Regarding REI KAWABUKO

REI KAWAKUBO is the Saint Teresa of fashion. I always imagined her locked in a self-imposed, deconstructed cell, like, massacring hemlines for her next season’s “no-dimensional” outfits that will be mocked, brilliantly reviewed, and worn by the brave.

I wear Comme des Garçons the same way Andy Warhol once wore $100,000 women’s necklaces underneath his Brooks Brothers turtlenecks — to be fashionable in secret. Only you know you spent money when you wear Rei’s creations. In fact, some of the more fashion-impaired public actually feels sorry for us! “That’s a shame about that coat,” an uninformed friend said to me once in a bar in Baltimore when I was wearing, well high fashion. “John Waters in his thrift-shop finest,” the press has written when, in fact, I was featuring a brand-new Comme des Garçons suit! Rei Kawakubo gives us undercover glamour. We know how great her clothes look, but others just think we’re poor.

Her look? Disaster at the dry cleaner. “I didn’t do it!” is the usual cry. Mine has learned to read the complicated and sometimes hilarious instruction labels with courage: “Do not dry clean; do not wash; garment may fray, fade, change shape.” These pants? One hundred percent polyester, wrinkled unable to be pressed. So comfortable, so unnatural, and so expensive. “Friction may cause the flocks to rub off or a slight fuzz may develop,” one label reads. Friction? What’s that mean? Walking?

Rei Kawakubo’s work is never funny, but her wit is so ferocious, so elegant, so scary, and sometimes even so ridiculous that her customers never have buyer’s remorse. How could they feel they had overspent when they look so courageous, so cult-like, superior, and even slightly insane every time they get dressed in one of her outfits? Rei’s look can never go out of style because she is either starting a new one or ruining a trend that’s not even popular yet but is about to be so. In her own words, Rei commented: “I think the world and its values are often lukewarm. I’d like to keep on trying to make it hotter.” Well, she certainly has. Beyond “hotter,” if you ask me, into spontaneous combustion! She makes pretty ugly, ugly handsome, and handsome disorienting. Rei Kawakubo is my leader. She is for many of us too.

John Waters, 2012 CFDA Awards speech

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

It wasn't an illusion. This book was short yet it was one of the sweetest and the saddest ones I've read. For me, it was the style that truly moved me. Certain words and the tone that was used. The narrative looked through what I was feeling and it directly confirmed what I was thinking; I hope you are following me.

Adolescence

Friends

Girls

Sex

Intellect

Books

Age

Lost

Life

Suicides

Reflection

Clique

Peers

Influences

Go over all of this in detail with Tony Webster, the protagonist. I had to use the dictionary several times to get through the book, and that means that Barnes's diction is pretty old-fashioned and specific.



Here are some excerpts from the book worth typing out (according to me anyways, haha):

pg 10 -- Yes, of course we were pretentious – what else is youth for? We used terms like ‘Weltanschuung’ and ‘Sturm und Drang’, enjoyed saying ‘That’s philosophically self-evident’, and assured one another that the imagination’s first duty was to be transgressive. Our parents saw things differently, picturing their children as innocents suddenly exposed to noxious influence. So Colin’s mother referred to me as his ‘dark angel’; my father blamed Alex when he found me reading The Communist Manifesto; Colin was fingered by Alex’s parents when they caught him with a hard-boiled American crime novel. And so on. It was the same with sex. Our parents thought we might be corrupted by one another into becoming whatever it was they most feared: an incorrigible masturbator, a winsome homosexual, a recklessly impregnatory libertine. On our behalf they dreaded the closeness of adolescent friendship, the predatory behavior of strangers on trains, the lure of the wrong kind of girl. How far their anxieties outran our experience.

Pg 103 – Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that’s something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, say. And after that, we’re just stuck with what we’ve got. We’re on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn’t it? And also – if this isn’t too grand a word – our tragedy.


  Big thanks and love to Kathy who lent me the book!  

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Having time

I now have so much time lying around that I can afford to take a quick few shots of myself (EW, HOW NARCISSTIC) before I leave the house.

Them black shorts that I've been wearing basically every sunny day this past summer was a DIY impulse project. I was lucky that they turned out alright. I just folded the sides up and pinned them after chopping the legs off... Idk how to sew. When my mom saw them, she almost cried. They used to be her treasured Versace jeans. Oops. #BadDaughter

Then later in the day, we hit up THE TEMPLETON on Granville Street for some dindins. YUUUUUMMY VEGAN FOODS!! Ahhhhhh!! Diner deco!!! AHHHHHHH, crushin' hard.

Them black headband is just a piece of elastic-y fabric. You can basically wind ANYTHING around your head, twist it, then brooch it! You'll have the headband you want for the day. Since all of your face is visible, you MUST put a little bit of effort on your face. So I even put colour on my lips and lined my brows all dark and all. Okay, if you massively failed at putting nice makeup on your face, you can always cover yer face with sunglasses. GOOD! THAT'S WHAT I DID.

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