a l'allure garconniere

"This is about all the bad days in the world. I used to have some little bad days, and I kept them in a little box. And one day, I threw them out into the yard. “Oh, it’s just a couple little innocent bad days.” Well, we had a big rain. I don’t know what it was growing in but I think we used to put eggshells out there and coffee grounds, too. Don’t plant your bad days. They grow into weeks. The weeks grow into months. Before you know it you got yourself a bad year. Take it from me. Choke those little bad days. Choke ‘em down to nothin’. They’re your days. Choke ‘em!"

"Anyone can write, but to write well and often and for pay can be a hard and lonely job, because to do it honestly requires - at least at the beginning - a certain amount of boring self-analysis whereby professional and existential crisis feed exhaustingly off one another. To be an honest political writer or journalist today is constantly to negotiate and re-negotiate the complicated relationship between conviction and orthodoxy, between critical reportage and activism-as-journalism."

"I am angry at capitalist systems that not only abuse fat people for not looking good in clothes, or not providing fashionable clothes, but also make us feel some kind of imperative to spend above and beyond what we have to make up for our fat bodies."

"If we actually started calling bullying what it is and address it as racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, fat phobia and classism it would actually give children a better way to deal with the very same power dynamics they will face as adults, while also giving adults more responsibility to challenge the intolerance that is rooted within our society overall."

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part of my empowerment through fashion and clothing has been largely due to my discovery of vintage clothing. i’d never felt at home in new clothing, never felt like it truly expressed what i wanted to. like most teenage girls, i spent a lot of time - and wasted a lot of money - trying to figure out what i liked to wear and what i wanted to look like. when i finally started foraging through the local thrift stores with friends at around fifteen, i felt at home. i started living in old man’s pants, ratty wool cardigans and little kids t-shirts (much to my mother’s dismay, but that’s another story).

the class dynamics operating here are interesting; my friend zach would borrow his parent’s van, we’d all chip in for gas money and head down the 401 to “the big city” of belleville to go to a few thrift stores there, since there were slim pickings in our smaller towns. when most of the other kids our age were going to the mall, the only reason we ever stopped there was to use the photobooth. we would inevitably end up at the now-defunct goodwill and forage through the racks to find the most hilarious things possible; obscure 1970s union t-shirts, old vacuum cleaners, 1960s mod coats… inside jokes would emerge around the clothes we’d come home with, the books we’d never actually read from cover to cover, the argyle socks and ill-fitting plaid pants.

it was a truly empowering experience for someone like myself, whose fashion choices had always been limited by how much money i had in the bank. at thrift store, i could find amazing dresses you couldn’t find anywhere else for a mere 5 dollars, as opposed to the beautiful new dresses in the stores in the mall across the street i wanted which cost nearly a hundred… i could play dress-up. i could be someone else. it’s something i really love about vintage; i quickly learned i could fool people into thinking i’m someone i’m not, and shock them in certain ways.

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Being a fourteen year old girl is like being forcibly submerged in this cultural narrative about falling in love. It’s a weird time – having no experiential knowledge of this feeling that is so ubiquitously discussed. Falling in love is aimed at young girls like a self-worth destroying weapon. When will it happen to you? What boy will choose you? Do you have the right lip gloss?

I was young then but I was smart. I needed someone who could speak to the terrified & terrifying young lady I knew I would be. It wasn’t the clothes or the dates that would be dangerous. That part I understood. It wasn’t love that was dangerous – it was me.

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"…we get along in a way that doesn’t often happen because she is so easy to be with. we don’t have as much time together as we should. but know that even though i don’t see julia often, she is always supportive of me and i always feel, when i see her, caught up on her life. not because i read what she says on livejournal all the time, but because she is an attentive listener and a fun and spontaneous person. she makes me feel relaxed because she will often just look at me and say “awkward!” and then we all laugh. julia’s entries, when she does post, are an achievement that is not usually accomplished on livejournal at all. they are entirely honest. they are not pretentious. they do not imply that people are being left out or things are being glossed over. she doesn’t allude to secrets that are too much to write about. she posts pictures of her smiling face. she talks about her dreams for the future. she writes excited entries about films and bands and friends of hers. she links back to things she had written years ago. she posts pictures of her younger self, long hair and big sunglasses, so that we can all laugh at our old selves. she staunchly refuses to become jaded about the medium. she counts me, us, as one of the many benefits of having a blog that outweigh all the negative aspects."

"at the end of the day, dressing for your job vs. dressing yourself is nothing to lose sleep over. but i’d be lying if i said it’s not something i think about before i get dressed in the morning to go to work. everyone does it to some extent, but i’m more interested in tackling the shift of someone who plays with fashion and how it relates to their (gender, sexual, class or political) identity, and how they feel they should dress depending on their line of work… once a wierdo, always a wierdo. and if fashion was the one way you feel like you can express that wierdness, it can feel wrong to have it taken away from you… even if you’re the person taking it away, to a certain extent."

"I do not want to be tolerated, or misnamed. I want to be recognized."

"Germaine Krull was the very prototype of the “New Woman”: a young entrepreneuse – she had set up her own portrait studio in Berlin in 1923/24 (together with Gretel and Kurt Hübschmann) with bobbed haircut, cigarette and bisexual inclinations, she almost ideally conformed to the typical image of the “New Woman” as portrayed week be week – whether admiringly or otherwise – in the art periodicals, women’s magazines and illustrated weeklies of the Weimar Republic."