Roots. Part Eight: Soul Searching and Baby Steps. 2010.

I wish I could say that I'd had my fill of lessons learned with regards to the relationship mentioned in the last Roots entry and that I moved on without a backward glance but, alas, that would be far from the truth. A month after my ex moved out, we got together and went on one of the best dates I've ever been on and certainly the best one we'd ever been on together. We began seeing each other again and remained more or less exclusive for a long while even though we would only get together once a month, I usually had to instigate, he was more often than not three sheets to the wind within hours of arriving or meeting me and he never stayed over for long. I should have broken free at that point but I still loved him very much and since he'd moved out, I'd made great strides in every other area of my life so it was easy to convince myself that this was okay. I'll spare you most of the details because a)they're personal and b)this series is about how the events in my life molded who I am today and why I make the style and career choices I do. 

A couple of things happened with regards to my personal style, as soon as the boy was out the door. Firstly, I had been greatly influenced by him in the sense that, even though he changed styles often in his life, he completely immersed himself in whatever it was he was into at the time. I followed suit while I was with him. We were both rocking kind of emo looks when we started dating. I had gone from goth to rockabilly to emo or "scene", while keeping punk elements throughout. Even though I loved psychobilly music and fashion, he hated all traces of either, since he'd thrown out all of his 'billy clothing and ditched his band. I loved that he was into fashion and always dressed and styled himself immaculately, no matter what the look, but he had strong opinions about what was good-looking on women and, more importantly, on me. You should never dress yourself in any way because your boyfriend says you should but I think it's only natural to avoid things you know he utterly detests. Exactly what these things were were confusing and changed a lot but, as mentioned in the last Roots segment, I was buckled into that roller coaster ride and just went along with it all. No frontal tattoos, no chelsea-influenced haircuts, no animal print of any kind but, if I must, zebra print, please; no pompadours, no shaving of any section of my head, no pastels, no retro underwear and on and on the list of unliked style elements went. Again, he didn't make me wear or not wear anything but I avoided any and all of these to please him so, when he left, I more or less flipped out, stylistically speaking and wore whatever the hell I wanted, when I wanted and styled it all the way I wanted to. I could finally blare psychobilly and punk rock in the apartment again and I started going out to dance for hours on end again. 

I started driving, obtained my licence and hunted down a job in the world of Westmount real estate, where I knew I would thrive. In July, I got my passport, hopped on a red-eye bus to New York City and spent four days there with my two aunts. Although we stayed in New Jersey and commuted to midtown only, I fell in love with NYC and have gone back at least once a year since. I didn't go very far (I live a seven-hour drive away) or experience a culture that is that different from mine but it changed me. I got stopped by random people all the time, whether it was because of my outfit, my hair or my tattoos. The one aunt I did touristy things with couldn't believe how many people I met and was particularly amused when I took her to the MAC store, started selling one of their mineral products to her, was joined by the sales rep (who has been my facebook friend since), who closed the deal and then, a few hours later, after we'd split up for a bit, introduced her to half the staff at The Empire Grill, as we'd all became chummy while I waited for her to see The Empire State Building (I don't do heights and I'm claustrophobic so that's not for me).

Here I am in our hotel suite in Tom's River, New Jersey (making a slight duckface, I'm sad to note):

Penn Station. Newark, NJ. July 18th, 2010.

Central Park. July 19, 2010. (A print of this photo now hangs in my bathroom):

Blues busker in Central Park. July 19, 2010.

Taken from the Circle Line cruise:

Grand Central Station. July 20, 2010:

We spent our last day in NY/NJ on the beach at Seaside Heights. It was during a mad heatwave and my aunt and I swam and relaxed by the ocean, eating crab legs and giant prawns and reading. I had picked up my book of choice at The Met a couple of days before and its pages did a lot to influence me. Reading about F. Scott and Zelda and especially about Lois Long helped set certain wheels in motion. 

Within two months of returning to Montreal, I bought my first car, ditched my job (most real estate agents are crazy people) and became a relocation consultant, began fostering a Great Dane and redecorated my bathroom. As is obvious by all of this, things began to move forward for me and at a fantastic rate!

My daughter took this while we were driving along the water, on the West Island (My daughter named the car El Chupacabra and it stuck):

It was around this time that my mother lost both of her breasts to cancer. I got this tattoo (by Lenny of King Len Tattoos) in her honour and am happy to say that, right now, she is alive and well:

My personal blog at the time boasted entry after entry about desire. The desire to travel more, to design more, to add colour to my wardrobe, to meet new people, to either move forward or have the courage to end it with Johnny, to lose weight, to get more tattoos, to have the strength to stop eating meat, to make more time to sew, and on and on I went. I was hungry for new experiences and for evolution but I couldn't summon the concentration required to focus on any one thing and so I went out and either obtained or achieved as many of these things as time and money would allow me to. Designing and business planning would have to wait just a little bit more. 

I spent New Year's Eve with the ex and we once more talked about remaining exclusive. He babbled on about how he wanted to spend next New Year's Eve with me too and, because he was sober when he said it, I wanted so badly to believe him. and maybe even allowed myself to, if only just a wee bit. It had yet to dawn on me that this had to stop in order for me to started piecing together my next moves. That's a 2011 story, though, and therefore one for the next segment...

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Roots. Part Seven: riff-raff clothing co. And My First Swimsuit Shoot 2008-2010.

Until last year, the first half of 2008 was the happiest I'd ever been since the year we first moved away from Montreal, when I was a child. I was head over heels in love with a local psychobilly musician, we had just moved into the flat I still lived in today, we were engaged to be married and, aside from some of his skeletons occasionally rearing one of their ugly, hollow heads, life was great. After years of botched relationships and general hardship, I'm not sure I even knew what to do with that much happiness and had a hard time staying away from the self-destruct button. We both struggled with that (the string of relationships he'd had were messes, to say the least) and, by Christmas, we had hit a few major, personal bumps in the road but we continued to plow through, devoted to each other and to a stable future together. I designed from time to time but spent most of my time doing my best to support him and stand by him while he dealt with the issues he had severing himself from the band he'd been with for eight years, The Gutter Demons and trying to launch the new, electro-rock band he'd formed a while back but had now decided to dedicate himself to... not to mention his as-of-yet untreated bi-polar disorder, the psychotic breaks he'd have when he did touch alcohol, the shakes he got when he went through withdrawal and all kinds of other rather interesting goings-on. 

On the way back from a trip to Ottawa:

When juggling all of that, my two children, and my own insecurities stemming from dating someone whom hundreds of women around the world wanted to throw their panties at became second nature, I finally settled down and started thinking about what I wanted to do next. I wanted to design but still didn't think I had what it took to dip a toe in mainstream fashion waters and so I began to focus on the subcultures that were of interest to me at the time and had been for a few years. 

I set up an etsy shop called Great Expectations, after the Dickens' novel, and started selling vintage clothing and jewelry while i ordered t-shirts from wherever I could get them and began reconstructing them into dresses, halter tops, skirts, tube tops, etc. I did fairly well for myself with this but not enough to quit my day job just yet. After years of shying away from it, I started to sketch again and I think it really helped me to keep it together as best as I could as shit hit the fan.

Some of the reconstructed tees I sold during that time:

I also made accessories from time to time:

Luckily, I had a wonderful friend to talk to. After meeting through mutual friends, we had decided to work together, seeing as she is a (super talented) photographer. Our professional relationship was made all the more interesting by the fact that we became fast friends. From the get-go, Annie was always welcome to offer her input on my designs and on styling and I always felt comfortable enough to speak my mind whenever it came to the actual photos she would take. It was great because I'd call her up, freaking out about the boy and our conversation would just slip into the realm of design and art and photography and it kept me focused and motivated. She kept me sane throughout this period.

This was taken in December, 2009:

By the fall of 2009, both of our mothers were diagnosed with cancer. Not long after, he took to drinking again, lying about it and staying out all night, coming home at six in the morning, with puke on his coat, bloodshot eyes and a wicked stench cloud hovering over him. Everything just fell apart and the more I tried to talk to him about it and try to help, the more he closed up for long periods and then lashed out for brief, agonizing moments. I was completely co-dependent and just rode the roller coaster, trying to hang on for dear life. Recreating a pattern he had gone through so many times before, he changed his hair, his clothing, his friends, the music he listened to and basically, in front of my eyes and alongside the life we were living together, he constructed a new life for himself and, when it was elaborate enough to keep feeding whatever delusions he needed to keep alive, he announced, in a drunken stupor no less, that he would be moving out. That was April 2010. 

This was taken about a week before:

A part of me was crushed but another part of me, one I had yet to really discover until last year, was extremely relieved. The night he left, Annie called me and asked me how I felt. When I told her I was sad, she immediately started to comfort me but I interjected, "No, Annie. I'm not sad because he's gone. I'm sad because I so incredibly relieved at the fact that my front door is closed and locked and will stay that way until I unlock it and open it again." I wouldn't  have to wait for hours and cringe when I heard the repeated scratching of a key being drunkenly aimed at the lock for a few minutes, wondering what kind of mood he'd be in when he finally tripped through the door. 

My riff-raff clothing co. tags right after I got them in the mail:

A few weeks before the last shoe dropped, I had hired a pattern maker who would also act as sample maker for a few months, to assemble some swimsuit designs I had been working on. I had come up with the name riff-raff clothing co. and had a fairly good idea of where i wanted to head with it. As luck would have it, buddy announced that he was leaving the day after my first riff-raff shoot so you can imagine how hard it was to focus on the tasks at hand. but i did and we got through it.

The night before the shoot, I cabbed across town to meet my pattern maker and seamstress, a slightly neurotic woman named Suzanne. Always check your goods before paying for them. I know this sounds simple but it can be so easy to trust people at times. I went out for drinks with a friend afterward, opened the duffle bag the suits were in, had a quick look, gasped, shut the bag again and concentrated on drinking and crying on my chum's shoulder.

The next morning I took the time to really investigate the suits. What a horrific mess. We're talking crooked seams galore, some fabric not even sewn to other fabric, where it should have been, crotches and gussets that looked like they had been made for a toddler's vagina to fit in and not a grown woman's. And I had paid a few hundred dollars for the patterns and samples. Constant adjustments, double-sided tape and tricky poses were required to keep everything looking good enough for the camera. Luckily I worked with women who were good at camouflaging and didn't judge me for my sub-contractor's shitty work. 

Here is the lovely Annie Stephens at work on the shoot. We had looked around for a location for weeks and finally found exactly what we'd been looking for in an industrial area, just a few blocks away from my apartment.

Aside from one of my models showing up excessively late with greasy hair and an attitude to match, the shoot went really well. (At one point said model inquired about who I was going through a break-up with and when I told her, her response was "Oh! I had been wondering what happened to that guy! So he's single now, huh?" I didn't really talk to her after that point, unless i had to, and when i told the boy, he lovingly told me that had anyone of his acquaintances said that, they would have gone through our tv head-first.)

Some of the photos from the shoot:

The first model, Billie Prudence, was an absolute joy to work with. She did, at times, make Annie and I wonder if we should have drafted up waivers for the models to sign, especially when she climbed up a rickety metal staircase in stilettos and began to pose on a narrow ledge, twenty feet above the pavement! This is why we loved working with her, though; this was our first shoot and the first person to be shot within it and Billie really made it easy for us, not needing any direction whatsoever.

Check out the aforementioned staircase and ledge:

The swimsuits attracted a lot of attention but nothing sold right away. I hired someone else to help with fixing the patterns and, after saying that she'd been looking for swimsuit design ideas, she disappeared with my green leopard print fabric and one of my patterns. After that I focused on reconstructing tees some more and took a breath while I tried to figure out what to do with my life, now that it had changed so drastically. I knew I wanted to move forward with riff-raff clothing co. but I also knew I wanted more. I just had to figure out what that was... 




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addendum: the swimsuits seen here will be once more be available for purchase as of autumn 2013.

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