picture-a-day 43008: the build-up

four papers due between now and next week, and exams to come in the weeks after that. i've got the mess to prove it.

and this isn't even my room. sorry, cam.

cite your sources

anyone remember that post on fashionista about wearing something a friend already owns? when i first read it, i assumed that i definitely wasn't the type of girl who cared about that sort of thing. but then a series of events occurred that have since convinced me that maybe i do care.. a lot.
take for instance the post i wrote - and later deleted - about one of my roommates buying the same marc jacobs umbrella as me (while constantly calling attention to the fact, mistreating hers, and then attempting to steal mine), and the intense frustration i experienced as a result.
still, i felt that this was not unreasonable anger on my part. i mean, we live in the same room.. her cramping my style was bound to piss me off, right?

but then there was the girl i saw walking around my boyfriend's dining hall wearing the black latex-look aa leggings that i caught so much criticism for when i first wore them on campus. i didn't know this girl, but i got a little upset nonetheless.
"would i sound like a bitch if i said i look better in them than she does?" i asked.
my boyfriend's affirmative response signified the potential need for a self-assessment.

it gets worse. apparently, now if a publication touts something i own, it's unforgivable, too.
there's a new student publication on campus, current events, lifestyle, arts, fashion, all that jazz. they proclaimed that white oxford sneakers were a great piece for spring fashion. i considered not wearing my white oxford sneakers anymore, the ones i bought last week, for fear that people might think i was mindlessly following the trend.
my boyfriend's disapproving looks confirmed that maybe i was getting a little out of control.
(note: also, why was this even an issue? i pledge allegiance daily to the trends dictated by the runways every season.)

and now, as i settle into the role of a blogger, i'm noticing how the fashion blogosphere creates a big fashion-centric high school environment for us all, where can marvel, envy, and take notes on exactly what stylish women are wearing all over the world. i, for one, envy those lucky enough to live in california or similar climates, the ones lucky enough to already be wearing those shoes, the ones that have been all over blogs lately. when i buy those shoes and if i post about them, i won't be able to help but feel a tad passe, and yes, it will irritate me a bit (though not nearly as much as the umbrella debacle).

am i getting overly self-conscious, self-righteous and out of control? yes. do i need to scale it back? yes.
and now that i've self-diagnosed, it's time to self-medicate.
the next time my roommate asks if i'd be "offended" if she buys something i own - and she always does - i'll tell her yes, terribly offended, and our relationship will never be the same if she does, and leave it at that.
pertaining to the things that she already has that are in my wardrobe as well, i'll try to be flattered.
outside of that, i need to relax.
there is an undeniably wide, wide world of fashion, but at the same time, there are only so many pairs of shoes, pants, dresses, tops, and skirts to go around. and even less truly good-looking ones at that.
so if someone has the same shoes as me, or vice versa, i will remember that style is in the details, the nuances, and the je ne sais quoi that i know everyone has.
and when i'm feeling a little insecure, i'll buy vintage.

1, 2, 3, 4

once upon a time in high school megan and i used to write notes to each other.. like, all day long. elaborate, hand-written notes with pictures, confessions, good news, secrets and nonsense, written out during several morning classes and passed along in the hallway to be replied to as soon as possible. i suspect we did it because, just getting to be friends at the time, we were shocked at how much we had in common. i know we did it because we were bored and couldn't stand to listen to what actually went on in class. we probably did it as a form of therapy, and i'm guessing we did it because it was a lot of fun.

one ubiquitous feature of our notes was the 'reasons to live' list, though we later changed the title to 'reasons to smile,' reasoning that reasons to live sounded a little dark, a little suicidal. anyway, the reasons ranged from 'spring is coming!' to 'going shopping this afternoon!', to '(insert boy's name here) is amazing' or 'step practice today!'.. and though the items on the list were usually things that made the writer smile, i think it always had the same effect on the reader, as well. it was a simple gesture that always seemed to put things in perspective and make things seem a little brighter. and because today is literally not bright, and this final stretch of papers and exams and whatnot has really got me down, i'm brushing the dust off the old 'reasons to smile' list and giving it another shot.

Reasons to Smile

1. spring time: despite the rain and a slight chill, it is spring, and that is a beautiful thing. the winter could not have lasted longer, and now we're only a stone's throw from summer..

2. speaking of springtime, i bought the most amazing vintage dress last week.. everything about it screams sunshine and happiness. i may be exaggerating, but this is a great dress. unfortunately, the lining was absolutely wrecked so i had to have it fixed, but i'm picking it up today! pictures to come.

3. and on the topic of pictures, i'm starting a picture-a-day project.. of anything, just so that i don't turn on my camera and wonder why i haven't documented anything in the past month or two.

4. i'm tempering my excitement until i hear back from my grant application, but i won't lie, the prospect of a month in france does make me smile whenever it crosses my mind.

5. i don't really know how last summer got away from me in terms of reading, but this summer i've got so many great books that i want to read! an excerpt from yesterday's conversation with taylor pretty much sums it up:
me :: TAYL i got the most awesome of awesome books yesterday you're gonna love them and we're gonna go to central park in the sunshine and read them while eating ice cream and dipping our feet in the filthy ponds
tayl :: YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS OH MAN YOU JUST GOT ME SO EXCITED

6. regardless of whether or not i end up going to paris, summer in the city of new york.. yes. scouring the island for vintage finds with jessica, flea markets, driving around with taylor with loud music and windows down, muggy nights, lazy days.. yes.

7. and sophie and sarah are spending the entire summer in new york as well, which is sure to make for great times.





8. summer dressing: dresses and sandals and short sleeves and sunnies neons and florals and NO COATS OR SWEATERS

9. cameron bought me a new sketchbook = start drawing again

10. cameron in general

11. rock the bells = kid sister and the cool kids again = joy

12. taylor says to expect a painting from her in the mail soon.. i don't know to what i owe this great pleasure, but i'm glad to receive it

13. the i-D magazine i just bought.

14. happiness, health, and great clothes!

happy birthday, megan!

the rain caught me unprepared with no jacket or umbrella, and there was an inexplicable half hour wait for the shuttle, so i had to walk home and i'm soaked, but nothing can erase my smile because today is megan's birthday, my style soulmate and the silent but supportive other half of this blog! and in honor of this special day, a virtual gift basket is going out with lots of love to my dearest.




first off, a tea party with mary-kate olsen and nicole richie, with extra seats and crumpets in case marc jacobs, andy warhol, karl lagerfeld, or kid sister decides to show up. secondly, speaking of tea parties, that alice in wonderland tattoo you've been wanting.. thirdly, a super-classic pair of ray-ban wayfarers. there are no sunnies out there that wouldn't flatter your face, and therefore there's no other choice but to return to the classics. then for summer, some bright accessories from your namesake of a couple of summers ago, chloe. and last but not least a mixtape:


hello stranger - barbara lewis: because i haven't seen you in awhile, and andy warhol writes about this song in popism<3 href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=FyEFc72xIEE">boy in a rock&roll band - the pierces: for all the best between you and cory

air war - crystal castles

the breaks - kurtis blow: because.. well, you already know

helter skelter - the beatles

i turn my camera on - spoon: for the most photogenic girl i've ever known

'88 - the cool kids: for a throwback to our year of birth!.. and the old school hip-hop heads we once aspired to be

hair - hair soundtrack: because yours has been every style and color under the sun, and i've yet to see it look bad

shopaholic - verbz: because if this isn't our theme song, i don't know what is

time of the season - the zombies: love.

have a perfect day, dear!

up, up and you know the rest..

i have two brothers, five and ten years older than me, so action figures, comic books, video games and superheroes figured prominently into my childhood at a very early age. i did have a major barbie affinity though, and i deemed myself to be a very girly girl, so i remember feigning indifference for x-men and spiderman when i was forced to watch tv with my brother, but in reality, i loved it. my unbroken losing streak couldn't keep me from playing video games with them whenever someone needed a second player, and despite my supposed disdain for the games, i was known to have a small fit if i wasn't being included in the gaming fun.

my superhero love has grown with me, so it's probably no surprise that i'm mildly stalking the superheroes: fashion and fantasy exhibit, coming to the met on may 7. and the exhibit-related spread posted on fashionista has just made me that much more excited for it (coco rocha ALWAYS = love in my book, but those pictures are beyond amazing). with that in mind, i set out to rediscover the sartorial and historical roots of my favorite lady heroines.




jubilee debuted in 1989, and boy, is it apparent in her clothes. i absolutely loved jubilee, even though my brother was always telling me how useless her powers were. but look at her - could there have been a cooler x-man? i think not. according to her wiki, she was born to wealthy chinese parents in beverly hills, and was on her way to becoming an olympic gymnast, but she also happened to be a major mallrat. in other words, she was lisa turtle for the comic book set. awesome. jubilee's super bright and bold ensemble is definitely represented all overthe spring08 runways and the street as well. loving it.




i'm not exactly sure how i became aware of cammy.. i was way into street fighter (chun-li, anyone?), but cammy wasn't in the game that we had. maybe i heard of her through one of our several fighting games, marvel vs. capcom, maybe. anyway, when i hit up style.com recently and saw the "marching orders" piece on military-inspired looks on the fw08 runways, i imagined cammy to be a super body-con incarnation of the look. also, a little unexpected body paint never hurts.




speaking of body-con, i remember always wondering why psylocke was barely clothed. but nowadays, my older (wiser?) leather skirt and latex legging-wearing self totally appreciates her bold fashion sense. like so many style daredevils, psylocke is british, and is quite a saucy little minx to boot. she's gone after several fellow x-men, single and married, and has undergone several costume changes over the years. she's even died once or twice. when i thought of her, i immediately thought of manic panic hair dye, and some notably body-conscious pieces and lines like hervé leger, vpl, and those american apparel leggings that changed my life.

..and those are the heroines that first come to mind. while i love psylocke's body-con suit, wonder woman and supergirl's all-american version of body-con never much appealed to me.. in fact, i never cared much for them at all. but i'm sure i'm missing a bunch of other stylish heroines. which superpowered ladies inspire your outfits (or halloween costumes, for that matter)?

here's the plan.

ready?

first i'm going to make it through this day - class, tutoring, work, studying, postering in my dorm for the fashion show..

then tomorrow i'm gonna get to campus at 6:45am and stay there until late night, helping to put on our spring concert (gavin degraw & wu-tang clan),

and then this weekend, i will possibly go out to other school's parties to promote the fashion show, work at home to promote the second concert going on next week (braddigan), and somewhere along the way, do some homework/studying/reading

next week, i'll be continuing to publicize the upcoming fashion show and concert.. thursday is the concert, friday is the fashion show

but on friday, jessica will be coming to town, so i'll be entertaining her next weekend, again hopefully finding time to do some schoolwork

and all along, i'll be writing the remaining 4 final papers, 2-4 response papers, and french compositions that stand between me and summertime,

then starting may 2, my events will all be done, but i'll be buckling down to study for all of my exams, ending may 22,

at which point i'll stat my spring clean-up job campus, leading to my reunion job looking after kiddies,

and then i'll finally make it home by june 8, and if everything works out with my grant applications, i'll be heading to paris on june 14 and coming home on july 19,

which is when i would start my camp job.. which i think will end around august 12.

and since i don't want to leave this blog alone until then, i'm going to add 'maintaining this blog' to the plan.

c'est bon?

a-hunting we will go

major absence, yes? my life is a whirlwind of responsibilities, homework, applications and upcoming events right now. i definitely overbooked myself and am now (and will be for the next several weeks) paying the price for it.

i've busted out my trusty old account book à la holly golightly, except i'm spending much more than her and i don't even have a sally tomato to balance my accounts. the fact remains that i'm trying to keep tabs on and reduce my spending, but the days here are (finally!) getting warmer and i'm dying to make some great spring/summer purchases.

my first plan of action is to cut my spending on food to channel it into other purchases, which is not so much a resolution to starve myself, but a plan to resume eating in the dining halls, even if their menus don't always float my boat. i take solace in the idea that while it's not the best food in the world, it is a distinctly college experience, one that i will (maybe) miss when i've graduated, so i'll take advantage of it now.

my second plan is to get back into vintage shopping. i've been known to supplement my wardrobe with vintage pieces pretty regularly, i guess, but i was beginning to grow tired of it. but now i think that happened because i had eased up on my online vintage searching and had resorted to hunting in person, which is great, but limited in my area. does anyone know of any good vintage shopping spots in the boston/cambridge area, outside of oona's and the garment district? that i can get to without a car? yeah, i know, my options are limited.

anyway, in the meantime, my convictions have been fully reaffirmed looking up my old favorite ebay haunts, though it's a struggle finding a suitable price range, especially on the nicest items. but that, my friends, is the true thrill of the hunt, yes?

yes.

oh, wow.

so you know when you have those back to the drawing board moments? like you're writing a poem or drawing a picture for instance, and then you take a look at someone's work that's just far superior in every way imaginable, and you just know it's time to go back to the drawing board. and it's not a negative or resentful feeling, more like a simple inspirational acknowledgment that, okay, you've seen the bar raised, and now you're gonna push yourself and just do your thing that much better if you can.

well.

i guess you could say i was plodding along through life, thinking i was living moderately stylishly, though i'll admit i've given myself plenty of leeway for non-fashiony days, due to school and overwhelming responsibilities. but overall, i thought i was doing a pretty good job of it all. and then i stumbled upon this. and then i knew it was time to go back to the drawing board.

there's a definite language barrier here, for sure, but who needs words with pictures like these? i don't even know if this blog is run by one girl or many. there's so many pictures of different well-dressed girls. but the girl who clearly has the most pictures puts together outfits that are truly to die for. thank you for showing me the light, underbaraclara.

p.s: thank you, ny times! for some reason or other, i love reading your fashion&style section, and i feel like it's been majorly lacking lately, but these articles are pretty decent. i'll even forgive you for waiting this long to talk about the victoria beckham marc jacobs ads.

once upon a time you dressed so fine

*audrey hepburn (my first true fashion idol), jacqueline bouvier kennedy onassis (i thought i'd put all of her names since i've got outfits from both eras), grace kelly (grace kel-ly, who my boyfriend actually measures modern attractive actresses against), marilyn monroe

here's to the women who did it first, the women who did it best. the ones who inspired our grandmothers and our mothers before we stumbled upon their greatness on our own one fine day. the ones who've entered the pop culture lexicon, and the ones whose cool factor has gone underground since their heyday. the ones who showed us what the epitome of glamour looks like, and the ones who demonstrate how the simplest garments and accessories can make or break a look. before the olsens, before cory kennedy, before kate moss and agyness dean came the original icons. here's to you.

*twiggy, francoise hardy, grace slick, edie sedgwwick, andy warhol

yesterday's mess

poor picture, i admit.

and my dorm is atrocious. at least i have two other roommates to blame for the mess.

even though every bit of clutter in this picture belongs to me. oops.

nothing special about this outfit, i just had that first day after, must wear new garment! bug.

my legs had so much space yesterday, they didn't know what to do with themselves. they're still recovering.

that's all.

STOP THE PRESSES

can we have a moment of silence for the end my skinny pants streak? i bought nothing but skinny, skinny, skinny for maybe two or three years straight, and today without warning, rhyme or reason, i stopped into urban and picked up these bad boys on the left. okay, i'm lying a little bit.. i saw them on sunday and thought them over for a couple of days before buying. but this picture doesn't even do them justice. they are WIDE legs. and they're super long! i'm like 5'7" and they're majorly dragging the floor in flats. i need some crazy carine roitfeld-height heels to wear them with or something.. hopefully i'll find a way to make them work.

shake a tailfeather: the results

well.

i didn't get a new flapper dress. i hit up the closest vintage store, and their "vintage" flapper dresses were clearly costumes marked up at ridiculous prices. so i just bought some gloves and a headband and went digging in my own room for other accessories. the good old college way!

results below:

edit: holy crap when did i get linked on style bubble?! i was just going down the list, clicking on all her links, and was totally stunned! it was a total "pandora's- pandora's closet? not my pandora's closet.. nooooo" moment.

shake a tailfeather

when i was in middle school, for some reason everyone in my class (or at least most of them, anyway) was convinced that they were gangsters. gangstas, to be more precise. so everyone's aol profiles were decked out in red and black impact and haettenschweiler fonts, proclaiming threats against anyone who dared to mess with their crew or talk shit about them. one popular term for gossiping that seemed to prevail over others was "flapping." as in, "you don't know shit about me, so stop flapping your mouth," or simply, "stop flapping." the phrase always made me cringe.. it made me think of skinny little preteen girls running around with no teeth.

anyway, there's no real reason that i brought that up except for the fact that that's the first thing i thought of when my roommate told me that there was going to be a speakeasy party on saturday. and then the second thing i thought was could this be any more perfect? the answer is no. i'm pretty positive that i'm the only girl who brought a flapper dress to college twice (that is, once in freshman year and once in sophomore year) on a single thread of hope that it might come in handy at some point. which reminds me, i've seen one too many of the same dress that i have going for hundreds on some reputable ebay stores. i mean, it's great if you want to pay that much for it, but you could easily go to any halloween store or website and pick up the same thing for about twenty or thirty bucks (plus a feather headband!).

but in typical me fashion, i'm taking this concept way too far, and i now want to go searching for an even better flapper dress.

p.s. this whole thing makes me think of agathe from stylebytes. is it just me or does that woman lead an absolutely charmed life? she's gorgeous, a lovely home, an impeccable sense of style, she spends her days and nights in the most idyllic ways i can imagine, and a stylish husband and adorable pet pig to boot! le sigh.

photography by hilde groven at phiary.

over spring break with my roommates, i proposed the notion that from now on, live in pursuit of aesthetic pleasure and nothing else, and let the rest fall into place accordingly.

sara retorted that, though it's a good idea, the essence of an aesthetically pleasing life is the money used to achieve that goal. money that we don't have at this stage in our lives.

then i'll consider this a personal challenge. all or nothing.