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.
