ready for the summer and a big change -- I wonder what? -- and just having time to think and relax and stuff. Anyway, I hope everything is going well with you, and that you are happy. I'll talk to you soon. 

lookin like a new wave nun

It's my 18th birthday today you guys!!!! This is a scheduled post because I am (hopefully) out doing something productive and cool. Or I am sleeping.

It is also...the blog's 3 year anniversary. Thank you for sticking around for so long, newcomers and old friends. Through the random hiatuses and my long winded rants, I just wanna know my life wouldn't be the same without this blog and the people I've met through it. Thank you for everything. ♥ I've made the greatest friends from this blog, and I'm constantly making new friends. But I can always use more friends and new blog reads. So please leave a comment and I'd like to check out your own blogs too. :) Payin' it forward! I wanna see new blogs on my blogroll.

This is what I wore Tuesday. I woke up early to go do stuff outside my house but I got side tracked by the k-drama Secret Garden and was so consumed with rage at the main character being a huge creep and potential rapist that I didn't go out at all. (HE IS SO CREEPY I HATE HIM NO ONE CAN TELL ME DIFFERENTLY) (Ha I bet Luxirare is shaking her head at me right now. Don't judge me for my koreaboo habits!!)

Anyway yeah. I was feelin a moody dominatrix witch vibe but it ended up being a "New Wave Nun" look as my parents describe it. Whatever works I guess I don't know blahhhhh. Here is a death stare to silence any criticism of my outfit/life/choices.

More photos after the cut, along with clothing credits. Go!