what i wore: leaves know they're ending, celebrate their end

ah, the fall! so beautiful, and quickly coming to an end. i must post these pictures before the snow starts to fall! i don't know about where you guys are, but almost all of our leaves have fallen now here in beautiful québec city. early october is always peak season in ontario and quebec, and i had the chance to enjoy the beautiful colours when visiting my family for thanksgiving/indigenous day of resistance weekend at the beginning of the month.






this is my younger sister's wonderful dog, aspen. she is potentially my favourite four-legged creature on the entire planet, not gonna lie. look at my big goofy smile! how can you not love this dog?


and how can you not love the beautiful fall leaves?




if you're interested in that kind of thing...
dress: 1950s cotton day dress, vintage clothing fair in ottawa circa 2007 i believe?
crinoline underskirt: thrifted
necklace: key from the ste. foy flea market, 2$, chain thrifted ages ago
belt: from le vestiaire, free
oxblood heels: gift from my mother, naturalizer
goofy smile: thanks to my awesome sisters and an adorable puppy.

so with that out of the way, we can talk about more interesting things.

the folk festival de québec is in full swing as of tuesday and i am filled with musical love and lust. anne-marie, simon and i went to see ferriswheel and timber timbre, which was so lovely. timber timbre's music is always so perfect around this time of year, and it's always a treat to hear it live. there are so many shows i'd love to have time to check out, but my time and my pocketbook unfortunately will not permit such things. i do think i'll have to go see lisa bozikovic, though.

this beautiful song, no denial, is about the death of her mother, and features some of the most beautiful lyrics.

brilliant gold, crimson red/ the leaves know they're ending/and celebrate their end

i don't think i've ever heard a more beautiful metaphor for death.

end of may getaway: what i wore

to take a break from the city and the seemingly endless job hunt, i decided to head to la pocatière to visit a good friend of mine, and boy am i glad i did.

this was the house i stayed at. my friend ashlee told me it is the oldest house in the town. all of the other houses that were built around the time the city was founded in the 1670s were destroyed when the english attacked in 1759. this house survived, and dates from around that time. ashlee lives there with four lovely people, a one month old baby, a cat and her four kittens, and a ferret. we listened to lots of 90s nostalgia inducing music while cooking, and watched episodes of malcom in the middle while we weren't enjoying the beautiful weather.

on the last day of my visit, the morning seemed calm and beautiful, another sunny day ahead. but a storm arrived in a flash, the temperature dropped, and then all was wonderful and beautiful again. none of my attempts at capturing the beauty of the storm succeeded, so here are a dozen photos of me enjoying the sun in my new favourite dress.

i think it's supposed to be a slip; i bought it at my favourite thrift store in ste. foy, where they sell things for pennies. literally. this dress was 99 cents.

yeah.

i know.

and the flowers in the backyard matched the colour perfectly! don't take my word for it, here's proof:

this was right before the storm struck

during the storm, i took a few in the greenhouse space of the house. the lighting was really eerie and beautiful, and i found wonderful old wallpaper (my favourite).

and of course, after the storm, we enjoyed a magnificent sunset.

do yourself a favour and watch the sunset tonight.
find a rooftop, a window, a front yard, a park bench.
it'll do you some good, i promise.

what i wore today: blossoming spring time

this is my new favourite dress. on tuesday my friend anne-marie and i hopped onto our bikes and rode for hours out to lebourgneuf, a suburb of québec city, to check out the new value village that had just opened. we found lots of lovely things but i ended up just getting this dress and she left with nothing because everything was absurdly overpriced. another reminder that value village is the "holt renfrew" of thrift stores and to support charity based ones rather than corporate bullshit ones, even if they are recycling.

i ended up shelling out the dough for this dress because it is quite unlike anything else i already have in my closet. at first, on the hanger, i thought it might be a bit school marmy, but thought to try it on anyway. on me, it feels like a dustbowl 1930s era dress. most of my dresses and skirts are knee-length but this one hits right between the ankle and knee and in fact, i think it makes me look even taller. it is perfectly floaty and airy for the lovely weather we've been having this week. i wore it when i worked at the thrift store yesterday and got lots of compliments on it.

after work i decided to go for another bike ride (may is bike month! i've been riding my bike every day) along la riviere st. charles on a lovely bike path which has gorgeous tress with pink blossoms right now. my allergies hate me but my soul feels better after laying under those trees. here are some more pictures.

my new favourite bag of all time. i found it outside the thrift store i work at, and added blue eyeshadow, eyeliner, nailpolish and lipstick to the young chaps. i am thinking about adding a monocle or a pipe to one of the two youngin's.

you can see my lonely bicycle in the upper right corner in this crooked one (the camera was propped on a tree branch)

but more generally speaking, things have been rough lately; i'm dealing with a lot of anxiety and other issues, and i'm realizing more and more as of late how fashion and clothing relates to this. i normally don't have a very hard time getting dressed in the morning (on average, it takes me all of 2 minutes to pick an outfit and put it on, ta-dam!) but lately i have been filled with anxiety and questions. i feel like there is nothing i want to wear, or that is appropriate. even though my closet is bursting, nothing feels right. i change three or four times before leaving the house to apply for jobs or interviews. what should i wear? i am handing out resumés at bars, how should i dress? at hotels, how should i dress? in retail, how should i dress? how should i wear my hair? should i wear makeup (which i normally very rarely do)? i am more concerned with how other people read me than how i present myself, and i feel like i am having a hard time knowing what people want to see.

there is a lot of power in that, in how you choose to present yourself. there are so many things in our lives we have no control of, but what we wear is something we actively choose every morning, whether we frame it as a choice or not. i think this idea relates to my self-portraits as well; i am the one deciding how to pose, what i look like, where to take the picture, when to take it, and whether or not the photo gets taken in the first place (since a lot of people dislike being photographed for any number of ((valid)) reasons). when getting dressed for others, there are very few ways to know for certain whether or not your appearance will please them. you can guess, but it is hard to know for sure, especially with strangers.

but hopefully i will find a good job soon and will feel less anxious and depressed. yesterday, as you can see, i decided to say fuck it and just wore what i felt like wearing and handed out five or six resumés and did a few follow-ups. if i try both routes (parading in a costume that is NOT me, and being myself) then i'm bound to find something.



but don't worry, i'm taking care of myself. cheering myself up by learning new old favourite songs on the ukulele, listening to lots of nina simone, abner jay, and old blues, drinking late night tea on my patio with karina, talking to old friends (thank goodness for skype) and spending more time on my bicycle than on the computer.

what i wore today: alice or dorothy

when i got dressed this morning, i thought i was channeling dorothy from the wizard of oz: a blue and white gingham print dress, paired with a new pair of lovely little red t-straps my mother bought me (ha! as if any shoes i'd ever wear could be considered "little"). but as the day wore on, however, my sister and mother both said i reminded them of alice. i like to think it's more because alice in wonderland is re-entering popular culture in a fierce way right now thanks to the remake, but either way i think i looked pretty cute.

what do you think?

my wonderful family bought me a plane ticket to come visit for easter weekend, and the past few days have been a whirlwind. i landed in toronto on wednesday morning, leaving the snow covered streets of quebec city for the sunny summer-like warmth of ontario. of course it is above seasonal; we normally don't see this kind of weather for another month or so, but this year it almost feels like summer!

early in the morning i took my big clunky cruiser to the gas station to fill up the tires, and go for a little bike ride. on the way i stopped by some old favourite places i used to walk along all the time when i was a kid, passed streets i used to deliver newspapers on, and of course saw the train go by.





when i got home, it was so hot i ditched the socks, the sweater and even ironed my dress. in april! april!



dress: emmaus, $5
slip + poofy underskirt: thrifted
shoes: naturalizer, gift from my mother! i love them
vintage queen pin: emmaus, $2


my sister's cat, who i briefly lived with when we went to university together, still quite dislikes me, even though i love her fluffy erratic self.


so there you have it! what i wear in trenton so that people look at me like i am an alien.

this happens every time i come back to trenton: i always feel simultaneously at home and completely foreign. for those of you who don't know me, i lived on military bases most of my youth, which meant moving every 3 or 4 years. we mostly lived in ontario, and the longest i lived in one place was trenton, for my entire high school years tied with five years in peterborough for my undergraduate degree.

as i alluded to, every time i am back here i feel out of place. my sisters, parents and friends often make (well-meaning teasing) comments like "you're going to wear that there?" but anyone who knows me knows i don't change what i wear depending on who i'm going to be with or where i'm going to be. yes, i'll wear that 1950s cotton day dress biking around trenton even though i'll get stared at. yes, i'll wear those three inch heels because i feel like it, even though it means i will tower over strangers and get comments telling me that tall women like me don't "need" to wear them.

so clearly, in the little over forty eight hours i've been in trenton, i've been thinking a lot about how our appearances are read by others as well as performed for others, in a sense. in the past two days, i've seen friends from a few years ago, from high school, as well as people who have known me my entire life, people who i haven't seen for a very long time. how much can we tell about each other, how much we've changed, based on what we're wearing? i've been thinking a lot about these things we see as "normal" for the most part and trying to theorize around them... i'll let you know once i've fleshed out these ideas in more substantial ways.

ALSO: thanks for all your comments lately! i love hearing your ideas and thoughts. a few people have asked me where my contact information is and i noticed i don't have it posted anywhere! i will change this. in the meantime you can send me emails with your ideas or comments to JULIACARON at GMAIL dot COM

my favourite thrifts: new feature!

today is the first in what i hope will become a regular feature here: my favourite thrifts. i've been posting my finds for years on thriftwhore but here i will highlight one item per post and tell you where i found it, what i paid for it, and why i think it's awesome. pretty straightforward. so here is the innaugural post of my favourite thrifts.



found: march 2010
where: emmaus
how much: 3$

why it's awesome:

i promised myself years ago i would stop thrifting things for other people; i would only purchase things that i could fit into and that i would wear. i wouldn't simply take anything that i thought was beautiful or interesting or cool home with me just to have it, or to give to a friend, or to maybe one day sell. this, of course, has failed miserably, namely since i started my etsy store in november 2008 and when i stumble upon things like... this dress.

this dress. this dress is made for a child, but it is by and large one of the world's most wonderful dresses i have ever found. i'm sure you're looking at said dress, thinking, "why, yes, julia that is a cute dress, but one of the world's most wonderful dresses? that's quite a statement to make about a simple little 1970s children's garment."

sure, there's no fancy embroidery, or embellishment, or designer tags. it, by all accounts, looks like any old dress a young girl in the 1970s would scamper around the yard in, spill ice cream on, get dirty in. but let us look a little bit closer.


upon inspecting the perfectly sweet peter pan collar, the awesomeness of this garment should become apparent. no? need more convincing? look closer still...


look at the print of the sleeves! there are little children holding placards; they are all protesting for women's liberation, a permissive society and worker's rights! how amazing is that! i can't stop using exclamation marks!


and to top it off, they are the most stylish adorable freckled little protestors you've ever seen.


this one, who holds the sign saying "up with permissive society," reminds me of a turn of the century suffragette. think of the mother in mary poppins.

and there you have it. one of the world's most wonderful dresses i have ever seen.

check out my flickr for a few more photos and for higher resolution versions.

the politics of vintage: part one

belleville, 2002

the internet is abuzz about discussions about vintage clothing these past few months; with the popularity of mad men, the increasing accessibility of buying vintage with websites like etsy and ebay, topped off with more and more fashion bloggers wearing and sharing their vintage duds, it was only a matter of time before interesting theoretical questions about the intersectionality of feminism and vintage clothing were posited.

threadbared seems to have struck a nerve in the feminist community by posting some excerpts from other like-minded blogs in a post entitled "On the Politics of Vintage, Starting with a Series of Thoughtful Epigraphs Before I Begin My Own Ruminations on the Topic." shared on the popular jezebel blog, people have been pondering the questions blogger Gertie Lang raises, namely her question: "Is wearing a fashion from an oppressive time period indeed a symbol of that oppression?"

when reading the comments on the jezebel post and in the fatshionista community, i have been quite surprised by the number of dismissive responses in regards to the political potential of feminists wearing vintage clothing. the overwhelming response seems to be summed by by a comment made here by cruelladivine: "I think vintage clothing is just that - vintage clothing. I don't feel that wearing it idealizes a certain time period, I think we wear what we think is flattering on ourselves. I most definitely consider myself a feminist but sometimes it is possible to overthink stuff. To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." to my surprise, no one has expressed any sort of disagreement with this commentor, but in fact it really bothers me. i'm not denying that a lot of people who wear vintage clothing do so for many different reasons, but this does not speak to my experience with vintage whatsoever. so i thought i'd talk a bit about that, about how a dress has never really just been a dress to me.

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 and like most young teenage girls, 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 started foraging through the local thrift stores with friends at around fifteen, i finally felt at home in my clothes. i started living in old man's pants, ratty wool cardigans and little kids t-shirts, much to my mother's dismay.

in trenton, ontario at age 16. the patches on my jeans were how i first learned to sew.

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 belleville to go to a few thrift stores there, since there were slim pickings in our small 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 end up across the street, at the goodwill, and forage through the racks to find the most hilarious things possible; obscure 1970s union t-shirts, old vaccuum cleaners, 1960s mod coats, and of course, ridiculous books. living in small towns, it was mostly what we did for fun. instead of dropping 10 bucks on a movie, we'd spend hours in a thrift store, laughing our asses off at things that didn't fit right, things that didn't seem like they should even exist, books with titles like "real men don't each quiche" and buttons of 1970s rock stars. 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.

trying on absurd things in the now defunct goodwill store in belleville, ontario


please note that the book in my friend's hand is entitled "real women don't pump gas." i gave it to a women's studies professor a few years later.

it was a truly empowering experience for someone like me whose fashion choices had always been limited by how much money i had in the bank. now, i was finding 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. (this is not even addressing on the fact that most of my vintage clothes are either handmade or have union labels on them, as opposed to the questionable "made in thailand" labels on the new clothing in the mall.) i could play dressup. i could buy something for a dollar, and if i didn't wear it, i had only wasted one dollar as opposed to 20, or 30, or 40. one must note that vintage clothing was not nearly as mainstream at the beginning of this decade as it is today; there were much fewer fashion blogs, and most vintage clothing was relegated to being tucked away treasures in thrift stores or expensive in vintage and antique stores, as Footpath Zeitgeist points out. i didn't really have a lot of access to compare myself with others, aside from a few zines which rarely had pictures of what other people wore. i wore vintage because it was used, cheap, and made me feel at home.

okay, so maybe calling too-small kids shirts from the 80s as vintage is not everyone's idea of "vintage," but it was my reality and my introduction. today i feel more at home in dresses and vintage coats, and can tell you how to tell apart a reproduction from a vintage piece, how you can tell which era the garment is from, etc. i still don't like to pay very much for clothing. actually, it's not a matter of "liking" to, it's a matter of not being able to. and it's also something i really love about vintage; i can fool people into thinking i'm someone i'm not, and shock them in certain ways. more on this later...

in my parent's backyard, summer 2004.


the classic value village changeroom photo that has been taken a million times, belleville 2004

so when it comes down to it, i wear vintage because it found me. since it found me eight or so years ago, i've thought about it a lot. which is potentially why i feel the need to chime into the conversation here...

in response to the question of the "oppressive" nature of these clothes, i am interested in why so many people are reacting in a defensive way, saying that a dress is just a dress, not a thesis. if you take a look in my closet or on my flickr when i did wardrobe_remix, you'll see that i own about 70% vintage, 30% new, with a good chunk of the new clothing being second-hand. part of the reason i was drawn to vintage was because it WASN'T something that was shoved down my throat, and felt like a different kind of consumption. because it felt like i wasn't just buying a dress, i was buying the history behind it. the more i learned about vintage clothing (largely through lj communities like thritfwhore, vintagelook and vintagehair, as well as through the sweet old women who would stop me in the street and tell me stories) the more intrigued i was by the political potential that could be unlocked in these garments. fooling people into thinking i went to school for fashion, or could afford to buy the latest magazine and change my closet with the trends and the seasons was fun for a while, and still is sometimes. accumulating my own knowledge with the aid of the internet and of strangers in thrift shops was very empowering and continues to fill me with passion today.

but that's just a small part of my own relationship to vintage; everyone has their own reasons and ways of wearing vintage, and i wouldn't call myself a purist by any means, but i am surprised at the tone a lot of these comments in these online discussions. i think what we need to remember at the heart of this debate is the fact that every person has a different relationship to clothing and fashion (not just vintage), depending on their gender, sex, size, culture, race, ability, sexuality and age, but more often than not that relationship is one that is filled with conundrums and contradictions. one of my favourite things to do is shock people by wearing vintage dresses, but never fussing with my hair, rarely wearing makeup, and flaunting my hairy armpits. fucking up these ideas that i am wearing something that imposes such a specific, rigid, and reductive idea of femininity and challenging that in my own little way. you would not believe how many people have made comments to me like, "you just shouldn't wear a dress like that if you aren't going to shave." i usually just laugh and tell them they're completely missing the point, but it is not surprising.

self-portrait in ste. marie de beauce, québec in july 2007. note clara bow above my bed.

especially among my femme friends, high-femme 50s fashion can be incredible fun to engage with and make our own. it is empowering to share new dresses we found with one another, talk about what an amazing deal we got on them, and how badass we feel pairing a pair of doc marten boots with a frilly crinoline 1950s dress. while other people might feel like a vintage dress is worth less because of stains or tears, i love wondering what kind of wine was spilled, in what circumstances that button fell off (or was torn off?), and being a part of that garment's history myself. part of the reasons i am raising these questions is because this was NOT why i started wearing vintage clothes in the first place, but it is something i have come to love about it through the years.

as i mentioned above, clothing, vintage or otherwise, is wrapped up in a whole number of questions that many of the people discussing these issues are raising: where was it made, who made it, who is it marketed to, how much is it sold for, where is it sold, and the cultural implications of that particular style of garment. there are so many questions we could unpack about clothes, which is namely why i started this blog, and it is really exciting to see them being taken up in such a variety of ways. i'm excited that this post's title ends with "...before i begin my own ruminations on the topic." i'm really looking forward to more discussions on this topic and hope we can move away from a personal defensiveness to a more collective sharing of knowledge, instead. the original threadbared post ends with the question, "how do we make clothing our own?" and i think that this very important question has unfortunately been overshadowed. let's talk about that next!