Photos from when I met up with Ophelia, Ellie, Ibe and Rachel in London on the 7th. As you can see from Ellie's blog post, we went to Brick Lane, met Zachary Robinson (i even TOOK my journal with me in case I saw someone famous (for an autograph) but upon seeing him I forgot all about it), and to The East End Thrift Store. We were also photographed for Rokit's blog which may or may not be uploaded by them soon (I'll probably add the photo here).
Ophelia by Shoreditch Highstreet Station.
Rachel in a bagel shop.
Ellie outside Shoreditch Highstreet Station.
Rachel outside Shoreditch Highstreet Station.
Rachel in a vintage shop.
Ophelia in a vintage shop.
Ibe in a vintage shop.
Ophelia in the backroom of an ice cream shop. We were herded out by the owner when they saw us in there.
Portrait //heavily cropped// version of the top photo.
Vintage Jumper - eBay £4
Black suede vintage skirt - eBay £12
Vintage tights - eBay £3 or something
80s bowling bag - Rokit £6 but from forever ago in year 8
Black/White bag - Charity shop £1
Feather barrette - Car boot sale 10p
I didn't buy anything other than American Apparel socks to replace an American Apparel sock I had lost. But I had only lost one and I had to buy them in a two so now I have three. I also bought LOVE magazine with a mysterious stain on it from an underground confectionery vendor. He conspicuously brandished a wet wipe before I ran off. I have never encountered a stall that offers gratuitous wet wipes with your purchases before. I also queued for a Krispy Kreme at 6:28 with my train leaving at 6:35, therefore abandoning any chance of purchasing dinner (priorities). However, I sat between the carriages on the floor from Waterloo to Winchester on the way back anyway to avoid anyone peering into my journal (as happened on the journey up) so eating dinner may have proved a challenge.
I have been absent for ages! It feels as if I've forgotten how to blog. From my journal about two weeks ago:
"I don't remember doing anything particularly poignant to make this summer terrifically good or horrendously bad. Everything is very subdued which bothers me because everyone else seems to find events so profound. My spectrum of emotion doesn't seem to ever venture too far out of melancholy indifference to content gratification, and I have no prominent feeling to write about as a result of this. I'm not doing anything and feel sort of desensitized to the world/things."
Things that have happened since I've blogged: We had a heatwave for two weeks and I went to the beach quite a lot over this time. Bus fares and Mcdonalds has bled me dry of any money I had left in my bank account from my paper round last year. I went to Mary-Anns who lives in the middle of no where in a very cool cottage. When I arrived, her horse was in their garden. I went to an Antiques warehouse. I saw the Great Gatsby and Monsters University and ate Pizza in the gardens in town. I have had four sleepovers and I am re-reading the Harry Potter series (I'm on the Order of the Pheonix). I did work experience for a week at a photographic studio which was really good. I've been to Boscombe a few times, to a cafe in town for the afternoon. I saw a show, had two picnics, went to a party, have tried to look for a job and have visited the Harry Potter studios. Butterbeer is my new favourite drink. I met up with some internet friends in London (and caught the train there and back alone which was daunting and I felt prematurely mature). I went to a beach gathering at night and we went in the sea in the pitch black. My parents are in Poland at the moment so I stayed with my aunt this weekend. I cut 7 inches off my hair and it's now a bob (it's shorter than in the photo below because I cut it again today). I like it and I'm going to keep cutting more off inch by inch.
We went to Molly's den with my Grandma yesterday. I've been before but I didn't take my camera. This dress reminds me of the one Luna Lovegood wears to Slughorn's party (which I saw in real life two weeks ago). But this was £85.
My August project is to redecorate my room. I have gotten rid of all of my clothes/things in my room because I had an existential crisis in July. I have 2 skirts, 4 shirts, 1 top, 1 dress, a jumper and 2 pairs of jeans (all of which are new except for one skirt and the one top) left and my walls are completely bare. I want one of my walls to have psychedelic posters plastering it but the ones in the first photo were all £30+.
I wanted this bike but it is child size! I have two bikes but both are broken.
I got these shoes from Molly's den in the middle of July - they were only £5! They're a size too big but I couldn't leave them so I'll stumble around instead.
I got this mirror yesterday - I would have got it the last time I went but we cycled there and being ceramic it's really heavy so I left it. It was £10. I have needed a mirror because my old green rimmed one smashed. The 60s vase and pastel pencil pot were stolen from my mother but they're probably originally from charity shops. The tin and alarm clock were car boot sales. The painting is also my mum's and also probably from a charity shop. Fringing from a haberdashery and green bottle from the SA. This wont be like this for much longer because I'm changing most things in my room.
These two photos are the beginnings of redoing my room. I posted them on tumblr a while ago. The focus of the bottom picture is on the blind cord which is really really really annoying.
I am very aware that prom photos are probably very annoying - the plethora that have been uploaded into every corner of the internet from my school year alone is irritating and the stream of uploads is never ending. However, my prom was last Thursday; no one really wanted to go because we knew it would be lame. It was raining so we couldn't get photos outside either. I'm quite relieved that the entire ordeal is over and done with. I got photos developed today, so there's some film ones and some digital ones below including some photo booth ones (one of the only positives about the event). The bathroom was one of the only places with decent light!
Paige, Becky, Me. Me, Amber, Lizzie.
Me, Amber, Mary-Ann.
Me (my head looks egg shaped but i swear it's just an illusion due to my hair), Amber, Lizzie, Mary-Ann.
Flora.
Paige, Becky, Me.
My dress was from a vintage shop called Clobber. I got it months ago when my mum found it (I was set on a similar mustard one). I am undecided as to whether I should sell it or not.
This is pretty much the most narcissistic post ever, but I would feel weird putting photos of other people here (that don't already assume photos of them could be here/are fine with it). Since exams have finished I haven't really been keeping track of time. I hadn't realized that I've actually been out and done quite a lot until I wrote it all down on my phone yesterday. Also, please watch this! It's really funny and more can get made if enough people watch it (apparently). Jessie Cave is in it.
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.
