Meditation

I don't have much to offer at the moment, so I figure I'd let you look at the clockworks of my brain, which means you would have to bear the self-centered and sentimental nature of the following. It still primarily deals with fashion. I hope it opens up an artery for an interesting conversation though; let me hear your thoughts. 


1. Phases I, II, III, IV and ongoing

I. I remember when I first started out I wanted all the visuals. I wanted fashion as architecture on a monumental scale. I had a very fierce and strict onus for the designers who rolled their collections out on style.com. They had to shock and please, thrill and delight and overstimulate my senses. I don't think I cared so much about structure in what inspired me as to momentum -I relished the heart-throbbing rhythm that is the core of fashion in its truest sense. This was probably something borne out of my entry into Tumblr, where stream of consciousness is key. The many things that appealed to my seven senses went straight from the point of excitement with my neurons to my online weblog. Amidst the color and lightning, it was the phase where I became sensitive to beauty. Sensitivity breeds adrenaline, dependency and tears -soon it was second nature for me to recognize beauty, to want to tear beauty out of all those editorials and faces and fabrics and preserve it in amber. It also awakened a need in me to have that beauty in my life, and it is here my first carefully-considered outfit makes its awkward debut (which I remember vividly and fondly): a pair of white shorts with a multicolored bohemia scarf used as a casual belt with a black long-sleeved DKNY top, a brown handbag borrowed from my mom and Converses which were 2 sizes too large for me, but I wore them anyway.

II. Some time around here, I became attuned to standards. The classical hierarchies and pecking orders of Tumblr blogs, editorials, brands, names. I unwittingly sifted out a number of inspirations which were my previous darlings from my Tumblr, my conversations with friends, and eventually my mind entirely -because they were "low" on the list. Suddenly that energy was channeled towards advancement -of what sort I have not figured out as of now. 

III. Henri Cartier Bresson: Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst. Do not look at them.

Ira Glass: All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, 

is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. 

Spurring the realization of an artistic potential within oneself is usually good taste, that sensitivity to beauty. That is why you end up despising your own creative handiwork, because it does not live up to your good taste. It is at that peak of displeasure that I find myself attempting to consolidate personal style and seek taste in my relationship with fashion. It is difficult, this period of absolute uncertainty and ginger treading. 

IV.  There is now an alarming need to streamline my choices pertaining to style. It has to be perfectly in tune, pitch and all, with my personal philosophies, my mood, myself as a character in its entirety. I need to identify with myself, to fully comprehend and take charge of my interaction with fashion. I want to exert absolute control over it, for it to dance to my own unique tune and no other. I want to be as powerful as the Pied Piper of Hamelin. I want to manipulate fashion, to extort everything I want from fashion in the way I want it.

For this to happen, I need to come to terms with myself