Bettina is a wild, clown-like yet surprisingly delicate facet of my own identity. In a way she is my id. She is more expressive, vibrant, violent, and feverish than I am. Here, we see Bettina intimately. She is at home, alone in the process of becoming herself.
I'm always amazed by how much and how little can change in six months. While there have been few tangible changes, the last six months have been marked by a significant change in my understanding of myself and my future. I have been trying to reconcile the art world and the fashion world, trying to understand myself as a verbal and visual thinker. I've been trying to fashion a future, however near or far, in which my academic interests are not pushed away by my creative pursuits. I'm learning it's all about my voice and my vision and it's about the world I choose to create.
GIRL IN THE CITY
This is me, sitting in a little hallow in Central Park, just two days after moving to New York. Do I look confused? Jet lagged? I am both. I remember getting dressed in this outfit thinking that I wanted to spend my first free day on my own shooting some photos in Central Park. This was an interesting in-between period for this blog, where I wanted to take photos specifically for glowy girl, but I wasn't really sure what the point of the blog was. It was unclear if I was trying to document my every day outfits, or if I was trying to dress specifically for this blog, and after all of that... who was I anyway, to the world and to the narrative of this blog? Was I just a person getting dressed, or was getting dressed what I did as a person?
THE CINDY SHERMAN QUANDRY
Accompanying the questions about my own identity and the purpose of documenting dressing (could it be called styling at this point?) was the messy question of how this project fit with my art practice. I have long admired Cindy Sherman. You may remember this tote I have with her name on it. I'm a big ol' fan girl because there is something about her images and her way of creating characters and environments that's always made me excited. When I saw her show at the Broad last June, I just sat in the gallery, surrounded by her work and thought, How can I do this, because this is what I want to do. So in styling myself and documenting those looks, it was inevitable that Cindy's influence would permeate the way I approached creating images. But I was unsure about where to draw the line. What was copying Cindy, and what was me? Did she have a hold on styling and fashion imagery in the art world?
PRACTICE AND PROCESS
And.... cut back to Berkeley. Three months in New York had opened me up to costuming in everyday life. I was thinking about drag and Cindy Sherman (still). I was curious about how I could take the photos I had been making for this blog and pivot that into my thesis project. I wanted to bring styling into my art practice. The only problem was that my art practice up to this point had been heavily focused on art objects and the art economy. So, whatever work I did with fashion would immediately be read in the scope of capitalism and the monetary value of images of women. I quickly realized that what I had been working on for glowy girl needed to stay separate from the academic art sphere. While this is a creative endeavor, and my styling choices are impacted by my understanding of art and art history, keeping this work out of an art discourse gave me the freedom to let myself proceed uninhibited by the scruples of the art world.
WHERE ARE WE NOW?
In short, we're (I'm) moving forward. The beauty of glowy girl is that it isn't really a fashion blog. As much as I love Lizzy Hadfield and Megan Ellaby, this blog will likely never be the highly produced, aesthetically unified big-time blog that either of those girls are able to run. I don't think that means, though, that I don't have something to say. glowy girl is a place for Bettina and Alexandra to live side by side, as equally viable entities. So to those of you reading this, thank you. If you are a friend, I hope that this blog reflects the Alexandra you know. If this is your first time here, welcome. I'm an artist, a thinker; I'm a girl getting dressed. Now you know what you're in for.
Hello hello! If you follow me on Instagram, you'll know that I recently chopped off a lot of hair and made the somewhat terrifying decision to get bangs for the first time in over 15 years. I'm taking strides!
I've had a bob like this a few times. Actually, this haircut was my go-to for the better part of the last five years, since I rarely let my hair grow far beyond my shoulders. But in the last year or so, I began to really enjoy my long hair. Particularly this summer, I started to realize the potential of having long, curly blonde hair like mine: it was the ultimate romantic, high renaissance accessory. I've often joked that my personal style can sometimes best be described as the attire of a young prince. I've always been draw to romantic details: eyelet lace, gold, brocade... if I could raid Louis XIV's wardrobe, I would say let me have at it immediately.
As my hair got longer, I became more and more engaged with this idea of romance and dressing. But at a certain point in November, I knew it was time to go short again, and a couple of weeks ago I was gripped by a vigorous, reckless need to just chop of all my hair as soon as possible. So, I booked an appointment for the next day and went to bed feeling nervous (I woke up feeling nervous, too). I was both scared that I would hate having my hair short again, but I was also worried that I would miss dressing like a princess (ha!). I knew that the hair cut would come with a bit of an attitude adjustment.
With my long hair and romantic outfits, I would listen to opera and sonatas to get me in the flowy glowy mood. Now, with my bangs and my bob, I'm tuned in to a more modern masculine-feminine balance. Naturally, my music needed to be updated with my hair.
Drawing upon the starlets of French New Wave film and an 80s rock n roll vibe, I've made a new playlist dedicated to dressing with short hair. Give it a listen and let me know what you think! And if you have any suggestions for additions to the playlist, send them my way.
This is what I wore to the opening of my thesis show. My gold blazer, white turtle neck, hand-me-down green men's Levis, and my white Steve Madden boots. There's not much to add about this, save that I wanted to capture the beautiful golden light on this perfectly crisp Berkeley afternoon. There are times when I'll be walking through campus, in the right place at the right time, and I will see things anew. This is a building I walk past fairly regularly, but I'd never been so struck by its color or its perfect placement among the trees. Moments like this one, when I see familiar places in a new way, are my favorite times to pull out my camera and document myself in the scene.
Finally, a blog post about one of my all-time favorite places in the Bay Area: the Headlands Center for the Arts. There are a few reasons I love this place: 1) It's absolutely gorgeous... out in the middle of Marin, the Headlands Center is one of the most idyllically Californian places I've seen. 2) The Headlands is one the foremost art organizations in the Bay Area, and hosts incredible residencies with huge, sun-flooded studios for visiting artists from around the world. 3) The Headlands was an old fort that was repurposed in the 70s by the artist David Ireland, another Bay Area favorite.
All the buildings in the Headlands complex have been sort of half-way restored, in typical David Ireland fashion. The walls are sealed, cracks and flaking paint and all, with Ireland's signature ocher varnish. The whole place is in a perfect state of preserved disrepair, which I find to be super beautiful, moving, and (oddly) invigorating. The preservation of the building's natural state of decay resonates deeply with me as it is reminiscent of the sort of honesty I often seek in dressing. A natural, stripped back way of dressing that doesn't seek to hide one's natural imperfections is much like David Ireland's treatment of the old buildings that make up the Headlands complex. Ireland recognized and highlighted the grace in entropy.
This was my second time visiting the Headlands during one of their biannual open house events, and I knew I wanted to really take advantage of the setting to wear this incredible yellow dress I had just found at a little thrift store in Berkeley. It is one of my holy grail finds: it fits me like it was made for me, and is one of those amazing anachronistic pieces that makes you feel like you're living in a movie. The sun shone on the sea and the breeze shaped my skirt just so and it really felt like the hills were alive with the sound of music.
Just a few days ago, I wrote about working with Hogan. Something that continues to be characteristic of our work together is the improvisational energy that accompanies our endeavors. On this day, for example, we got out of class at the same time and met up with no plans in mind. Thirty minutes into messing around with movement experiments on unused pedestals in an big empty room, we decided that wasn't working and maybe it was time to head home. As we headed down the hill towards home, we noticed this disused ornamental balcony on the side of the old women's gym, designed by Julia Morgan. It seemed like the perfect location for an impromptu photo shoot, and so that's what we did, capturing this pattern-clashing outfit. I think my favorite thing about these photos is the way the colors turned out. That butterscotch tone is so warm and sweet!
I'm wearing a vintage dress and vintage blazer, hand-made skull bolo tie, and K-Swiss trainers.
Do you remember what you did over summers as a kid? Or what you did when you had a free few hours to yourself as a 10 year old and you could do whatever you wanted? I remember doing one of two things: I would either sit and read through a huge stack of books I had checked out from the library, or I would shut myself in my room with the radio on and get dressed, my closet and box of fabrics close at hand.
As a child who was inexplicably drawn to fashion, I would frequently get asked if I wanted to be a fashion designer when I grew up. I didn't really know any better, so I probably responded that yes, I did want to be a designer. Though I'm still occasionally drawn to the prospect of design, what I actually enjoyed, and what I continue to enjoy, is what I was doing on those summer afternoons. The pure joy of constructing outfits (along to music--this just as important now as it was then!) kept me occupied for hours. I would layer dresses and tights and booties and a big fur coat (mind you, I grew up in Southern California) and then would dance around in my room, adding to my outfit as I discovered new things that I could repurpose as improvised garments. It was enough for me to just stay in my room, listening to music and imagining outfits in a perfect, protected creative enclave.
This isn't to say that I feared approaching the outside world in my outfits. On the contrary, I regularly wore off-kilter outfits in my daily life, probably earning myself the reputation of an odd-ball as a middle schooler. Luckily, side-eyed glances and comments from peers, teachers, friends, etc were not enough to put me off the great pleasure of dressing.
This process of dressing to music in my room is still an integral part of my daily routine and is my favorite way to spend time with myself. When I started this blog, I wanted to create the sort of blog I remembered reading in 2009, before brand deals and native marketing were the raisons d'être of fashion blogging. I just wanted a place to document what I, a super normal person living a non-influencer life, was wearing and feeling good in. As I continued posting, however, this blog became less of a documentary outlet and more of a motivation to create specifically for glowy girl. Suddenly, though I had been getting dressed as I always had, the sense of play and possibility re-entered my experience of dressing, bringing me back to a similar head space as when I had dressed up as a kiddo.
These photographs and this video both document the progression of my experience with an outfit from creative-enclave to outside world. As I got dressed, I was really enjoying layering lots of red. I had just taken a couple of quick photos purely as documentation of what I was wearing. But then I saw a small 6-inch cube I had made in a beginning sculpture class a couple of years back, and I wondered what it would look like if I performed a dance using only that cube as my stage. Thus, the video and the majority of these photos came into being because of that curiosity. After I felt I'd fallen off the cube enough times to be satisfied with my experiment, I left for my the destination I'd been getting dressed for all along: the grocery store.
