low click of a ticking clock

Dream master* and fashion photographer extraordinaire Tim Walker delivers what is undeniably my favorite magazine cover shoot of the month in the December 2014 issue of Vogue China. The mostly monochromatic schemes are highlighted with splashes of bright color, each shot enhanced by dramatic shadows and practiced angles reminiscent of the millennia-long tradition of Chinese calligraphy that inspired this spread.

Up until I started high school and joined the debate team, I used to spend my Saturday afternoons at ink-and-wash painting lessons at a studio inside the Seattle-Chinese newspaper office building in the city, trying to emulate the wet-to-dry brush techniques used in both traditional calligraphy and painting. Chinese art, much like Roman art in the West, is obsessed with order and discipline. The practice of calligraphy itself is first and foremost a practice in perfection; the primary objective for most students of it is to write each stroke with measured precision that can be repeated with each character for every work transcribed.

I'm not sure if it's because of or in spite of my traditional art background, but the thing that really drew me to high fashion editorials was how they could embrace such raw emotion and turn dresses into an art form beyond practicality. Fashion is art unlike the compositions I studied in my childhood of art lessons in everything from sketching to cartooning to watercolor; my favorite photoshoots emphasized expression in the way they were able to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. Fashion is Modern with a capital M, and the initial spark of interest by the provocativeness and absurdity high fashion had to offer grew into a lifelong passion for fashion.

Sometime between 2007 when I started reading Vanessa Friedman's Sunday fashion column in the Financial Times like it was my religion and today, the lines between fashion and art appreciation have blurred and seeped in to one another and became inseparable parts of my life. Coco Chanel, my first fashion heroine, said: "fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening," and it's something I really took to heart.

Before I started this blog, I was writing a different (older, embarrassing, and thankfully now private) personal blog throughout my first three years of high school also by the name "seattleite fashionista" even though I only posted about fashion 20% of the time. It was never so much about personal style anyhow: fashion, to me, is about the way I live my life and how I come to perceive it. Fashion on this blog is how I document and express my aesthetic interests of the moment: what am I feeling? What do I want to see? What ideas or themes am I attracted to?

Although I didn't make a post about it last year, 2013 was all about invented nostalgia and escape plans. I dreamt of road trips and amusement parks and rainy days at cafes, imagining a life a little too good to be mine, telling myself I'll get there eventually. I was scared to stop dreaming and start living, and after giving myself the first semester of college "off" to figure out who I was, I gave myself permission to let go a bit and experience life instead of simply meticulously daydreaming. I said yes to everything I possibly could and my life this year was so much more colorful and memorable for it.

2014 was a year of flashes of color much like the chaotic and beautiful Vogue China shoot: not only was it the pop-art supermarket pinks at Chanel RTW and the red neon signs reflecting on glass windows at bars on the 33rd floor of the Shard in London, it was also the bright grey of that rainy Saturday in March when I jokingly told a friend to bring me food and he actually showed up at my window with a tray full of cinnamon rolls and container of Häagen Dazs ice cream, the dazzling blue of the London Eye at midnight on my last stroll through the most magical city after a long Friday in August, and the warm cream of the light I stared at at my best friend's apartment when I was lying on her roommate's bed asking her "do you think he likes me? Because I like him a lot" on a Thursday in November.

I want to know, does it bother you? 

Low click of a ticking clock 

There's a lifetime right in front of you 

And everyone I know 

Don't Lie | Vampire Weekend

xoxo, vivian

Images from this post taken from: "笔墨幻境" (trans. "Ink Fantasy") by Tim Walker for Vogue China December 2014

* 造梦大师 translates to dream/illusion master, as Walker is referred to on the cover of this issue

the fictions we create

I'm not really sure why I've been subscribed to Net-a-Porter emails since high school if I obviously can't afford to add studded leather Valentino shoulder bags or even Totême wool-blend felt coats to my online shopping cart, but I think it has something to do with the carefully selected items in the editor's pick section and the modest yet lovely editorials constantly featured on the website that keep me coming back from time to time. I'll admit while I usually spend about three seconds (if I'm being generous) to look over the daily promotional emails I get from the websites I normally shop at, I was more than a little intrigued when Net-a-Porter sent me an email about November's cover story with "A Modern Heroine: Keira Knightley on fighting for feminism in film" as the leading headline.

"I left [fairy tales] behind. Why should you be told to wait for some f*cking dude to rescue you?" the almost 30-year-old actress challenges, and it's a question that resonated with me for the rest of the day, and one that I feel like I've been thinking about a lot in the last month or so especially. Now that I'm older, I find myself being even more critical of the damsel in distress dilemma. What was a happy ending after all? One where the princess gets saved from an evil fate by the dashing prince in exchange for a hand in marriage?

Even as a kid I remember that was something that always upset me: the clever, hardworking, graceful princess you spent the entire story getting to know always required a prince to come in at the very end to truly escape. She was always adept but not capable enough to truly save herself, and her virtuousness is only important because it was what makes her worthy of the prince's love and affection; by the end of the story, she is reduced to be nothing more than the ultimate prize for the prince, the true hero who is redeemed simply by showing up at the right place at the right time: at the end of the day, it's his story all along. Veni, vidi, vici; after happily ever after, he gets to rule two kingdoms—his, and hers—and she to give him beautiful sons as heirs. 

—

There's something so achingly sad in Daisy Buchanan's reply when she's told she gave birth to a baby girl: "I hope she'll be a fool—that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool." Because Daisy isn't a fool at all, despite what the men in her life want to believe; she knows that there's no space in this world for girls who don't need boys to save them, and the only thing girls can do is play the game by the rules.

“It’s a political thing, having a baby girl, in a way that it isn’t for a boy. You think, ‘Oh, isn’t this fairy-tale lovely?’ Then suddenly you worry, ‘What [expectation] am I planting with that? I don’t want her to be waiting around for a man to fix her problems.’” 

 Keira Knightley, The EDIT interview

That girls grow up learning they need to be pretty and smart and kind in order to be desirable to men rather than heroines of their own narrative is something we're so used to acknowledging that most of us won't even immediately register the inherent inequality in expectations. 

—

“I am not dangerous. Only the stories are dangerous. Only the fictions we create, especially when they become expectations.” 

David Levithan, Dash and Lily's Book of Dares

I still remember being fifteen and looking for a hero in everybody but myself: are you going to be the one who saves me? I asked, not because I needed saving but because I wanted it. 

What happens to the princess whose prince doesn't rescue her in the end? I was sixteen when I spent a year and a half answering that question writing the only piece of fiction I've ever published, about a schizophrenic violin prodigy and her search for salvation. I'll come back to write a much more in-depth post on "Facing the Music" some time in the coming months; even though it's been over three years since I finished the complete first draft, this story has felt like a work in progress of my own growth too. 

Four years later and in spite of everything, I still haven't completely let go. Here I am, critiquing what's wrong with the idea of waiting for prince charming to come, and yet I still like being told by others that they'll be there to save me from myself; I still want to believe that I don't have to fight by myself all the time. The other night when I was up at 3:30am doing Greek drills, I had both The Weeknd's "Rescue You" (Let me rescue you / I can see the truth / I can see right through the pain) and Lana Del Rey's "Off to the Races" (Because I'm crazy, baby / I need you to come here and save me) playing on repeat. 

I wish 15-year-old me had someone to tell me that I should leave those fairy tales behind; I wish 19-year-old me had someone to tell me that I'm not a bad feminist for liking the idea of them anyways.

xoxo, vivian

Images from this post were taken from: "The Heroine" by David Bellemere for The EDIT November 2014

up where they stay all day in the sun

"We had this idea of a girl on a pier..." 

One of my favorite designing duos of all time is Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte. The California born-and-raised (and Cal alum!) designers known for their frothy dresses returned to some of their childhood roots for inspiration for their Spring 2015 Ready-to-Wear show. Their latest collection, which hit the catwalk at New York Fashion Week on Tuesday, channels the dreamy allure of a kingdom by the sea with fishnet textiles, aquamarine sequins and gossamer skirt hems that look as if they had gotten caught on jagged rocks by the seashore. 

You don't have to look far to see how this collection was inspired by the Monterrey tide pools teeming with underwater life. “We wanted to re-create the texture of those underwater tide pools to explore this idea of underwater worlds, with all the movement and fluidity,” Kate explains. Set against a Swarovski crystal backdrop and pale blue stage lights, this glammed up mermaid look is tied together by the bands of sailor stripes and structured lace-up pirate boots, and the result is a perfect blend of fantasy and fashion. This is the world I wish I could be a part of: clothes like these that make me want to escape to fairy tales edged with sea foam and siren songs again, if only for a little while.

Now that school is back in session, I'm busier than I've ever been in my life. I'm taking four full academic-unit courses again this semester: elementary ancient/Attic Greek, classical political economy theory, security and risk management, an introduction to the solar system, and a film seminar on the Coen brothers oeuvre. I'm also in the process of filing paperwork to finally declare my double major in political economy and classical civilizations this semester, which was more work than I had anticipated after all of my original concentration ideas I had weren't enough...does it surprise you that I've been getting up at 6AM (7, if I'm being generous) and sleeping at 1AM on an almost daily basis? I wish there were more hours in a day so I could do everything I set out to accomplish.

Still, a part of me is glad that I have so much on my hands at the moment; it keeps me from dwelling on how empty I've been feeling ever since I got back from the UK. I don't know why—if there's nothing missing in my life, why can't I seem to get rid of this feeling that I need to do and be more than I am already? More of what, I'm not sure; all I'm sure of is that I can't feel this hollow forever. For now, I'll have my mermaid melodies and noun declensions to sustain me. 

xoxo, vivian

Images from this post were taken from: "Behind the Scenes: Rodarte" by CR Fashion Book and Yannis Vlamos for Vogue.com coverage of Rodarte Spring 2015 RTW.

a chameleon soul

One of my favorite films I watched in my French New Wave cinema class this semester was Wong Kar Wai's Fallen Angels (1995). Even though the film obviously wasn't a part of the actual New Wave movement (the "not French" and "made in the nineties" probably gave that away), Wong was influenced by the unique attention to aesthetic paid by New Wavers of the sixties. Unlike a lot of the black-and-white scenes of the French predecessors, Wong had the advantage of filming in color and was able to saturate his Hong Kong with buzzing neon signs looming above his three protagonists. Even though Vogue China's "Beijing Romance" editorial depicts a much cleaner love affair, I'm kind of in love with this idea of how people change under the glow of artificial lights.

I don't know if it's because I grew up and am currently stuck in a pretty boring suburb and want out already, but all of my daydreams lately have been lit with flashes of neon signs and cold reflections on spotless glass windows. Although I live less than twenty miles out from Seattle and could technically just drive downtown if I wanted to (BECAUSE I JUST GOT MY DRIVER'S LICENSE TODAY *celebrates*), the aesthetic difference of the metropolitan life I think I crave and the quiet cul-de-sacs of houses facing the Puget Sound feels like a world apart.

I talk about escape a lot, but what I think it all really boils down to is a desire to escape myself. It's never really so much about the cityscapes seen from 24th floors above or strawberry mint lemonades at seaside cafes as it is a chance to do something outside of my comfort zone. Maybe that's what draws me to the stories told in films like Lost in Translation or Before Sunrise: I keep thinking to myself that if only I could get out of here and go someplace far away, I might be a different person with better stories to tell. Just you wait: I'll be in England in a month from now, and I plan on making it the time of my life.

For now, I'm still working on finding a balance between relaxing and not letting myself waste away. I spent my first week or so back from school catching up on sleep, but it turns out that there is a such thing as too much of a good thing: I made myself sick from overindulging in sleeping, eating, and lethargy. After a week of doing nothing, I promised myself that I would try and accomplish something every day. I'm still trying to get back into the habit of blogging regularly again (it's been a couple years since I could bust out a post in a week) but I'll tell you what: I'm going to try to continue to post my favorite fashion editorials and ad campaigns on Fridays. In the meantime, I hope you all are well!

xoxo, vivian

Images from this post were taken from "Beijing Romance" by Peter Lindbergh for Vogue China June 2011

I found my love in portofino

Even though I've been home for two weeks now, it didn't start feeling like summer until the warm weather and sunshine slowly seeped back into my life again. I'll admit I was looking forward to coming back to rain (if only so I had an excuse to watch TV all day) (which I did), but it would be poor taste to not appreciate how nice the Pacific Northwest gets around this time of year. I think this is a sign that I'm getting old: I always have to pause and remind myself that I need to enjoy this while it lasts, especially because I really just don't know how much time I'll spend at home in Seattle in the years to come. 

For example: who would have predicted that I'd be studying abroad in London this summer a year ago?! Even though I've been making these plans for months now, I still can't believe I'm jetting off to England in a month's time. It's been almost three years since I traveled overseas and four since I traveled to Europe; my wanderlust has only grown and it feels surreal that I'm about to start traveling again. 

When I was younger I used to read a lot of books about super rich kids (think Gossip Girl and other such stories that follow the Cecily von Ziegesar oeuvre) who spent their summers in the Hamptons and the Côte d'Azur with shiny yachts and Cavalli couture. That kind of life was always just so fascinating to me with its extravagance and indulgence—their vacations were nearly unimaginable for a suburban girl like me. I guess it's good I've only ever lived vicariously through the rose-tinted lenses of books and TV shows though: at the end of the day, I think I'd prefer sitting and reading in a cafe by the French Riviera and observe than actually participate in that kind of excessiveness (although I definitely wouldn't mind a closet full of cruise collections).

Anyways, the Dior Cruise 2012 ad campaign is probably one of my all-time favorite Dior Ready-to-Wear collections to date. It captures so many elements I love about Dior, from the way the color palette perfectly complements the colors of Portofino itself to the way its designs embody the femininity and romance Dior is known for. 

I highly recommend watching the short film shot by Ellen von Unwerth for this collection (embedded below). Jac Jagaciak in this film reminded me a bit of a more polished and elegant Brigitte Bardot in And God Created Woman (1956), although if we're going to talk Dior channeling Bardot, Tim Walker's Dior Addict 2012 campaign with Daphne Groeneveld embodies more of that brand of carefree liberation. 

Christian Dior Cruise 2012—I Found My Love in Portofino

I'm not even going to deny or make excuses for the fact that my blogging has gone from sporadic to seemingly non-existent in the last year, so I've made myself a resolution for at least my month left back home before I'm off across the pond: I will be posting here twice a week, with fashion posts on Fridays and film/literature/TV/life/etc. posts on Tuesdays. It'll make me feel like I'm accomplishing something in my month off from school, yeah? ;) I hope you all are having a lovely post-Memorial Day start to summer! 

xoxo, vivian

Images from this post were taken from "I Found My Love in Portofino" by Ellen von Unwerth for Christian Dior Cruise 2012.

that kind of luxe just ain't for us

I never knew grocery shopping in couture was what was missing from my life until the Chanel Fall 2014 RTW show debuted at the Grand Palais in Paris last week, and lemme tell you, this collection was instant theia mania for me. After weeks of dreamy dresses in a succession of fashion weeks littered with Hollywood awards ceremonies in between (particularly loved the ethereal Valentino Spring 2014 Haute Couture collection, schoolgirl-cool Miu Miu Fall 2014 RTW collection, and this year's Academy Award red carpet turnout), this season's Chanel show was the refreshing break I needed from the prettiness I've come to expect. 

While I love my Elie Saab gowns and Oscar de la Renta confections as much as the next fashion aficionado, the bold patterns and Pop Art consumer-culture roots of Karl's latest spectacle makes this my favorite show of the season by far because it reminded me of why I fell in love with fashion in the first place. The bright, gaudy colors transformed the mass-market consumer culture into something bold and a little fantastical: if only my grocery shopping trips were filled with Chanel tweeds and the only stylish high-rise sneakers I've ever come across.

It's this excessive attention to detail, from the sweatpants ripped just-so and jackets with neo-corset midriff insets to the 500+ repackaged and relabeled supermarket goods, that turned the mundanity of rolling a shopping cart down florescent-lit aisles into a glamorous affair. I think the most important question that needs to be asked at this point is this: why haven't I gone to Safeway dressed to the nines for no good reason at all yet?!

Ha. I actually have to go grocery shopping for like the first time this semester next week; I have a week and a half left of school before spring break, and the most glamorous plan I have as of yet is to go to the supermarket because the dining halls will be closed and I can't afford to eat out every day. (I know, my life sounds really exciting, doesn't it?) There are worse things than "being stuck" in California for a week without lectures to attend—I'm sure my friends and I will make some spontaneous plans for an adventure soon. 

xoxo, vivian

Images from this post were taken from: Chanel Fall/Winter 2014 by The Satorialist; Sisley Fall 2010 ad campaign; "Impressions Fortes" by Naomi Yang for Glamour France February 2014; Noel for Chi City Fashion