My clothes here are all black and white. I bought the dress to replace one I bought from Etsy a couple of years ago that I've gotten too tall for (shock horror (I'm still short but taller than my previously shorter self, at least)). It was green velvet with a lace collar and pearl buttons down the front (I just found the link here). The annoying thing is that I had to take it up first of all to wear it, then I outgrew it, so if I'd have left it I could still wear it now. Anyway, I wanted a 60s dress that actually fitted me because I have a habit of buying clothes that are gargantuan. The top half is tiny pin tucks in a sheer fabric and the skirt bit is crimplene.
Dress - Vintage
Glomesh Bag (with tortoiseshell Lucite handle) - Vintage (and doesnt belong to me)
Unknown. I found similar tights in American Apparel to these and I want them.
Under appreciated things 1) patterned tights. I branched into buying vintage hosiery last summer with 3 pairs of Mary Quant tights. Only one pair hasn't laddered, which sucks. If shops sold geometrically patterned tights more I swear I would buy hundreds because the way they used to make tights seems prone to laddering which isn't great for klutzes like me and there's only so many that are available for sale online/in vintage shops. They also always seem really small and I'm not tall (as afore mentioned (as afore noticed by you, in the picture above)) so I'm perplexed as to why.
Sharone Poole.
Tights - eBay
Shoes - Gift for my birthday (brand Kenneth Cole)
My feet. You can sort of see the cutouts in the sides of my shoes. I like wearing white socks/tights with them because it makes them look more like saddle shoes. They're like saddle shoe/loafer hybrids.
Marc Jacobs SS13 by Juergen Teller. Other collections with monochrome/optical illusion-y clothes that spring to mind are Moschino SS12 and Louis Vuitton SS12, but their campaigns have bright colours in too so I haven't included pictures here.
Also, I only have one exam left (on Monday)! Then summer starts and I'm off for 12 weeks. It's all fun and games until results day in August. As a side-note I've found myself uploading things to Tumblr instead of putting them here at all more often recently. This used to be more of a record for myself only, and the fact it is a blog dedicated basically just to myself feels overwhelmingly contrived sometimes and this was ok when I didn't have to think about others seeing it. I guess I'm becoming disillusioned with Blogger as a whole but I'll try to continue to use it because I enjoy it when I do use it. Not that this occurs often. I'm sure it's just a phase.
These pictures are from Hel Looks, a street style blog from Helsinki. I must have been living under a rock because I only came across it in March-ish via Tumblr. I like the sort of style featured on it, it's not so 'high' fashion, more every day casual stuff, but still really innovative and fresh (I need to rinse my mouth out and download a new vocabulary). I don't know if i's something to do with both being nordic countries, but when I went to Iceland in March 2012 the street style I witnessed while I was in Reykjavik (for only about 3 hours) was also astonishing there. We saw a man in a head to toe purple suit inc. matching top hat.
Also, Australian designer Karla Spetic is someone/something else I found out about through Tumblr. Oyster Magazine describes her AW13 collection as reminiscent of The Virgin Suicides so it shouldn't be much of a surprise I'm fawning over it.
SS14, AW13.
SS14, SS14.
AW13, AW13.
The translucent and tiered layers of the collections above remind me of Tata Naka (I may have written on my blog about Tata Naka before but I can't remember). They are one of my favourite designers.
AW13, SS13.
AW13, AW13.
AW12, AW12.
AW12, AW12.
And the same sort of thing (diaphanous, semi-sheer) again from a more minimalistic perspective, Low Classic SS13. I found this through Tumblr also.
Low Classic SS13.
Dress - eBay
Skirt - eBay
Socks - Topshop, £3.50
Shoes - Kenneth Cole (for my birthday).
An outfit from a couple of weeks back? Maybe last week? Exams are making me lose track of all time. Everything is merging in to one. I only have 5 exams left and have done 12. I am free from the 17th of June and I have so many outfits to take photos of and a photo shoot I have had planned since last July that might actually materialise.
This post seems relevant right now. I'm very into reflections, sky, water, reflections on water, shadows, the suns rays, freckles and bouffant but stray and wispy peroxide blonde hair, clouds in the sky, 'slick' looking editorials with obvious flash or overexposed film and the silver/gold, blue colours that lend themselves to these sorts of photos. I've been scared of colour for a long time and I only started embracing it more this year and last year. Before 2012 I was most comfortable in dark granny florals, charity shop size 20 blouses and skirts that may as well have not had a waistband because I had to wear belts with everything all the time. I used to stick to 'safe' colours because otherwise I couldn't match anything. I am very conscious about matching my clothes. Now I have more clothes I have more than two things of the same colour so I can wear both and match. I hope I grow out of this because it is a really annoying habit and I can't rest until my clothes are cohesive. I think I have a happier medium now though, and colour allows me to be more creative. I started using the lookbook I signed up for in February 2011 the other day because it felt time to. I had always wanted to upload outfits but knew I wasn't totally ready, I was still striving to be better. I'm very tenacious and find myself rewriting essays because I make one mistake or lines overlap themselves. I redid pages of my textiles coursework 10+ times all the while knowing I wouldn't gain any marks for it, I just couldn't leave it alone. This means that sometimes I can't bring myself to even begin writing notes in lessons in case they aren't neat. I am a perfectionist and people see it as laziness (my physics teacher sees it as laziness) but the amount of discarded a4 sheets of paper at the bottom of my bag with a slightly slanted title or smudged ink (the bane of being left handed doesn't help either) are testament to a weird mentality I have about faultlessness. My instagram grid is another archetype of it, and it's biggest manifestation is in my clothes. I have been blogging for roughly 3 years now (not on this blog, the first two years were on my old blogspot, the reason I started a new one being that I felt I had changed too much to continue my old one) which seems like a long time to be documenting. I see it as a feat in itself because I spend a long time meticulously arranging things on here and clicking preview to see what it looks like, so publishing anything at all is like, a big deal. I also feel like people actually read this now, which I've never really had before. Sharing things online now isn't just documenting it for myself, which is what it was for a long time, but it now entails the possibility of people from school reading it, strangers, friends, even family. I'm not even saying what I put here is at all good, I just have to feel comfortable with it myself, which seems to be becoming ever more difficult as I become more aware of myself with age and the fact more people are going to react to it, which is awesome, but daunting. By the way, I'm only being really introspective because I turned 16 on Saturday and I've been apprehensive about it for a long time. Suddenly becoming a 'new' age after 365 days of being a different one, i felt, seems to feel like it should signify a 'change'. When you tell people you are an older age they expect different things of you. Things you achieve at 25 would have been more impressive if you had done them at 11 years of age. But really, you've been growing up a little bit over the span of those 365 days, there's just no milestone. People have asked me 'what does it feel like being 16?'. Well, it kinda feels exactly the same as I felt last week when I was 15 but for some reason I'm suddenly considered more mature and in the eyes of the law am now able to buy a lottery ticket, so yeah, I feel like a completely different person. I know I'm thinking about it too much and we need to have ages to gage how old people are, obviously, a 4 year old rarely has the same level of maturity as a 9 year old, and we can only see changes in people in retrospect, after enough time has lapsed to notice a difference. The fact this is signified by a specific date seems odd, but necessary, and I've been struggling with how I should be a better version of myself now I'm 16. In starting A Levels next year I need to really start working efficiently and dressing with less regiment, because I won't have a uniform to rely on anymore. I applaud you if you read all of that because it was effort to spell check.
Some photos (film) I took in London last weekend. I think they fit with the few lines above I wrote outlining inspirations and things that I've found interesting.
I love the reflections in this, and I feel like I couldn't have captured them on a digital camera. I feel empty without my ae-1 now despite having only used what, 4 rolls of film on it. It's a big step up from using the occasional disposable camera and it's costing me a fortune in film/processing but it's really cool to be able to take photos more manually, with less influence of automatic settings on a digital platform.
Marilyn Monroe, Me in Malta, Source unknown, Petra Collin, Petra Collins, Photo from tumblr captioned 'By Acidill'.
“Agricola Agricolam Agricolae”, The Face UK, October 1997, Rookie mag, Little House on the Prairie, Chanel, Little House on the Prairie, Unknown.
Britt Ekland, by Cleo Sullivan for Show 1999, I think this photo is a scan of mine from a book but it was saved on my computer and I don't know, Unknown, Petra Collins (by Maya Fuhr?), by Rosalind Duguid, an old disposable I took in 2011.
These are some music videos that are very visually enticing. If I haven't mentioned MS MR enough across my sprawl of social media sights recently, I'm going to do it again anyway. I discovered them through watching an online show called The Fox Problem (with Gemma Cairney) about a month ago; they were video calling to be on it and they played an excerpt of 'Hurricane'. They only have two music videos but both are divine. I probably prefer Fantasy though. I realise you may not want to watch the video itself so I screencapped them. It was hard to resist screencapping every frame.
The colours in this Noah and The Whale video are similar to the ones in Fantasy. The same cheerleader theme runs through both, and the added fact that Autumn de Wilde directed and filmed this makes it all the more excellent. As well as Charlie Fink's hair. The model, Megan Nison, has a Lara Stone/Emma Stone (maybe she is a long lost stone) likeness and she also looks exactly like a girl in my geography class, but she is ginger, not a dreamy peroxide blonde (have you grasped that I really want to be blonde for summer yet). I sort of want a goofy tooth gap but my teeth are already bucked so I'd only look alien, not like Lara Stone.
Pink tweed suit from eBay (I had to alter this from a size 18 to an 8 which was a feat), top from Etsy, dagger collar shirt from Ebay, Tan bowling bag from Rokit in Covent garden - it used to be my school bag in year 8 -, cream converse, topshop socks, button barrette I found that I glued last summer.
Last Saturday was me living out many Harry Potter/fangirl dreams in one go. I dressed vicariously through Dolores Umbridge (I found myself searching vintage tweed suit on eBay a month ago and found a garish pink one for £12(it was by accident but everyone has been telling me it's in her vein) and saw Jessie Cave's comedy show Bookworm at the Soho Theatre. (Jessie Cave played Lavender Brown in Harry Potter.) I discovered her website pindippy pretty much exactly a year ago and have followed her twitter/videos/instagrams ever since. I wrote a typical fangirl email to her last June/July but never sent it and once she favourited my tweet at about 1am and it was the highlight of my day/biology lesson being able to tell fellow fandom obsessee Abi the next morning. I went with my mum for my birthday because London is like, 2 hours away so it was a bit of a trek to get there. The show itself was amazing and exceeded expectations. I would definitely recommend it and do sit in the front row because her sister Bebe will give you gingerbread. If you want a more accurate less contained version of events see here. I think I may be going again this month but then again maybe not - It depends on travel arrangements and stuff, but do go! I may meet you! We can discuss Jessie Cave over the internet together afterwards!
Me, cakes in Soho.
My feet on the floor of a bookshop in Soho.
Ed's Diner.
Some film photos from last weekend. The top one at Baker Street station was going to be the outfit photo part of this post but I opened the back of the camera by accident while I was absent mindedly fiddling with stuff so it has a light leak. I had bjork buns last Saturday because my hair was too long and dead and horrible. I had it cut yesterday though so I took some photos today, hence why my hair is down in them.
I think Dolores Umbridge's office is severely underrated.
The cat plates, desk, balloon lamp, curtains, carpet.
See mohair, lace and chaise lounge.
Note tea cup.
Notice boucle cape and brooch.
It's half term now so I'm catching up with outfit posts. I've done over half of my exams and they have been ok to good with the exception of Physics. God help me with physics. After June 17th I am free for the summer so I'm counting down already.
Photos from my leavers day last Thursday. There are others but they're mainly of people so I don't think they'd appreciate them being here! They were taken on my canon ae-1 if you wondered. Year 11 leavers day is a sort of pranks/dressing up thing, hence the pictures of people covered in foam with water guns below. The two converse ones below weren't posed, which I thought was cool. The one above is my converse with my wayfarer bike.
