RED DANCE

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.