Thursday, December 26, 2013

short intermission



Boots - Camden Market £25




I have about 3 unfinished draft posts I need to add to, and choosing which one to use first is why I have left this abyss of time between my oh i am probably returning to here post and this one. The top photos are film ones from way back in September from the same day I posted this on Instagram, and I will call them self portraits because I set everything on the camera manually despite my mother acting as a tripod. I forced my parents to take me to this nearby country house because I had been growing obsessed with them at the time, and I took these in the greenhouse there. I used to visit this place a lot when I was younger when my grandma used to be a gardener there so I roughly remembered it. My dress is vintage from Etsy and I was bought it for my GCSE results in August.

Below is a recent outfit - the skirt is irritatingly lopsided because it is too big, but wearing a belt makes it too short, so wearing it requires vigilance. 


Coat which is too long for me - Zara £70


White shirt - Topshop £20
Black vest shirt that people i know despise and refer to as that top - eBay £10
(legit (how exciting)) Chloé skirt - eBay £14
Shoes - Dr Martens eBay £25


(appreciate the print)

Hope you had a good Christmas!

-Hollie

Tuesday, December 03, 2013

St Ives & Penzance

Hello! My reasons for not blogging pertain to the same 'crisis' thing I had back in summer. I consciously took a break from sharing stuff instantaneously, and consequently, I've allowed myself to think and make things and go places without the nagging thought that I may only be doing so to have something to blog about. I've done this blogging thing for so long now (all of my _____teen years) that it began to feel innate to share stuff and trace all of my references. I think I found myself questioning how much of myself was real any more. I found I wasn't allowing myself or my blog to evolve naturally due to this now instinctive consciousness and analysis. Around this time I watched an interview with Simon Amstell where he stated that he began to look for comedy in situations almost before living them. He said he sought out comedy in everyday life to be able to use in his shows 'scarily quickly'. This kind of precedent is mirrored in my blog (but obviously not with comedy (instead with fashion and colours etc)).  I began to wonder if I was forcing things, and the notion that I may have become dependent on validation scared me a lot. 

Many people have written before about the fact that seldom things are original (some Tumblr quote says that striving for authenticity is the more important alternative) and apparently this is heightened with the prevalence of the internet now, which is culpable for the relative dissolution of subcultures (things change too fast) eg Courtney Love on Miley Cyrus. Again this legitimacy archetype applies. Too many things to question. This all came to a hilt with a passing comment someone made to me over the summer about me looking young. It made me question my entire existence and by the end of the following week I'd cut half of my hair off and had begun purging one bag of rubbish from my room each few days. I have also restricted myself to wearing only black clothes for the past 3 months, partially for practicality (sixth form blah hate not being able to match clothes blah money blah) but also to rouse the expulsion of what I felt was somewhat fake from my life. In this time I feel I've grown up a lot and it's been a sort of a long awaited detox.

Anyway; I'm planning on returning slowly to blogging now but my posts may be different WE'LL SEE.

 One of the things that I did keep constant was keeping my camera on me, though it did take me about two and a half months to use up one roll of film (despite having used 1 roll a month for the past few months), again to counteract this am i taking my camera to take photos to ultimately share online mentality. Nonetheless, I now don't feel any particular rush to post in real time and I've had the photos below for over a month without the compulsion to share. I think of it as more of a choice to put this here now rather than more of a mandatory obligation.

SO, I went on a trip to Cornwall from the 7th - 9th of November. It was an art trip with school so I was with my art class and I had to take photos for my sketchbook anyway, hence why some of them are quite random. If so it's because I drew something that's in them or whatever. Also don't fret I am not transitioning into becoming a plant blogger. It just so happened that a lot of Cornwall is green. One of the three plants I bought at the Eden Project is already dead so I'm definitely not cut out for that life.










Barbara Hepworth Museum and Gardens
  • 1, 2, 3.  Where there was a room full of botanical miscellanies that even I fawned over despite being my lowly un-plant blogger self.
  • 9, 14, 15, 18.
Newlyn Transition 10
  • 4, 27. This was an open space for artists so we were able to talk to them as they worked. 
  • 12. Mary-Ann with an artist who was forging copper wire bulb sorts of structures.
Beach/St. Michael's mount
  • 5, 8. Collecting things from the beach to draw later on at the hostel (writing this out feels like annotating my sketchbook for the 100th time).
  • 17. Ellen and Mary-Ann drawing St. Michael's mount.
In/around St. Ives
  • 6, 7, 10, 13, 16, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 28.
Eden Project
  • 11. The ceiling of one of the biomes. 
  • 19. Cacti in the temperate biome.
  • 23. Ellen drawing.
The main point of this trip was to visit galleries and make copies of pieces we liked and to generally make our ideas cohesive by the end of it to form the basis of a project. I didn't really fill many pages/get much done compared to others but I can actually tolerate what I did manage to get done for once (this is rare). The Hostel we stayed in, which was a huge old Georgian house, was supposedly haunted, and the food wasn't too bad either, so it was a generally good trip for one partially spent on a cramped coach or out sketching in miserable windy weather. 

- Hollie

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

CRISSCROSS



HOWWWWWWWW do you people make your photos portrait sized to fit your blog without making the quality x100 worse? (I try to resize them then put them in as original size but as you can see from the photo below and the one above the difference is insane). Anyway, finally an outfit post! Variations of this outfit have been my uniform for the past 6 weeks. I wore these exact things last Thursday though. 



Sweater - eBay £9
Shirt - eBay £7
Skirt - eBay £15
Tights - American Apparel £22
Shoes - Etsy £26

I've been buying geometrically patterned/grid prints a lot lately and I think it was spurred on from keeping a tag for anything along these lines on my tumblr (photos from the tag below).



From visiting the local art museum in summer, also in a grid print shirt from Primark for £12. I cut the hem off so it's cropped now. I've had my hair cut since then and also these photos are for my sketchbook for school so theyre posed (who takes photos without squinting yet i have my eye WIDE open).









1. Hel Looks 2. Photo by Rosa Rendi 3. Rodarte SS14 4. Jo See Paris 2013 5. Narciso Rodriguez SS14 6. Source 7. killingiteveryday 8. Source

The Rodarte SS14 and Narciso Rodriguez SS14 collection pictures here are quite random additions but the looks I have posted are very much what I'm into wearing at the moment (well it would be, if i could afford designer clothes ha h  a ha). However, I wasn't very enamored with the Rodarte collection as a whole despite the two looks above offering a slight fraction of a redemption. The polar contrasting blocks and strict tailoring of the Narciso Rodriguez looks (and entire collection) are completely my new object of adulation, though. 

-Hollie

Tuesday, September 03, 2013

the type-writered beat

I go back to school tomorrow so summer is over really. It's been good on the whole but it's been so long that it's merged into one huge void of time - I haven't had a lesson since the first few days of May because of study leave and my GCSE exams so it may take a while to get used to when I go back. I'm starting sixth form and I'm positively bricking it. I don't think I'll blog any less than I am at the moment, which is just sort of when I have anything to put here because it doesn't take long to upload things I would have anyway, if that makes any sense? Like we wear our own clothes in sixth form so I can post more outfits (if I don't resort to literally wearing jeans and a shirt everyday which is probable) and I carry my film camera everywhere too so I'll post random photos. I'll most likely post more than I have done over the summer too because I've spent the past few weeks wearing black and white only (on the whole) which wasn't very interesting; and I threw most of my clothes out/changed my room throughout July and August because I needed to purge things out of my life that I felt were stagnant. However I replaced all this stuff with more basic clothing for school so I had nothing to blog about outfits wise. I have a job now though so I'm slowly finding things on Etsy that are more interesting and for once I can afford this stuff.

These are some photos from a couple of weeks ago when we went to play tennis at the local rec.


Ellen.


My feet, Pam.


Pam.


Ellen.




Top: Pam, Frankie Ellen, Bottom: Pam, Ellen.


Pam, Pam, Ellen, Frankie.


Lizzie.


Pam, Ellen, Pam.

These photos were taken throughout the day hence why it's sunny in some and grainy in others. The photos below here are from a day where I visited a place in my county called the Blue Pool (I thought I'd include them in this post because they're blue/green such as the above). It was really awesome there and it didn't look like England whatsoever but my camera seems to be really bad quality wise at taking photos from a long distance away (I'm looking for different lenses/film) so I didn't have any from a wide angle to do it justice. 


Random vintage store we went into on the way back.



Also, I was in this article on Sunday which was quite cool. I definitely didn't say some of it so I take it that it's paraphrased (bear that in mind) also I look like a serial killer with a chucky smile and eyes like daggers (they asked for a photo in which I am smiling) I hate my smile) for now obvious reasons))).


It was in print too so it's immortalized forever.


-Hollie