Campfire September

Southern Sensibility

Viva la Revolution!

  The Spring 2013 Chanel Couture: the most exciting I've seen in a while. Usually couture shows are too hyped up for my liking and there's no point of even writing about them - but this show was excellent. I love how collections can always somehow correlate to what I'm studying in history at the moment - or may that just be my combined obsession of history and fashion? Either way, this Chanel show was cool. Karl Lagerfeld usually preaches about his own shows - but this show was worthy to preach about.
  I found this constant aesthetic of post-French Revolution ghosts of noblewomen coming back to haunt Versailles. Those unkempt feather headdresses combined with their messy hair felt like the aftermath of the French revolution, and, even better, when viewed from the side the headwear acted as if they were floating ghosts, especially the white one. Nobody who was part of the revolution saw the eyes of the noblewomen - they didn't understand their state of mind as they lived in the lap of luxury. It made the revolutionaries feel as if they were advancing if they slashed off their heads at the guillotine - they were hungry and finally fed. The nobles were fed and were abruptly starved. The different paradigms of people during a revolution are interesting to explore.
  The whole psychology of a revolution and its stages are probably some of the most intriguing parts of studying history - probably why I'm attracted to it so much.

Groupie Vibes

Band of Outsiders Spring 2013/Band of Outsiders Pre-Fall 2013

McQueen Bee

  I had silently given up hope on Sarah Burton as I processed her collection last season, but this season I'm eating my own words. Her spring 2013 collection for Alexander McQueen is probably one of my favorite collections this season, maybe ever. The honeycomb motif blew my mind, and the colors paired with it were just an oxymoron. I love honey, don't get me wrong, but the collection was creepy. This collection was a manifestation of a phobia of bees. Creepy.

  Besides making me realize why my friends are so scared of bees, the colors are so distinctly English. I thought the colors embodied the English court around the time of the English Reformation - Henry VIII, Mary Tudor, Anne Boleyn. Burton was not too pretentious about giving it an English flair either. She did not make a collection around English rockstars or Cambridge scholars, but it was something distinctly new with references all over the place. The colors is one aspect that gave it that feel of a true English brand.

  The colors especially reminded me of the portraits of English royalty during the English Reformation - or at least, the people that slept with English royalty. 

Catherine of Aragon

Anne Boleyn

Mary I of England

Elizabeth I of England

A Cinderella Story

  When I first saw Jason Wu's Spring 2013 collection, my immediate thought was a punk rocker or a greaser marrying into the royal family. His collection was basically a wardrobe from a girl power Cinderella story movies, something like The Princess Diaries or A Cinderella Story or What A Girl Wants. He told a much more honest, more raw Cinderella story, one where Cinderella has to make her own dress!

  One part of fashion that's amazing is the ability to take the clothes and narrate a story from start to finish. Some of my best short stories are modeled alongside collections. Fashion can help you make a whole new world so you can live in complete delusion if you'd like. It's awesome.
  Those Jason Wu gowns are probably unimaginably expensive, and yet they look very honest, do-it-yourself Cinderella where I can take my ballet leotard, a belt, and some tulle. No matter what the feminists say, Cinderella seems like a great story to live. Fashion makes fantasy so delightfully real. If Jason Wu says you can be a punk rock Cinderella, than why not?
  What a great start to Fashion Week! It's like that time in What A Girl Wants when Daphne cuts up the dress her evil stepsister gave her!

  I'm a sucker for Amanda Bynes movies...

Eloise at the Plaza

  Style.com has confirmed, so it is official: 20 DAYS UNTIL FASHION WEEK! Excuse the combination of capital, italicized, and bold letters. You just don't understand my feels.
  I am pretty down whenever I think about the summer ending and sophomore year beginning, the year where the excuses you use are a freshman are worthy of a comic strip if you use them when you are a sophomore. Fashion's Night Out and Fashion Week always makes the first month of school more bearable. School is not completely bearable ever, but coming home from school and checking style.com for the latest shows and those cute little Fashion Week highlight videos is just so thrilling!

  I am also excited to see the street style going down because somehow the pitiful comparison between me and street style goddesses motivates me to dress even better and ~ *embrace my individuality*~ (to quote the books I've had to read for guidance class). I am very most excited to see the ensembles of Eleonora Carisi due to her magnificent curls I will never achieve, the wardrobe I will attempt to steal, and all-around perfection. Observe:

  Get my drift? She's what I call a morph between Jackie O and Cherry Valance and Eloise, or, to put it more simply, she's perfect. Notice the Miu Miu Spring 2010 clogs she's wearing in the last rad outfit. I will never get over that collection, I swear. And look at that fuzzy yellow Jackie O coat in the first outfit! 

  Pink has always been my favorite color, but I like pink especially now because I visited the Eloise store at The Plaza and got me some stickers for my locker this year featuring the best illustrations known to any form of literature, both children's books and math books (those graphs are pretty hard to beat, am I right?). Observe:

  Get my drift?
  I decided to do a real-life moodboard thing, kind of like the ones magazines do with bags and shoes. I happen to do mine with my Eloise at The Plaza book and my Crew Cuts jewelry that I want to get a little more excited about to wear to school this year.

  Also featuring my long-time friend and bunny, Marilyn.

  My zebra necklace is navigating through a maze of elevators and floors at The Plaza. Good times.
  In terms of ~*inspiration*~, I think children's books are top-notch. It motivates me to wear as much pink as I want, shamelessly, and color coordinate everything. To tell you the clean truth, I'd rather wear Eloise's outfit than one of those huge coats that go for $452,452,525,252,524,747 nowadays. I mean, seriously, who doesn't love that pink ribbon?
  I have tons of children's books still but let's focus on all the glory of Eloise because she's my favorite! Sorry, English roses.
  I guess this post is kind of a beginning of my mood for fall. I like how children's books are genuinely girly because everyone's into "creepy" girly stuff now and I'm not really into it. I have always been a genuine lover of pink, so I take offense.
  Ever notice how most of the mean girls in movies and books wear pink? I call it the "purple protagonist" complex. I wanna keep femininity in my feminism, okay?

Sweater Vests

  Just some adorable scans from the Paul McCartney II book that my dad took out from the library (thank you, dad!). They have all those awesome summer yellows and blues I'm into now (along with the green on the carousel!) and my favorite sweater vest of all time. Paul's sweater vest-wearing days date back to Magical Mystery Tour. His sweater vests are simply awesome. He's just so `~groundbreaking~` (like, t0talliiii)(this sentence has been a mini-rant of my loathing for the word "groundbreaking"). No, but seriously, only old men wore sweater vests before Paul McCartney. He opened the realm for my English teachers, Cambridge professors, and just awesome people, okay?

  I took some homemade screenshots of Magical Mystery Tour just so you can be as delighted as I am in Paul's sweater vests even though the pictures are kind of pixle-y. Sweater vests aside, however, Magical Mystery Tour is one of the most aesthetically pleasing movies you can watch. Here is the link to the full movie. Magical Mystery Tour was made as a TV film in 1967 and was a total failure, but it's one of those movies that suck but are still so nice to look at! Magical Mystery Tour was made with that genuine 1967 psychedelia which is one of my favorite things in the universe!
  While we're on the subject of sweater vests, I was asking myself why I love fashion these past couple days (this query has relevance to sweater vests, I swear!). I mean, its not going to save the world or create world peace or do something about relocating all those annoying people at school. People won't think you're any more intelligent for liking fashion. Quite on the contrary, most people would do a mental eye roll and think, "Oh, she likes fashion."
  Okay, I listed the cons. This morning, however, I had what I might call a revelation about why I love fashion. My favorite fashion bloggers would talk about how fashion is self-empowering and all that Girl Power stuff....which is great and awesome and I would totally cite that reason as one of my reasons!
  But my reason isn't a famous fashion blogger's reason. My reason is that fashion is one of the few true unifying forces in the world today. Nobody talks about it, but fashion truly, truly unifies people. See, in any other industry, sweater vests can be laughable. Some conservative politician can get absolutely slaughtered by the part of media that detests his beliefs, and him wearing sweater vests is just another excuse for the slaughtering and can result in quite a couple memes (poor Rick Santorum...). Lady Gaga has earned herself a plethora of parodies on YouTube that usually include ensembles of edible items and household products that poke fun at her actual ensembles.
  Fashion, however, welcomes everything. The CFDA awarded Lady Gaga the Fashion Icon Award (look who's laughing now, YouTube!). If someone notoriously wears sweater vests to fashion shows, it will immediately become their "signature piece." Fashion is so acceptant of almost anything. Fashion critics are there to criticize some things that fashion is acceptant of, but there are way more cool things that fashion has accepted in its history than negative things: the little black dress, miniskirts, and, more recently, armadillo shoes!
  Nobody really thinks or talks about how unifying fashion is because most people look down upon fashion as absurd. The designers and journalists of fashion don't care about the people on the outside because they've been accepted by fashion.
  The people on the outside look into fashion and wonder how the hell people in the industry could be so absurd, but the people looking in aren't as happy as the people inside.