soundtrack to life

Utabautayun by Ikue Asazaki

Recently, I've been listening to a lot of what could be categorized as folk singing or traditional music or ethnic music, but the label is not so important to me. What I think is that the human voice is possibly the most beautiful instrument in existence. My taste spans genres, but I am exquisitely moved by a voice that is laid exposed and unfeigned; honed and molded to the rawest, barest economy of beauty and intuition and sound. I liked mournful music and sensuous music, lilting, coy music, and music that I don't understand but feel, nevertheless.

Regardless. Youtube this woman. She's glorious. 

la mer

I have dreams of monstrous sea cliffs and sweet faded seashores and crashing waves and muslin and sultry days  and girls and women and black and white photographs. How about you?

'

Zippora Seven in Russh Australia/Brigitte Bardot/White Cliffs of Dover/Brigitte Bardot/Kate Moss Vogue 06/Moss again/great flapping mass of seagulls; origin unknown/Bardot/Camilla Belle in A Devira (Adrift)/Moss/Zippora Seven/Sea Cliff from Tdd Rchrdson/A Devira/il postino/Brigitte Bardot and seafoam

my imagination explodes and showers bits of schiaparelli. It's raining schiaparelli? I like.

                                    Tear Dress, 1938, Elsa Schiaparelli

A coastal town, rocky beaches, ochre buildings. Somewhere beautiful and Catholic. Italy? Spain? The Hotel Cipriani, Venice. The coffeehouse. Alfresco. Everything is pale and perfect. It's either breakfast or dinner. Not lunch; too un-chic. She is, perhaps, alone. She reads Faust.  Absentmindedly, she brushes the just barely translucent headscarf to one shoulder. A peek of an austere, fiercely beautiful widow's peak. She has dark hair, dark eyes, pale skin burnt olive by summer. A young wife? 

Don't you love when a dress, deceptively simple, is so magnificently, provocatively, incredibly fun-ly evocative? And it's such a personal thing too. One dress can conjure up ten different scenes in as many people. I always have these little visions when I look at a dress I am particularly fond of. Where, who, when. This feels like an old movie dress to me, from the time when movie dresses were memorable and had personalities. Isn't Elsa Schiaparelli wonderful? Obviously her posthumous reputation hasn't held up as Chanel's has, but in the day, they were contemporaries and rivals. Coco famously dismissed Schiaparelli as "that Italian artist who makes clothes". Legendary female designers cat fight? I'm totally there. Forget girl's gone wild, can I please please watch?

I can totally imagine the exchange. Round One: Bias-cutting. Ding Ding. I'll show you. I know my way around a pair of scissors. Okay, that's sleepy, high on pretty dresses me talking. No, stopping talking.

                                              Hotel Cipriani

My inaugural post!

A thought that has been resting at the back of my mind for some time-both in terms of the individualism/individual style phenomenon as a whole and its effects on my dressing, personally-is whether individualism has become its own trend. Is it individual if it's deliberate? Are we really individual if we're all individual in the same way? Not just that, is this whole quest for individuality also not allowing ourselves to sometimes just wear what we want to and occasionally (or frequently) indulging in something trend-led and ubiquitous and 'it' and utterly irresistable? 

Other things too- like the seemingly dichotomous problem of how sometimes you want to wear something quite extraordinary, but it feels a bit too outre and it never leaves the doors of your bedroom? So much of dressing is to convey something to others, an image, a certain choreographed impression. Fashion serves that role, and I'm not denying that it's an interesting and maybe important one. I'm not saying it's wrong. 

And I'm starting to descend into incoherence here, so...I want there to be truth in my dressing? Is that really cheesy? I want to look at myself and know who I am, and convey that. There's such a connection for me between clothes and courage. I think I first began to like and love and know and define myself through clothes. Fashion has been so kind and important to me in that respect, and I think fashion has become so massive in my life that it is the perfect doorway to self-exploration.

Hence...this is my meagre attempt to let my clothes and person speak, and to begin to care less about what people think about me (or if I'm to be honest, what I think people are thinking.) Expect styling experiments that stretch a spectrum of eras, tones and personalities. Even while fashion is important and valuable to my life, I want to be the sort of girl who takes herself lightly enough to try anything at least once, and recognize, if it doesn't work out, that it's only fashion, only class or a conversation or a picture, only embarrassing or frightening for only a moment in my life. I'm alive and young and there are so many beautiful things to marvel over, so this is my attempt, as well, to be grateful for that and celebratory of all the wondrous fashion and books and theatre and art and food and music and people that make life interesting.

Also, me being me, I shall probably be unable to resist crazed pagan homages to fashion gods and other crushes, excited monologues about new buys, wants, finds, books, art and movies, sadness about my so-small-it's-nonexistent budget, and general fun and happiness. 

So, yes. Those are basically my rather long reasons for starting this blog. Sorry the front bit was so serious-ish. I shall hopefully have something more aesthetically pleasing to post in the near future.