Spring 2013 Wardrobe Design. Part One: Orange and Blue.

anyone who knows me at all knows that for years, i have worn black. two years ago, i shocked some of my friends by sometimes wearing purple, navy blue or grey and, for the last four or five years, i'd been whining about how i wished i could wear colour but that every time i tried to incorporate some into my wardrobe, it just didn't work out for me. the colours i did wear were solids or, on occasion, plaids. i also wore coloured tights with completely black outfits or, when out at punk or psychobilly shows, sported bright animal print accents. i also love my pale pink, vintage ben sherman shirt but that was the only pink item in my closet. two years ago i even challenged myself publicly, on another blog, to add colour to my wardrobe and failed. no matter how much i could appreciate colours and prints on other people, i just couldn't do it for myself. 

then, last year, i began falling in love with english countryside looks with an edwardian feel to them. i sought out tweeds and plaids and suddenly found myself owning brown and oxblood fabrics and clothing. i'm not sure at what point the door to my batcave was blown open and the sunlight spilled in but i remember thinking, green and blue are my favourite colours so why don't i ever wear them? i also remember buying a dark yellow sweater (bad choice, given my arabic blood but, hey, it wasn't black) and a bright purple skirt and then, the next thing i knew, i was wearing colour and loving it. 

i think part of the problem is that whenever i did try to wear colour, friends who have been trapped in a time warp and believe me to be alongside them on that particular journey would scoff. "no. that's not you," and so on. spending time away from these people and hanging out with old friends in toronto was part of what helped the transformation along. hell, spending time in toronto at all, and out of my bubble, did it, too. i felt disconnected from everyone i knew here and free to discover other sides of myself. i wandered through streets that were new to me, soaked up kensington market, perused the thrift shops on king west. a friend i met here last year, jessie, also helped with this, given that she wears what she wants and has encouraged me to wear different things, too. either way, once i took the plunge, there was no going back! and, seeing that, as a kid, i was more punky brewster than wednesday addams, this made some sense. 

contemplating a spring wardrobe for myself is not something i'd ever given much thought to because, when all you wear is black, you're somewhat limited. i had warm clothing and clothing for warmer weather. again, i could appreciate what was happening in the fashion world and what others were designing and wearing but all without adhering to any of it, myself. this year is different and i'm so very excited about it!

last week-end i headed out to the fabricville in lasalle for inspiration and found it in one meter of discounted wool suiting fabric. i immediately imagined what i would make and what i would wear it with and, running with this idea, toured the shop and picked up a few other pieces that will look amazing in my personal, spring wardrobe. somehow, the end result is a blue, orange and neutral shade pallet. while this only represents what will be a third of this season's warbrobe makeover, who would have thought that i would have fallen for these colours and prints? certainly not i, had you asked me a couple of years ago!

the top piece was what made the rest come together:

i'm absolutely in love with it! what i'm thinking is that i need a pencil skirt out of it, to wear with a blouse made out of the second fabric in the pile, one-and-half-meters or cream-coloured poplin that was on sale for a whopping $2.00.

i'm liking vogue 8119 for this.

i can see these shoes from zappos.com working well with the outfit, too. the hunt for the perfect handbag as also begun.

next up, we have this lovely, orange, crepe. 

which i intend to use with vogue pattern 8825:

the next two fabrics are chiffon, for blouses. the orange  twill will be for another skirt and i would very much like to make myself a dress out of the blue fabric on the bottom but i have yet to figure out what design i would like to go with. the first four fabrics were bought at fabricville, last week-end, and the other three i already owned. the dark blue is leftover from the grade six grad dress i made for my daughter, last june:

to add to the blue and orange pallet, i found this be-bop dress on sale at winners for $13:

i'm not usually a fan of the short skirt on curvy women, like myself, but i'm a sucker for houndstooth and i think i can rock this with a pair of black, opaque tights and a cropped, black blazer.

last but not least, i will pull out a dress i bought last summer (it's in storage now, seeing as i don't have room for all of my clothing and must alternate between fall/winter and spring/summer wardrobes. you can't see the dress but the print is really cute so i'll share it with you:

the dress came from winners, the clutch from a clothing exchange and the shades are vintage, from the 1960's, and came as part of a lot of items i won on ebay, a few years back.

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Roots. Part Six: My First Fashion Photo Shoot and Design School. 2005-2008.

in two-thousand-five, i was still dating and living with the man i mentioned in the last "roots" post. i wasn't happy but had grown too dependent to make a change. i had begun working in real estate and assisted a real estate agent in selling prefab condos, which had begun to sprout all over montreal like weed. i didn't believe in my work but it paid for some bills. i decided that real estate was probably the best route for me to take, seeing as i was good at it and i stood a chance at making a decent salary. began taking courses by correspondence and took out student loans to do so. 

 

as far as my designing was concerned, this was the first year i started coming up with clothing that didn't cater to a subculture. i decided to stick to the name "khimera kreationz" because i was still spinning under the name dj khimera, even if the frequency was dwindling and this would end up being the last year that i mixed in a club or for other people at all. i hired two people to work for me; someone who would handle patterns and someone who would handle the sewing. i lacked the equipment and was mostly focused on my real estate courses, my kids, and managing the enormous, five-bedroom apartment we lived in, in st-henri. i wanted to design, market and manage a small crew so i did.

i started out with one girl who did the patterns and sample assembly for my first shoot. the seams were crooked and she admitted to having watched movies and to talking on the phone while working on my dime. nonetheless, the shoot went really well. one of the models was also a make-up artist so she helped out with all of that and we had a great time. the photographer in all of these was a frenchman who now lives in england, named stephane bourgeois (my kids liked to call him "steven burger") and the make-up artist was angie boudreau, from montreal.

my cousin is (once more) modelling a corset i had designed for the khimera kreationz fashion show of two-thousand-three. 

here, angie is wearing a dress i had made for our friend who was in a local band called the scroll. they're still around. check 'em out.

here angie is wearing a dress that had also been featured in the fashion show. she is so tiny and it was hard to make it fit. in the end, i think it looks good, even if it was a bit too large in some places.

this is one of the new peices i'd designed for this shoot.

my baby cousin is also weaing a dress i had designed that year.

and here she is wearing the vest and shorts combo that ended up being different from what i had designed (it's not the right fabric or colour but the structure is close enough). she had worn this outfit in the fashion show for me, two years prior, as well.

when i hired a second woman, thanks to a subvention from the local ywca and hired both women full-time, the first girl flaked out and the second one spent her whole first day of work struggling with simple ties i had asked her to make. everything unraveled during the few months that followed  the man i had almost left my daughter's father for and who had become a great friend hung himself, my boyfriend moved out and my wretched boss (the woman was miss havisham in a suv) convinced me to drop all of my real estate courses, claiming that i couldn't handle it and be a mom at the same time and that i didn't have the right personality for it. our project closed and i ended working at a gym, overweight and hating everything about my life.

the last drop, and i do believe i needed this, was when my boyfriend moved out and i found myself in the spacious apartment, alone with my two kids, again. we continued to date but the separation, even though neither of us had been happy in a while, made something within me snap. i was twenty-six with a high school diploma, a failed business attempt, two small children and a bunch of dreams i needed to turn into goals. on a whim, i called up college lasalle and asked them about their fashion design program. two days later, not knowing how in the hell i had never thought of really doing this before, i was enrolled for the fall semester and student loans were scheduled to come in.

college lasalle was quite the experience. i racked up a ridiculous amount of debt , given how affordable our schooling normally is here, but i learned what i needed to. it also made me feel so much better about how far i'd come along, alone. for someone considered self-taught (with help from my grandmother, of course!), i had been doing pretty well! the pattern drafting courses were helpful, as i'd always improvised and used my own form of draping. the draping courses, given this last point, were a nightmare. my teacher asked us to drape an a-line skirt and i did. my finished product was fine but, because i had not applied the same techniques we'd been shown, she gave a failing mark on the skirt and i never returned (but i'm going to suck it up and go back this fall, in the evenings). the illustration classes definitely helped because that's not where the bulk of talent lies, to say the least, textiles was interesting and fashion history was absolutely fascinating. studying alongside seventeen-year-olds was a huge pain in the ass but the thing that bothered me the most about college lasalle were the teachers. i have no idea how the hell they go about hiring their faculty members but the teacher that was supposed to be teaching us about the industry had spent her whole career, up until that moment, behind a desk, working for sears, and i know of another teacher who does ridiculous amounts of drugs for a grown-up and this on a regular basis and i felt that only a few of our instructors were actually prepared to answer our questions, teach us and put us out in the world. if i had known then what i know now, i would have looked into other schools. anyhow, i walked away a more skilled designer and was lucky enough to have met one of my best friends, amanda, there. 

during the summer between my first and second years and when i was hanging out with amanda and another girl, shannon, on a regular basis, i broke up with michael. months later, i ditched shannon, her judgemental remarks, negative outlook and depressive moods. amanda and i are still friends, she's doing quite well, back in toronto and i love and miss that girl.

sadly, the only pictures i have from my days at lasalle are of people sleeping in class (the workload was unbelievable and people stole winks whenever they could and of us drinking pints and doing shots at the bar, one block over. even if i had small children and i was older than most of my classmates, i finally got to experience college life and it was a blast while it lasted.

i had to reduce my course load during the second semester and, by year two, i was with a newer group for most of my classes. i couldn't connect with anyone anymore and the financial stress got to be a lot. i was working for the aforementioned miss havisham part-time to make ends meet and my personal life took a wild turn. i started dating the singer of a local but well-known psychobilly band and was completely and utterly smitten and therefore terribly distracted. i finished most of my second year courses and then stopped going, knowing that my third year would be all about learning how to put together a collection and a fashion show and i couldn't borrow another twelve grand to do that, when i felt like life and my two-thousand-three show had taught me plenty. right around the time i finished at lasalle, i moved out of the gay village and back to montreal's southwest but, this time, with the new boyfriend and to the flat i still live in, today.

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Thrift Store Haul. $15.50

last week-end, my mother and i were getting a few errands done in my neighbourhood, when we noticed that the goodwill that opened up a few months ago was actually open on a saturday. we attempted to simply duck in and check things out, seeing as i had brought bags of clothing to donate and had intended on leaving them on the step, anyway.

to our surprise, everything in the store was marked at 50% off for the day. we tried to leave three times but something caught my eye each time and we rounded back into the shop and back to the cash. together, we spent $15.50 and got a gracy boat and dish, a roots mesenger bag, a nike top for 
my son's upcoming boxing lessons, and, the pièces de resistance, were these eleven (i know. i guess one of them broke somewhere on the way to the store), blue glass goblets:

for some time now, i've been thinking about collection mixed, vintage, glass dishes, thanks to this photo (i've had it for so long i don't recall where i found it so please excuse the lack of photo credit).

thanks to it, i'd been thinking that i would like to hunt down pieces in different shades of pink and purple but these glasses have steered me in another direction and blue and, perhaps, green they shall now be!

i also scored some sewing notions and buttons:

this crucifix to add to my collection of religious iconography:

a roll of this green fabric i photographed the other items on, whose fibers are unknown to me. notice the yellow flecks throughout:

for a chance to score incredibly cheap, vintage and/or useful finds, check out "deuxième vie" at 6030 rue monk, in ville-émard.

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Decor Break: Inspiration For My Bedroom Makeover.

by montreal apartment standards, my bedroom is enormous. it's 12' x 17.5' with an extra nook in the doorway and two closets. for the last two years i've been agonizing over what to do with my room, wanting so badly to paint over the dark, teal walls, spruce up and/or replace furniture and set up my sewing things in a more aesthetically pleasing manner (everything is in cloth-covered boxes, on black shelves, right now). i poured over thousands of online photographs and flipped through decor mags and books at the library, waiting to feel that spark. i knew i wanted a white, cloth headboard and white furniture, with stainless steel accents but beyond that, no matter how many ideas i came up with, i tired of them within days. dusty rose, warm grey, mint, cream... nothing stuck. 

until i fell upon this photo. i've loved it for a few months, now, so i'm good to go.

the wall behind by bed will be this exact blue and i will paint the rest of stark white. i've designed a floor-to-ceiling shelving system that i will get a few friends to help me build, i've decided how i want to repaint my furniture and reupholster the wingback chair i have in there. i will post before and after photos but, now that i've packed away all of my workshop items and labelled the boxes for re-shelving, it's time to pick up some primer and get started on the paint. this week-end is my son's birthday party so i start next week and i'm quite excited! after almost five years of staring at the same walls and having a bedroom that is not, in my opinion, conducive to proper rest, relaxation or sensuality, this is an idea whose time has definitely come and gone and come and gone and...

(photo source: victoriadreste.blogspot.com)

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Another One Of My Tumblrs: Photos of Montreal, Then and Now

i really want to set aside more time to write about montreal but, in the meantime and for the last year or so, i've been posting photos of la metropole on one of my tumblr accounts. i must admit that the photos are so far all from "then" as opposed to "now" but i cover interesting themes and feedback has been quite positive thus far. check it out!

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Today's Simple, Office-Friendly Look

it's -40 degress celcius with the wind chill factor, today, and motivation to get dolled up just a wee bit more was simply not there. this is today's office look. my velvet blazer is vintage and i've had it for years. my sheer, black blouse was bought at winners and i really should have looked at the label but, again, this morning i just wasn't having it and it's new so... my pants are from forever 21 and i bought my oxfords on ebay. one ring is from le chateau, the other is vintage.

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Roots. Part Five: Khimera Kreationz. 2000-2004.

i was nothing short of a hot mess when i arrived in montreal, in march of two-thousand. i was nineteen, pregnant and completely incapable of being alone without experiencing great anxiety. i had just been diagnosed with a non-life-threatening but rather scary heart condition and i got lodged into this vicious stress-causes-palpitations-causes-stress pattern. i barely had any furniture, the few childhood friends i had couldn't relate to me because i now spoke an international french, having long since dropped my quebecois dialect, i was about to become a mother and i now wore cat-eye contact lenses and goth clothing.

i went on an online goth forum and wrote to three different girls i thought i might have something in common with (one of them is the closest thing i've had to a nemesis in this town, the second i was friends with for several years but abandoned her due to her weak character general flakiness and the third i am still friends with) and i made plans to meet with them and most of the other forum members once i'd had my baby.

my daughter was born june twenty-ninth, two-thousand, a few months after i turned twenty. her father came to stay with us the day before. he remained with us for six months and then, to my relief, went back to toronto. it was around this time that a group of my ottawa friends began visiting on a regular basis, bringing gifts for my child and helping out but also crashing all over my apartment, eating my food and keeping me up at all hours. i briefly dated a man who was handsome but quite troubled and, despite all the ambition he possessed, he made no move to improve his life and spent his time brooding. he was creative and a fellow aesthete; things may have been different had we possessed more life experience but he was destined to be yet another one of my passengers. 

here i am in the fall of two-thousand,  just a few months after my daughter was born:

i had begun working as an event planner and part-time coatcheck girl for a goth club that was set to open new year's eve, 2000. it was there that i met a dj and fell in enough lust to break up with mister troubled, start dating the dj, get pregnant and move in with him. a month later, i realized my mistake but it was too late. we vowed to stay together until our child was born and see what happened then. my little mister was born january twenty-ninth, two-thousand-two, just six weeks before i turned twenty-two. when our son was four months old, his father moved out and i found myself alone, with two babies.

my style began to change quickly. i shaved all of my hair off but kept my bangs, sporting a chelsea haircut. my attire did not follow suit, though, as i went from being a more classic goth to wearing rivethead styles. a typical outfit was comprised of a mesh top over a tank top, an a-line mini skirt over coloured-tights and torn fishnets with laced up, knee-high rangers. within weeks of the dj moving out, i started dating an electronic musician. (that was a fiasco and my friends spent a lot of time with an eyebrow raised for about a year. he was the source of much mockery, having failed grade one four times and quite obviously pretending to play the keyboard on stage, with one finger tapping random keys in a rythmic way and the other arm straight up in the air, pointing at the ceiling. also, his keyboard was sometimes unplugged while he pretended to play.)


right around that time, i also became a dj. i started spinning noise and then branched out into industrial, eighties, ebm, synth pop, darkwave, new wave, electroclash, techno and old school goth. i was really good at it and quickly drew a crowd. for the first time in my life, i found myself seeking stage clothing of sorts and had immense fun coming up with outrageous outfits. i grew out the top of my hair and teased it up so that, when it started coming down towards the end of the night, people called me "robert smith" or "siouxsie soux". i shaved off my eyebrows and drew them on. i was the first one in the montreal scene to wear new rock platform boots, with visible springs in their six-inch soles.

here i am spinning at an 80's night, on club saphir's first floor, right as my hair was starting to grow out. these senneheisers are still my favourite earphones of all time:

when the top was long enough, i began fastening all sorts of extensions to them, as is popular among this crowd.

since my first pregnancy, i had been sketching and designing clothing at least three or four times a month but now, given everybody i was starting to know and how immersed in the whole rivethead and cyber goth cultures, i decided to sit down and draw up a collection. i started talking to other people about it and, before i knew it, i found myself with a small but enthusiastic production crew. everyone was so helpful and wonderful and, they believed in my project's success to the point of working for free. i began thinking that it would be a great idea to open up a third goth store in montreal and spent two months working on a business plan and looking into grants. i named my company khimera kreationz, which made sense at the time, given that i was dj khimera.

the man i had almost left my daughter's father for, before moving to toronto, had moved to montreal and we spent a lot of time together. we still really liked each other but he couldn't deal with my young children on a regular basis and so we remained friends. he was a great artist and made this graphic impression of me, with larger breasts and gun of course, wearing a t-shirt with my company's logo on it. (he also included my company's name and font as part of a card game he'd created).

here we are at bar passport, between my sets and right before i became wednesday nights' resident dj:

in may of two-thousand-three, i hosted my first fashion show at foufounes électriques. i figured the best way to have as many people as possible in attendance, men included, would be to book a well-known band or two and then have my fashion show open for them. i got together with another dj and two investors and, together, we booked covenant and melotron, electronic bands adored by most of the goth crowd in town. we had six-hundred-and-twenty people in attendance but, boy did i learn a lot about what not to do when organizing a fashion show! firstly, i had an over-zealous crew member who was happy to go her own way and make executive decisions regarding my clothing. she hadn't finished two outfits on time so she grabbed coloured duct tape and proceeded to tape up said outfits so that they had diagonal, duct tape strips running across them. another crew member showed up with work that was well-made but he hadn't used the right fabric and had added style elements that were not part of the original design. my sound guy, who was my son's dad, dropped out at the last minute and the new guy was a bit lost. i had foolishly decided that i should not only design, book, oversee, organize and style but host the damned thing too, so i was onstage when things ran amok backstage and i had no idea why my next two models weren't coming out. i had to gesticulate frantically to the poor gymnast we had gotten to perform during a half-time of sorts.

here are some souvenirs from the show. you can see the duct tape fiasco at the bottom left and i'm the one in the vinyl cheerleading skirt (who can't believe that sentence just came out her). my baby cousin modeled the red, velvet corset.

the response to my show was fantastic, despite all of its hiccups and it's small size. many people wanted to buy from me but the truth is that i was twenty-three, with a baby and toddler at home and i wasn't able to deal with any of it. i would only find out a year later but i was also sufferiing from grave's disease, making me hyper, skittish and unfocused as well as keeping me up most nights and experiencing migraines. everyone i had showed my business plan to liked it but not enough to finance my project, given my age and lack of business experience and so i continued to dj but backed out of the event planning and designing for a while. i let my crew down and spent a few months only going to clubs in order to tend bar or dj and left when my shift was done or his out in my booth until closing time.

i went to a few parties. this was taken a t a loft party in the gay village, with the guy who'd sewn the vest i had designed and am wearing in the photo:

i started dating someone that wasn't right for me and who was really aggressive and whom everyone around me had a hard time communicating with (we're friends now but now i also don't tolerate a tenth of what i used to back then). we moved in together and i settled into a routine. bring the kids to daycare, work, pick the kids up, watch tv with the boyfriend. i had undergone radiation treatment for my thryoid condition and now found myself with the opposite disease, hypothyroidism. i put on almost a hundred pounds, got depressed and had a hard time sticking to anything.

things would get better for me but not for another couple of years.

as with everything else i've shared in my "roots" segment thus far, this all seems like it was in another lifetime. someone else's lifetime, even. it's where i come from, though, and it's these experiences that have lead me to where i am today. next up in "roots": 2005-2007.

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I'm Now on Bloglovin'. Follow Me If You Are, Too!

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The Cringe Factor Behind John Galliano and Oscar de la Renta's Collaboration

one thing that is always hard to deal with is watching someone you never want to have to dislike do something completely deplorable and, essentially, unlikable. i hate to admit that, if it had been almost anyone else who had made those horrible, anti-semitic remarks, in two-thousand-eleven, i would have felt utter rage before anything else but it wasn't anyone but john galliano, one of my idols and someone i loved to like. that isn't to say i wasn't terribly angered by the news of the outburst but i first felt shock, then the horrible sinking feeling of disappointment and then, after all of that, i was right pissed. the higher the pillar, i guess, and i know i'm far from the only one to have struggled with feelings such as these.

i understand that addiction is a disease. i have seen people close to me fight it and win and i have seen others lose the battle badly enough to have ended up dead. i get that. what i don't get is that this was an act of hate. i don't care how drunk or high you are or even if you tend to really fly into a rage when intoxicated. there is general anger and then there is the type of anger and hatred directed at another race or religion. a line that i don't feel has anything to do with simply being blitzed. that said, i am happy that he sought rehabilitation and has apparently been on the wagon since.

four days ago, it was announced that john galliano was invited by oscar de la renta to work with him in his new york studio for three weeks. i get that there is a giant, galliano-shaped hole in the world of fashion when he is not creating and again, i hate having to dislike anything about him but all of this has me on the edge of my seat and not in a good way. i've waited this long to write about it because i wanted to see how everyone else would react to it. i'm not usually one to play it safe when it comes to speaking my mind and i don't encourage it in others but i must say that the well-known members of the high fashion community that are keeping their remarks with regards to this positive but without elaboration are the ones not making me cringe. alexandra shulman's "this is terrific," tweet is a fine example of this. nina garcia also tweeted on the matter, saying, "welcome to new york, john galliano!" both statements are pleasant and welcoming without defending his actions.

the anti-defamation league claims that he has "demonstrated effort to learn from his remarks about jews, hitler and the holocaust." the organization's national director, abraham foxman, also stated, "we believe that individuals can change their hearts and minds as long as they demonstrate true contrition."

i wholeheartedly agree with the latter half of these statements but on what planet must one be living in order to have not learned enough about the holocaust that you would need to, as an adult, be educated on the matter so that you can stop hurling anti-semitic remarks at people, when you're drunk. he used the term "gassed", for crying out loud. this was hatred and not ignorance.

headlines like rt.com's "fashion's bad boy is back on track: john galliano to work for oscar de la renta," are what's not helping the matter. to use a playful term such as "bad boy" in this case is, in my opinion, inappropriate. and, easy tigers, he's going to be there for three weeks, in order to supply oscar de la renta with his input on the upcoming collection and then they and everyone else will see what happens.

all of this having been said, i, along with slew of other people, am anxiously awaiting the results of this alliance and i do think this was a smart business move on oscar de la renta's part, as all eyes are now on them and will be straight into fashion week.

in 2011, john galliano was hired by kate moss to design her wedding dress.
photo source: patmoyerweddings.com

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My Current Facebook Profile Picture

taken by me, in montreal.
january, 2008.
edited by me, last month.
camera: unknown. mine was lost and this one was borrowed.

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Roots. Part Four: On The Streets of Ottawa, A Year In Toronto and When I Became A Goth. 1996-2000

i moved out of my home in gatineau, québec and into my aunt's townhouse in nepean, ontario, an ottawa suburb, when i was sixteen. the change of environment was too much for me and, after years of not being allowed to express myself or be a kid at all, really, i went out all and crammed as much ridiculous teenage behavior as i could into one year. this and the fact that i had decided to take a year off from school after i graduated resulted in me being kicked out of my aunt's home after having lived there for just over a year.

i informed my dad that i was moving back in. he had finally broken up with his mentally unstable girlfriend of eight years but lived in the bottom of the duplex, while she occupied the top floor. we loaded all of my belongings into his minivan and headed east. what my dad hadn't told me became clear as we pulled into what seemed like the wrong driveway upon arriving at their home. he was moving me back in with my stepmom and the best part is that he hadn't told her. he just moved me into my old room, in that place, and let me deal with the immense scene she caused upon discovering me and all of my things in her apartment when she got home from work.

i was even more miserable than the first time i had had to occupy that room. the only differences were that now i was allowed to swear when we spoke, i was allowed to shower (she had forbidden us to shower when we were kids and, instead, made us take baths, claiming that we would "ruin the bathroom floor" if we showered), i was allowed to place my furniture the way i wanted it and i now smoked. i got a job at market fresh, in ottawa, and things really fell apart when she imposed an eleven o'clock curfew on me but work finished at ten, one province and two cities over. i started staying out at night, crashing wherever i could, and then coming home to shower and change when she was away at work. eventually, it all blew up and i was out, as we say, on my ass, at seventeen.

i was dating a twenty-four-year-old acid dealer and professional loiterer with a tattoo of lambert, the friendly lion, on his chest, and one on his back of a large skull with a green mohawk that someone was kind enough to give him while he had sojourned in prison. he was the second in a line of tall, lanky, tattooed, blue-eyed men in my life and liked to go by the name "tigger". tigger and i started out by sleeping outside, next to the rideau canal. when it started to get cold, we began squatting in a townhouse on kent street. a bunch of our friends had lived there and, when they got evicted, they left a key under their mat so that we could get in, drink the rest of the keg that was in the kitchen and get some sleep on the couch they'd left behind. when that option was no longer available to us, we crashed on couches, wherever people would take us in.

halfway through the winter, we decided it was time to find an apartment. we got one next to the infamous-but-waning hull strip. it was a newly-renovated two-bedroom for all of four-hundred-dollars a month. i worked and paid for rent and food while tigger went to school and we waited for his student loans to come in. i got a puppy from some street kids we knew. he threatened to kill it. then i found out he wasn't even going to school and so there would be no student loans. for additional icing on the cake, he cheated on me with a fourteen-year-old and spent the rent money i had been giving him on god-knows-what and i lost my job. i met a girl who would be my friend for a dozen years, she moved into the spare room, we got evicted anyway, thanks to tigger, and found a place in vanier, an ottawa ghetto.

here i am, in 1998, hanging out at the steaming bean café, on nocholas street, in ottawa. 

we settled into a routine and, by then, i had become someone everyone knew, downtown. i had also, overnight, become a goth. i suppose that i would have probably starting wearing punk garb as soon as i was out on the street, except that all the punks i knew at the time didn't bathe and i couldn't deal with the stench. that is honestly the only reason i dodged dressing like a punk at that age, wore sporty labels for a year and then, one night, became a goth.

i don't really know what happened but i must have been influenced by some of the kids i was hanging with downtown. i had always listened to all sorts of music so that's not what caused it... i was playing  around with my make-up one evening when i found myself with cat-eye liner and dark red lips. loving that, i ran to my room, grabbed a pair of fishnets, tore them up and put them on my arms. i threw on a bunch of clingy, black clothing, another pair of fishnets for my legs, my doc's, and headed downtown. at first i thought it quite funny that hardly anyone recognized me but that novelty soon wore off and it simple became a lifestyle, as i met up with other goth kids and became really good friends with them. what was interesting is that half the goth kids i knew were a year or two younger than me and still living at home, in suburbia, so i got to see what money could buy me and set out to find all of the same fashions at thrift stores and on sale. i did pretty well for myself, seeing as i could go to montreal whenever i wanted to and hunt through all the secondhand shops there.

until recently, that was the best year of my life. i fell in love with one of the goth kids and became best friends with his crew (we joked around, calling it a "mope of goths"). i finally felt loved and supported and, when my boyfriend moved to toronto to study massage therapy, i moved into a section of his mom's house for a low cost and got a job on parliament hill and another one at the national arts centre. if it wasn't the best time of my life, it was certainly the most carefree. it was the one year i got to be a teenager and i adored every minute of it. friends would climb up the balcony to my room, as i had only read about or seen kids on tv doing, i always had someone to hang out with, i was never teased and i felt beautiful and strong.

here is the crew at the celtic cross pub, on bank street, in 1998.

here i am with my then-chum, paul, smoking indoors (or at all, really!) and everything.

in the summer of 1998, my other friend paul and i went to montreal for a wedding. my mother had remarried and had given birth to a girl. here i am holding my new sister, geneviève.

after a few months and despite my misgivings and the fact that someone artistic and handsome had fallen for me and i for him, i left everyone behind and followed my boyfriend to toronto. that was one of the worst years of my life. i auditioned for theatre school but got put on waiting lists. i attended humber college and couldn't relate to anyone in my classes. i got accepted to theatre school in ottawa but chose to stay in toronto, with my boyfriend, even if we fought all the time. i was incredibly lonely, he hit on everything with a pulse, and we were broke. the only good thing that happened during this time (aside from me getting a job at a music store and meeting the chemical brothers), was that i started to design, as i had always done as a kid but, for the first time, i envisioned it all becoming something. not long after we broke up for the second time, i got pregnant. i was nineteen.

the chemical brothers and i, on queen west, in toronto:

my daughter's dad and i, new year's eve, nineteen-ninety-nine, in ottawa. i was a few months pregnant and he was visiting for the holidays. his mother had lent me the shawl so that i wouldn't get cold. 

january, two-thousand. pregnant with my daughter and about to go dancing at barrymore's, on bank street, in ottawa. 

a then-friend doodling on my arm, in my dad's basement, before going out. february, two-thousand, a week or two before i moved to montreal and four months before i had my daughter. 

i moved back to ottawa, where i took up german studies at ottawa u. i lived with my dad, my brother and his new, also-pregnant wife, in a house in the country. my brother was doing a lot of drugs at the time and he was very aggressive. my depressive moods would set him off and all of this pissed my dad's wife off so nobody really got along. there was no room for me when her kids came home so i was asked to sleep on thin boat mats on the floor, in a room covered in plaster dust and being renovated. i took the couch but that pissed her off too so we butt heads. when i said a certain music made me sad, she turned up the volume; if i coughed because i had a cold, she sprayed lysol all around me, casing me to wheeze and gasp. (we're cool now but those were some seriously shaky first months). i had to rely on my dad or brother for rides into town and, often, this meant going into ottawa at 6 a.m. with nowhere to go and only enough change for a coffee and toast. i would hang out at the main mall and at the library until it was time for school and then wait at another coffee shop until my ride home was ready. all of my old friends had dispersed a bit and those that remained drove me mad with their refusal to evolve. this lasted only five weeks before i'd had enough. i called my mother, who talked to her ex, who was looking to sublet his place in st-henri, in montreal. i packed up the few belongs i had and, three weeks later, loaded it all up into my uncle's pick-up truck and we headed for montreal, where i have been since.

that time spent in  downtown ottawa was the only breath of fresh air i got between one tough spot and another and, even though the memories are hazy now, i can evoke the carefree, happy state i lived in at whim and make any current situation seem better in doing so. it's also another reason i ended up deejaying at goth nights and that i still own a lot of goth and death rock clothing and will always feel a kinship to that subculture and its romantic and macabre aesthetic.

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Pieces

if you like perusing through vintage photos from around the world, check out one of my tumblrs. i've been neglecting it for a bit but am about to jump back in and continue with the latest theme of choice, prohibition.

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The Little Blog That Could

thanks, dear readers! i just reached 15 000 hits today and most of those are from regulars! 59 posts to 15 000 hits is not a bad ratio at all. xx!

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Today's Look: Early 90's Marks & Spencer Blazer

today i wore a vintage, marks and spencer blazer to work. it boasts the m & s gold buttons with crossed-rifle insignia and a long, slim line. i've had it for about two years and found it at the mmrc. it's the first time i step out in it, as it had been stored for my shop during all this time. i recently decided that it should be mine, after all. i tried to find a photo of it online, in order to create a collage depicting today's outfit but it is nowhere to be found.

if the three blazers in the following collage had a bastard love-child, it would look like the blazer i'm wearing. the rest of the outfit is pretty spot on.

my searching did lead me to an article written by pauline weston thomas, for fashion-era.com, in which she says:







"The classic blazer, a late 80s early 90s fashion, remained popular with women over thirty five, especially with subdued worsted wool straight trousers. One blazer sold by Marks and Spencer rumoured to have been designed by Armani was voted a best buy by a national magazine. Many UK women owned at least one of the colours it came in, which ranged over a 10 year era from navy, bottle green, camel, black, wine, red, saxe blue and several dulled tartans.

By mid decade, with its gold finish buttons, now a leftover sign from the 80s, it began to look quite dated, even though the shoulder line was softened and narrowed. Still available it is worn mostly now by generations over sixty."

this may have made sense to someone of a certain age, about ten years ago but times have changed and old is now new (again). i got three compliments on my blazer today and all before two p.m. so if it's not shaped like a box and its shoulder pads aren't so high as to mess with your peripheral vision, then i say rock that late 80's/early 90's blazer, girl!

(i'll take a photo of the blazer this week-end, when i get to see the light of day!)

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Roots. Part Three: Annelie et La Poire

once we'd moved to gatineau, i was sent to saint-aloysius elementary school for three years. it was horrible. in addition to the verbal abuse and general mental fuckery i was dealing with at home and to the the constant bullying from neighbourhood kids because i chose to speak english on a regular basis, i also had to deal with mainstream, suburbanite brats at school. every single day was a struggle and no amount of money in this world would be enough for me to go back and relive any of it, without the confidence and knowledge i possess, today. no way.

 there are no english high school in gatineau or aylmer so all the anglo kids from those two towns join the ones in hull, where there are two, d'arcy mcgee and philemon wright. before heading to the former, though, i was part of the second last grade to go to junior high in the district (since then, like with most of québec, kids finish grade six and go straight to high school, which is grade seven). anyhow, about one-hundred-and-twenty of us occupied the second floor of an elementary school in hull and learned how to switch from class to class, start calling "recess" "break" and go to experience the thrill of leaving school grounds at lunch. 

i immediately tried to find friends that i hadn't previosuly known and found the most common ground with a girl named kim. she was the closest thing to a real grunge kid that i'd ever met, wearing oversized cardigans and sweaters over band t-shirts with baggy corduroys or jeans that were frayed at the hems. she wore very little make-up, if any at all, and her blonde hair hung in straightened but nonetheless messy strands, usually covering one of her eyes. we walked around at lunch, talking about music and boys. i talked about the boy i was "in love" with but had moved to québec city over the summer and she talked about her eighteen-year-old boyfriend she had sex with several times a week, smoked weed and got drunk with. we were twelve. i enjoyed her company a lot but felt juvenile around her and often felt embarrassed after describing what i'd done that week-end (which was usually biking to the library, borrowing thirteen books and biking back home to read them in my room). i would say things like, "i wish we could study shakepseare" and she would say things like, "i'd like to give my boyfriend a big, wet, french kiss."

within about three months, another girl, annelie, sometimes joined us for lunch or sat with us during gym. she had blue hair, piercings, twenty-hole docs and a patched up perfecto and she wore plaid or combat pants. annelie also had sex with her much-older boyfriend on a regular basis. she talked about bands that i had never heard of and soon had me drawing up posters and stickers of their logos. before i looked any of this up, i was drawing an actual skinny puppy beside that band's name. a few other girls who knew and loved the sex pistols, ministry, the dead kennedys, gwar and a bunch of these other then-strange bands saw what i was doing and asked for art of their own. i had screwed myself by pretending to know all about punk and industrial music and so i couldn't now go back and ask annelie to let me hear examples on her walkman. it wasn't until i got to high school, the next year, that i managed to hear snippets, started browsing through other people's music magazines and listened whenever anyone spoke about any music i had yet to hear. it was annelie who started all of this, in grade seven, though and, to this day, i am grateful to her.

by the time the new year had rolled around, some of the popular jocks had noticed, through kim's curtain of hair and beyond her baggy sweaters that she had beautiful blue eyes, a clear, creamy complexion and really large breasts. we started to get invited to the mcdonald's, down the street, for lunch, with the popular crowd. we were only invited because half of us was kim. i got pushed out quickly enough and, before i knew it, kim was wearing what everyone else was wearing, tying her hair back, wearing make-up and sending the same nasty looks my way that most of the other girls did.

the only time i ever asked for anything specific for my birthday was when i asked for a pair of ten-hole docs. the only time i ever got what i wanted for my birthday was when my parents picked up the aforementioned boots for me in chicago, while on their way back from a trip to texas. i got these just a little over a year after meeting annelie and, had i been allowed to wear patches, torn clothing and military garb and to shave and dye my hair, i would have done so at that time, too.

by the time we all got to grade nine, kim was sporting fake tans and wearing pastels. one of the outfits she wore more frequently was comprised of pear green, flared dress pants, a white and pear green, floral, short-sleeved blouse and silver, open-toe, high-heel sandals. this oufit gained her the nicknames "la poire" (the pear, in french) and one i came up with,"malibu what-the-fuck-is-she-wearing barbie", among a slew of other ones. she was, of course, a cheerleader and was known as one of the dullest tools in the shed but people tried to look passed that because of how heartbreakingly spaced out she actually was.

three of my best friends, at the time, playing around in front of the school. 

this was the committee for the trip to europe, which i don't think anyone even ended up going on. i'm the one in the middle, sitting on the floor. the beautiful asian girl seated at the bottom right was one of the only people to ever stick by side through whatever anyone threw at me. sadly, she passed away when we were twenty.

here's a group shot of the decorating committee, which should have been named another-excuse-to-get-out-of-class-as-often-as-possible committee. i'm in the top row, second person (sort of), with the bob and the cream, angora sweater (even then in the 90's, i knew how to dress). with some of the haircuts and clothing in this photo, i wonder how, in the name of hell, i got picked on for the way i looked. wow. 

la poire is in this photo...

i guess i'm also grateful to kim. she showed me what i never wanted (or want) to be. my vintage shopping experiences, my insane stepmother and the general douchebaggery that took place every day at my high school bred within me a pure disdain for conformity but "la poire" became a symbol of this for me and, no matter how mean her friends were to me, whenever she was present at the time of bullying, i just couldn't take it as seriously.

in two-thousand-three, i became a dj. before i knew it i was spinning ministry, skinny puppy, front 242, frontline assembly and a whole bunch of other bands annelie had made known to me, back in nineteen-ninety-two. she was just being who she was and not giving a shit about what everyone else thought, when were just kids. it took me many more years to be that confidant and to proudly wear whatever i felt like wearing. and i do believe that i would have eventually found my way to punk rock but she definitely planted that seed for me.

my daughter took this photo of me nineteen years after i met annelie. another lifetime, for sure, but that t-shirt says "strummer 77" on it, there's a misfits patch on the back of that vest and i was wearing plaid, tuk sneakers. this is the type of outfit i wear when i go to a punk show... or sometimes just to the market, like on this particular summer day. wherever annelie carron may be: big ups, girl. you made a difference to me.

(and even though i vowed to never ever turn this into a series of photos of me standing around in my backyard wearing whatever it is i'm wearing, like so many other style blogs out there, i do have to share photos of myself with you from time to time! note that the side of my head is no longer shaved and that, while it is still two-toned, the proportions are different.)

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