I'M A GROWN WOMAN (I CAN DO WHATEVER I WANT)

jk jk lol

but i am officially 14! every year i realize that growing older is pretty much a scam, i never feel any different; this time i almost forgot it was even my birthday because i was so stressed out by other things. but then each year i convince myself that it will be different the next time: i'll be 15, i'll be a freshman in high school, 16: i get to drive, 17: dancing queen!, 18: college?? the future is so close, so far. everything is uncertain. einstein's theory of relativity is v real to me @ the moment. (on a related note, please tell me your interesting ideas about time in the comments so i can learn from y'all. i no longer have an excuse for being so uncool in comparison to willow smith now that we're literally the same age haha. )

anyway-- when i got dressed, i wanted to at least trick myself into thinking that i was growing, so i went for whatever the responsible, comfortable, mature woman of my future would wear.

part 1:

 heyyo! i'm cool AND i can dance?! the black turtleneck is the same one i wear in every single outfit thank you very much. i made the white culottes for my last fashion show (photos soon, i promise), the grey jacket is super old, idk where it's from, and the holograph shoes are thrifted. 

part 2:

i wore my dad's white shirt, unironed because i'm afraid of my responsibilities tbh; for a difference in shape i added the fringed pencil skirt that i made for my last fashion show, DIY-ed princess pin, and thrifted block heels. 

i accidentally did a google image search for that photo when i was attaching it, and i just really like the search results: 

ok, i'll go back to dressing like a 4-year old now!

thanks, 

-=-

kanyinsola

so just cut me loose, learn to tie your shoes

listening to a TON of sia 

i went to the chicago history museum's FashioNext competition finale a while ago. the competition involves chicago high school fashion students designing and constructing something based on a theme (i think this year's was the history museum's exhibit: fashioning the magnificent mile ). the designs were incredibly cool and smart, but i didn't get any pictures of them bc the lighting was kind of dark. i did get photos of some of my favorite looks from the exhibit itself:

this yohji yamamoto was my absolute favorite: the sheer wapping! it's hand-painted! *swoons*

very cool, simple, delicate

 

i feel like this would be the ultimate dress to dance to dancing queen in, if only bc of the color scheme

reminds me a lot of marques almeida for some reason, or maybe just the 90s faux fur trend. the blue adds a whole extra layer of coolness though. 

i think this would function incredibly well for me as a substitute wedding dress.

then my outfit: 

this is a pink velvet shirt from UO. I wasn't sure whether or not to dress up, so i wore UO mom jeans with thrifted block heels that apparently make me look like a granny (i'm pretty sure the person who told me that meant it as an insult lol). if anyone complains about socks with sandals, you're grounded tbh. the pants are a bit too big, and i had to lend my plain black belt to l because she needed it a lot more than i did, so instead of just tying the thrifted pink button down around my waist, i pulled it through the belt loops and knotted it. creative problem solving ftw. silver watch is thrift. 

l8r sk8rs,

-=-

kanyinsola 

i'd be lyin if i said i didn't miss you

listening to i'm tired and i hate this song (don't go) by cyberbully mom club  a lot because of it's dreamy tiredness, and the video is really cute:

speaking of cute things! these! powerpuff girls overalls that i've actually had for a while but never got to show on here.

i saw them in a thrift store i think in december but i was in the store for a specific purpose and didn't have enough money for it, so i let it go with a heavy heart tbh. but then i came back like a month later, and they were still there! 

they have really cute embroidery on the front:

but unfortunately, they are made for 6-year olds, so in the words of the woman at the thrift store who came out of nowhere to share this with me: :it's cute but it's a little tight on the fanny".  oh well, i think i'm just going to crop it and make it like a denim t-shirt that i can still wear over something else.

i usually wear it with my thrifted black reeboks. 

another thing i wanted to talk about a bit in this post was the announcement that Conde Nast is turning Style.com into an e-commerce site and transferring all of the content to "voguerunway.com". and i kind of wrote this in response to something on manrepeller about it.

(i just added some photos from fw2015 to make it easier to read instead of just a block of text)

i've always been into fashion in the way that most people are into fashion: i like to look and feel comfortable, i recognize that there is a relationship between the way i feel about how i'm presenting myself and how i feel overall, my emotions, my attitude etc. but i don't remember when or where it was that i realized that fashion was its own universe but i know how. i had started reading fashion blogs because i read something about tavi gevinson in a newspaper somewhere, and when i went deeper into the photos on these websites, marveling at how much they knew about everything  i found the websites where the photos originated from, usually: style.com and vogue.

[this look from and re walker reminds me of something a hip parisian women would wear in the 1920s, if she was also living in a daydream that looked a little like the dystopian future in the adidas x kanye show. ]

 at first it was like a trivia game (i didn't know many people irl who i could compete against though), but i wanted to know everything: if i saw someone wearing something on the red carpet i wanted to be able to identify what season and what show it was from, i wanted to know what pop culture references influenced this look, to be able to chart the growth or identify the calling card of a certain designer.  other websites like vogue encyclopedia helped me too, but i think that i drifted towards style.com more often because they had an app that i could download and i preferred the layout of their website. eventually i would go on the website regularly, to read old reviews and articles written by geniuses  and look at beautiful clothing that felt like it was conceived on an entirely different planet and feel like i was part of it.

from beaufille, i really like the jil sander-ish minimalism. the contrasting layers, the continuation of the trend of turtlneck layering, and POCKETS! IN! DRESSES! the shoes are also kind of yohji yamamoto and exude cool-girl 

that's why i'm a little nervous about this change: i guess it reflects something that's been going in the commercialization of fashion (not as if fashion isn't already commercial art by definition, i just mean it's a bit scary to imagine abandoning what makes it beautiful, and at the risk of sounding incredibly childlike, magical) that reminds me of how i felt when meadham kirchoff was forced to go out of business. it's impossible to have an industry that wants to create something beautiful without falling into what is needed to survive, and style.com is simply being forced to concede to that pressure in the same way that every other brand is. that's just the way it is. e-commerce isn't that attractive/important to me for obvious reasons (i'm a 13 year old girl), but it's also to do with the idea of selling people a more "wearable" version of something that doesn't fit with what i want style.com to be (of course it already is that).

alien mermaids alien mermaids scaly green alien mermaids living on mars who crash-land on our planet soaking wet (marques'almeida)

 the shifting tides away from the value of expert reviews with the rise in popularity of fashion blogs written by "LOOK! REAL PEOPLE" probably has something to do with this too. is there still a commercial value to reviews written by people who "know what they're talking about" in offices in new york, when style.com itself has created a whole generation of people who "know what they're talking about" in their bedrooms in the suburbs.

this off-white outfit is deceptively simple, but the cutouts on the shirt and the slits on the front of the pants make it so cool. also suede boots are a staple of the runway 70s revival (if you want to call it that ) and they look amazing with this. 

idk the river of change never stops following and all of that stuff. i feel a bit like i did watching the series finale of parks and rec: i can't tell if i'm sadder about the idea of style.com being gone or about the actual things that i liked about style.com being gone (photos big enough to cry over, tim blanks and tommy ton, trend reports for someone who loves organization and patterns).

this is the sweater of my dreams wow. i love the minty green/gray color, the embroidery and fringe. and it looks so cool on that skit and those bright boots (leonard!)

--
thank you all for reading, and sorry that this was kind of an unorganized collection of thoughts! graduation is so close! i have a ton of projects to finish up, including one that i'm super excited about for fashion that i will probably post on here when i'm done.

love 

-=-

kanyinsola

warm magical tropical oceans

my mom looked gr8 @ the met gala!

via

can i just say that i screamed when i saw this, i saw it on the christopher kane runway and i was like !! and i didn't think it could get any better but it did. this dress was made for her.


i'm wearing a  black t-shirt with a really cool texture from the gap, on top of a netted black tank top from express, with blue mom jeans from uo to contrast color. and then thrifted white sandals that go with everything.

talk to you soon! (tell me about your favorite met gala looks! the beauty that is rihanna's 100% self-aware resemblance to an egg yolk! lorde! the imperialist nature of the prompt for the theme (looking at China through an exclusively western perspective), how some of the outfits creeped into the territory of appropriation, and how inevitable (of course, still unacceptable) that was given the theme.

-=-

kanyinsola 

can't you see we're only dancing

hello! i would like to do an outfit post (practically) every day in may regardless of how much i planned/like my outfit, and this is the first: 

i've had my shirt since childhood, the jeans are forever 21, and the shoes in this beautiful shade of blue that's slowly emerging as my favorite color partly because in the first few scenes of mamma mia! (which i only recently saw despite the fact that it's literally an ABBA musical?) everything in the hotel is this beautiful, rich shade of blue: 

via

sorry if that run-on sentence was hard to follow but the shoes were thrifted lol. also on that shade of blue: i was stressing about having a dress for graduation (!!!) and my friend found this for me:

l if you're reading this i love you because this is basically the perfect dress. it's sold out for my size atm but who knows, it's at least nice to finally have an image of what i want in a dress.

and a playlist:

1. all we are / utmost good [super cool 70s-ish pop]

2. got it / marian hill [a fun swinging sound with an amazing oboe solo]
3. this is not about us / kindness
4. fiya / tUnE yArDs [she sings "what if my own skin makes my skin crawl? what if my own flesh is suburban sprawl? what happens between us makes sense if i'm nothing and you're all, if i'm nothing at all" and it's all so honest]
5. fourth of july / sufjan stevens [i was so excited to finally listen to sufjan's newest album: carrie and lowell-- he's one of my favorite folk singers and his dreamy, moving songs never stop amazing me. this is one of the more story-telling based songs about being with his mother on her deathbed and i definitely recommend it]
6. i like to be alone / rachel trachtenbug [this is such a dreamy song and the video is like a picnic at hanging rock meets x-files]
7. inky sea / laura groves
8. soundtrack to mamma mia! [amazing overall but especially gimme gimme gimme, voulez vous, and mamma mia]
9. dream (original mix)/ autograf [i guess if i went to raves i would want them to play this song haha because it's electronic and it has this strange literally bubbling feeling]

ok i think that's all! i hope you all have a bright and beautiful may <3

-=-

kani