990forever

[990forever]

tu favorita fashion freak <3

[990forever]

Modern Donuts

02/04/25

Well I began the day in a small panic. "I began the day," this is starting to sound like Renee Gladman. Anyway I'd had some sort of bad dream and I called my friend Skijler who said that I should get out of bed and start the day over. So I walked to the donut store and bought half a dozen donuts and listened to Madonna on my iPod. and you know what. I do feel better.

I put on Coastal Grooves when I got back with the donuts, my favorite album to just wildly dance around my room to as of late. Twitter's been forcing me to keep up with the Grammys and I've been questioning my long-time crush on A.G. Cook... I've been in love with him pretty much since high school but I think my affections have since shifted... to Dev Hynes! Sorry! I only have time to crush on ONE English experimental pop producer-baddie and I think it's obvious who wins that one.

Anyway, all this dancing got my hair in a pretty ecstatic state. It almost looks teased. And I only know of one thing that can hold a look of such teased-hair proportions together: a Vivienne top. I'm borrowing this one from my bestie and need to return it expeditiously... though I don't want to!

My favorite of Vivienne Westwood, this top included, are not the Sex Pistols-adjacent punk vibes but pieces like this that harken to Mod--Beatlemania through a sort of awesomely perverted punkish lens. Not The Beatles, Beatlemania. In a lot of ways, early rock-n-roll was more ecstatic than punk. All that disaffection! Compared to the craze that was Mod? Rock-n-roll before there was No Future? I'm thinking about those pictures of girls screaming and crying, like God's present.

I'm no historian but I do remember a number of old Betty and Veronica cartoons which made fun of Mod style:

And also a villain who I loved in Teen Titans called Mad Mod. (Once, while I was working at the club, some really drunk twink told me I looked like a batman villain, and he said it with so much sincerity that I still fondly think of it as the best outfit compliment I've ever received). Mad Mod was a typical mop-top English mod and all of his villainous tactics were these totally groovy booby traps...in fact I think that my American idea of the Mod is completely and totally cartoon-based.

A good example of this is that Vivienne's resurgence in America during the years leading up to her death, especially amongst younger people, had a lot to do with the popularity of Ai Yazawa's late 90s mangas Paradise Kiss and I think to a somewhat larger extent Nana (though I'm much more a fan of the former). I can't speak to Vivienne in Japan aside from a vague knowledge that it got really popular in the 90s, partially due to Yazawa's influence (I've personally only ever encountered Red Label garments with Japanese sizing, maybe speaking to Vivienne's popularity in Japan over her American popularity). So for me, styling Vivvy today means throwing the look through all these time-stretched, multinational, cartoon portals: we're doing an American 60s batman villain interpreted by a Japanese animation studio for an American audience in the early 2000s doing an English 60s Mod doing a 90s Japanese Harijuku Paradise-Kiss character doing an 80's English punk. Keep up.

Below is one of my favorite images ever and I think probably one of the most iconic: when Naomi Campbell fell down during Vivienne Westwood's fw1993 show. (Note her hair, btw. love, tried to resemble). What I love about this image is her smile, her laugh. How her legs are laid out in front of her, like a doll. In the video, she nods her head with its great hairstyle, doll-like, too, as she falls. And after the fall, she reappears with a cane, but held sideways, as a joke-- kind of a cartoon, the kind of cane that would pull Daffy Duck offstage.

I think the doll vibe is very mod: think Twiggy-style makeup. But Vivienne's false-mod is punk, too--a distortion midcentury of English youth culture; a fantasy of a doll that blushes real blush, wears rubber tights.

True to the Mod tradition I've paired this top with a miniskirt and go-go boots, plus a sweet little pussybow. But if you look closer you'll notice that, perhaps against a Mod sensibility--they're all black. In fact, my boots are Pleasers, the iconic stripper boot which I often wear out and about in order to be taller, and the pussybow is a scrap of t-shirt fabric lovingly gifted to me by my girlfriend (I'm trying to wear it a different way every day).

I wouldn't chalk this up to a 90s does 60s, I don't think it's that simple, but here I'm thinking about Sonic Youth's cover of of The Stooges' 1969 I Wanna Be Your Dog (btw, can anyone ID Kim Gordon's tights in this video? Is it possible that they are also rubber tights???), or Black Francis flirting with some leggy girl singing I wanna be a singer like, uh, Lou Reed on Pixie's Come on Pilgrim. There's a cartoonish 60s present in the 90s that extends beyond punk. Post-punk, "go-go" boots don't exist anymore--Pleasers do. This is something I think Vivienne was very good at understanding and using as creative material.

[990forever]

Discipline

02/03/25

I'm always thinking about when Karl Lagerfeld said sweatpants are a sign of defeat. You lost control of your life so you bought some sweatpants. Which is actually so interesting because when I googled him to find that quote the first thing that came up was an ad for Karl Lagerfeld sweatpants. I take issue with that quote because of its obvious nastiness but also because I'm not so into Chanel and I think it's incorrect. Don't sweatpants directly point to an active lifestyle? Is a uniform not discipline? I have only recently owned sweatpants, a random grey pair my sister gave me because I was staying over at her house one night and I was cold. She was all like, don't you have sleep pants? And I was like, sleep? Pants? I'm a lifelong nightgowner if I don't sleep naked. But then again, my sister is the type of person to go jogging. And, like, to spin class. For someone with such an obvious fetish for history, design, and culture, I lack all discipline. Which is a problem! You think any great artist accomplished that with a tik-tok-level attention span? That's part of why I'm starting this blog. I'm also supposed to work on my novel every day.

I have my first ballet class of the semester tonight. It'll be the first time I'm in dance class for a few years, after quitting my much-beloved cultural dance form Bharatanatyam when it got too expensive. During my first Bharatanatyam class, I showed up in leggings and a t-shirt. My teacher, an old Indian lady, was horrified and pushed an old kurti into my hands and told me to never show up in a tshirt again. I chose to interpret this as a push towards wearing more cultural clothing instead of what it obviously was: slightly religious slut-shaming.

I'm kind of inept when it comes to religion but I've got to think about God and spirit if I'm dancing--that's part of what that teacher disciplined into me. So I'm wearing tiny jhumkas today. My friend Andrea is also in this ballet class and she told me she's been feeling depressed, and hopes that the ballet class will get her more "in her body". I understand this--I hope our teacher is an old, really mean, impossibly thin Russian lady who yells at me for having scoliosis.

These khaki capri cargo pants have been deemed my gay pants, potentially the gayest pants on the planet, by my girlfriend. On top I'm wearing a slightly mothbitten Helmut Lang tshirt. I remember having borrowed this top from an old girlfriend's roommate, returning it to her, and then immediately buying my own copy of it. It's maybe the most loose, lightweight shirt I own. It'll be perfect for moving. I'm also wearing this big hoodie I love. I had a panic attack over the summer, I don't remember what about, and one of its psychotic conclusions was that not owning a zip-up hoodie (I only had pullovers) was a big problem. I thought that maybe I'd end up in the possession of an Anna Bolina or Rick Owens hoodie, or some tiny slutty hoodie a-la Megan Fox's hoodie in Jennifer's Body, but when that didn't happen I just bought this Fruit of the Loom one in a size Large.

It's a perfect beige. I wear this beige fruit of the loom hoodie like an amazing cloak of nothingness, sometimes off one or both shoulders, and isn't that what beige is? A cloak? A surrender? Zen? This entire outfit is beige, I've been loving beige. There's something so monastic about it. Which I think is an appropriate way to feel while dancing. The high neck of this top and the cloak of the hoodie and the simple, straight cut of these pants all seem very pious to me, though I do wonder if it'd be easier just to wear a Kurti. There's even a bleach stain on the shoulder of my hoodie that's a great brown, like it got stained while I was doing some super earthy monk activity (as opposed to, uhm, touching up my highlights). To counter Lagerfeld, maybe loosing control isn't such a bad thing--maybe that's what discipline can be, or ought to be, especially in dance class: just handing over control of your body to another person, to a set of rules. Focusing for a while. Again, I haven't danced for a while, but I also just read this interview between Addison Rae and Lexee Smith about discipline and dance, whereI think Lexee sums it up best: "everything is about full sending".

[990forever]

ex fashion intern starts fashion blog

Well the lightbulb in my lamp is one of those fancy ones that you control with your phone but somehow it got disconnected. So I’ve got about ten candles going in my room right now, blackout-style, and you know what it’s pretty nice actually. I've been meaning to start this blog forever. Like last week at some party for an art magazine this girl I know came up to me and said that she's the one who took over the fashion magazine internship I'd had over the summer. I warned her about how it's unpaid and how everyone kind of hates working there, but I also wished I'd stayed on longer because of how wonderful my coworkers were. The two staff writers were so smart, and excellent writers, and along with the fashion assistants, they all were really some of the most knowledgable and obviously best-dressed people I've met-- which brings me to my point: I SUCK AT FASHION WRITING. And it's because I'm not smart enough.

By vocation I suppose I'm a novelist. I study at an art school, but it's kind of a look-don't-touch situation for me, a novelist. But I think you have to be really smart to write about fashion, or art. To write about objects, visual culture. The fashion editor for Interview recently posted a tik tok with a response to the question: what should I study if I want to get into fashion? Her answer? Be a student of everything! And I think that's true. Because fashion is culture. Over the summer, my interest in writing about art and culture (THINGS! OBJECTS!) expanded greatly. I even started reviewing visual art shows. But still, my skills for writing about objects and materials is... lacking. During fall fashion week, I could barely get a word out about any garment: "The smallest hint of danger entered this breezy, almost nautical scene as imposingly large trench-coat buckles cinched at happily floppy collars and metal belt buckles served as shoulder straps," I wrote of Proenza Schouler's S/S25 show. What?

My best friend is the smartest person I know. Like, that's why she's my best friend. "There are moments in this show where I see something like elegance, but it’s also very arid, it’s like the process of stripping something back, sex defined in a roundabout way, like Mapplethorpe’s flowers," she texted me about Courrèges S/S25 show back in fall. She's a novelist, too, and a brilliant writer at that, but she doesn't really write about fashion. She just lives it. She works at Beacon's closet, which has provided her with a shockingly robust education in archive vintage and designer fashion. Like, scary. She can identify the season of a Rick or Margiela garment just by looking at it. She showed up to a movie one time wearing five skirts layered on top of each other, that one's miu miu, these two are comme, that one's junya... When we were invited to a party at Comme de Garçon by a writer friend, she gave me a vest to throw over my favorite supersnatched Gucci button-down. You have to wear it backwards, though. My editor from the magazine was there and she pointed at me and yelled, Vandevorst! And I had no idea what she was saying because I was drunk and apparently too stupid to recognize that I was wearing archival AF Vandevorst... or who that was. She kept going Vandevorst! Vandevorst! And I kept going What? What? and if anyone had been watching it would've seemed like we were doing a bit, Vandevorst! What?

My handle is a reference to the nightclub I used to work at, where again the limits of fashion were constantly being pushed, challenged. Some of is not the best looks I've ever witnessed happened while I was working the bar--things that a runway or an editorial spread couldn't dream. That's why I think this stuff is important. It's evidence of how we live.

Back when I was at The New School majoring in gay robots and apocalypse poetry, I heard that the fashion students at Parsons were required to explain their own outfits every day. I don't know if that really happened or if it was just part of a canon of fashion-world imaginary glamorous bullshit (think: The Devil Wears Prada, and then grittier but essentially the same, How to Murder Your Life by Cat Marnell), but I think about it a lot and now, every day when I get dressed to go to art school. It might be productive to write about that unconscious morning's first foray into culture. Practice makes perfect!

see you soon

x