Fairfax

Some of you may have noticed (or maybe not), that I haven’t been posting photos of my outfits as much as I used to. I hate to sound like your stereotypical shady lover, but I can explain. Let’s start with the genesis of this blog.

I created this blog in the spring of 2013 because I went to London Fashion Week and got snapped by Vogue Italia and they asked me if I had a fashion blog and I said no. A few more magazines, the British Fashion Council and even a small group of German design students asked me the same thing during that week and, by the end of it, I decided to make a damn blog because then I could say yes. Plus, since high school, different people have told me that they’d memorize my class schedule just to see what I’m wearing, so I thought that, by creating a blog, I could eliminate a lot of time-manipulated walking on their part. (In retrospect, I don’t see why people went through the trouble because my outfits were pretty basic in high school and during freshman and sophomore year of college I was floundering in the dark abyss of my bio major so my daily look was a catastrophe. I’m fairly positive I wore pajamas every day to class. In fact, I distinctly recall wearing a red penguin-printed onesie to Contemporary Topics. My friend Hannah can vouch for me.) I also figured it’d be a great portfolio for jobs because I wanted to defy my Asian upbringing and work in fashion.

Fastforward to last year when I sorta kinda (not really but I guess really) stopped posting outfit photos. I got my dream fashion job around the same time I started experiencing an identity (clothes-dentity?) crisis. I had just ended a long-term (at least for me) relationship and was feeling a bit lost because I had put so much of myself into the relationship. It was like I was so fiercely independent for most of my life and then I found myself in this relationship where I couldn’t imagine myself without the other person and then the relationship ended and it was just me and I felt very much like Jean Valjean in Les Mis when he’s like “Who am I?” minus the “24601” part because I didn’t even have that to answer my (non)rhetorical question. That’s when I decided to strip my style to minimal bones in order to “find myself” again, which led to the whole outfit blogposts thing falling to the wayside because

1)   I was wearing a V-neck with high-waisted jeans every day.

2)   I was working the fashion job I wanted so I didn’t need a portfolio for job applications.

Around month two of the fashion uniform diet, I started to feel very boring. I thought that by wearing the same thing every day I could force my identity to reveal itself through other facets thereby supplying myself with a tangible, and less clothes-centric, source of self (Lord Voldemort, that was too much “self” for one sentence/I experience a visceral discomfort when the same word is repeated in one breath/Unless I’m using it poetically as anaphora). Anyways, that was not the case. It was very much the opposite. I felt less like myself without the eclectic wardrobe. So, shortly after this epiphany aka probably another month or two after, I slowly rekindled my love affair with the whole gamut of styles and reunited with my chameleon soul and also sent my friends Ronnie and Hunter very long psychoanalytical texts about my sartorial reversion.

I realized that, for me, what I wear has always been my way of expressing my individuality. It’s what makes me unique because it’s purely my own creation. I use clothes as art. Through my style, I am able to unleash my creativity. It projects my perspective, my mood, my interests, my influences and even my aversions (like when I was a student at the University of Notre Dame and used my style as a reactive statement against my oppressive prison of soul-sucking homogeneity). I think, for a while, I thought I didn’t have a firm grasp of my identity because I used clothes as a means to show who I am. And because my style was so fluid it meant that my identity wasn’t solid. But then I read this piece in Man Repeller about David Bowie and how he embraced superfluidity as identity and how multiple personas don’t negate a strong sense of self and that’s when it all clicked.

As Joni Mitchell says, “You don’t know what you got til it’s gone.” I didn’t know how important my wide-ranging style was to my sense of self until I restricted my outfits to a uniform. So short story long, my outfit posts are making a comeback but I don’t want to do the same old stand-in-front-of-a-brick-or-graffiti-wall shot (only sometimes). I want to create a narrative with each look. Marry clothes, photography and words into one blogpost to tell a story. I want to revert back to middle school and high school me. When I’d explore my environment, DSLR in hand, with friends; snapping shots in a sea of sunflowers or crashing waves or creepy city corners. I want this space to function as a creative outlet. Where I can let my imagination flow just to let my imagination flow. At least that’s my plan and I hope I stick to it.

On that note, see above for my first photo adventure of 2016. This was a thrifting excursion (in which I did NOT find the $1 destroyed, boyfriend-fit Levi’s of my dreams) turned mini Fairfax photo shoot with my photographer friend Nicole. We just had fun walking around the area, climbing shit and making silly faces in front of pastel walls. Then we ate at Café Gratitude which is muy delicioso! We have more thematic, story-focused photo adventures planned for the near future so stay tuned!

xx