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
