28 Jul 2013

Shopping#10 — Skull Kitsch


Before we proceed with the ever-growing queue of still-to-be-posted outfits, I’ll show you some of my (relatively) recent purchases for the summer season. They are not the hippie sort of thing that I usually wear when the temperature goes above 25º, but they definitely have the adequate vibe for the pre-summer months (a.k.a. that time of the year when I mostly wear cowboy stuff).

Bershka ‘Our Lady of Skulls’ tank top


A grey tank-top from Bershka with a fancy comic style Our Lady of Guadalupe/Santa Muerte print that looks pretty cool. It’s quite big, but not impossible to wear with some adjustments… and with something underneath, preferably — I’m honestly not prepared to try the Taylor Momsen nipple-tape thing… especially in summer LOL

 


 


Skull & roses T-shirt


This is an extremely cheap T-shirt from the flea market, but that’s exactly what makes it so perfect. Only a genuinely cheap design like this one could capture the skull kitsch concept in its full dimension. I mean, come on: it has a huge skull; it has roses; it has tiny crystal incrustations... What else do you need? The only problem about this T-shirt (aside from it being extremely flammable LOL) is that it’s huge like a f*cking sheet! And it doesn’t have the easiest colour palette either… I’m gonna have a bit of a hard time trying to figure out how to wear it, but I’m sure the result will be awesome :D

[If you’re wondering why you didn’t see the crystals on the skull T-shirt in the picture above, it’s because I accidentally hung it from the reverse side. It has the same print on both sides, so I didn’t even realize until the mess was done LOL]


I bet this T-shirt would look awesome with my denim New York dream-jacket. One day it’ll be mine – I promise! LOL

Una from Bubbles Harajuku in Acid Wash

Misc. bracelets


All these bracelets come from the flea market as well. They all have a really cool, very Motörhead-friendly biker/cowboy/rocker design, which encompasses quite a wide range of my styles. Something tells me I will be using these a lot… In fact, I already have :P








[“WTF you’re looking at?” LOL]

5 Jul 2013

Prince Not-So-Charming

As you might have already noticed, it’s the season for Metallica T-shirts and Metallica-inspired titles and concepts for posts, and so here comes another one!


This is an outfit I wore about a month ago. It’s a bit outdated already, in the sense that it’s not exactly a summer look, but who cares? It looks cool anyway, and that’s all that matters in here ;)


I started this look from the animal print scarf (I’ve been using it for a while now, even though none of those outfits have been posted on this blog yet for reasons I have repeatedly explained, but I promise they will see the light sometime! LOL), which I chose mainly because it matched my metallic brown nail polish.

The truth is I’ve been allowing my weekly nail polish to determine the colour palette of my outfits lately. It gives me a cool starting point, and it adds a conceptual unit to the whole thing that extends beyond the clothes. Crazy, right? :P Anyway, the metallic brown nail polish gives this particular outfit a cool twist, straying away from the more predictable black/gold combination.


I didn’t really know what to do with the scarf in the first place, so I just left it there and waited for the inspiration to come.


I don’t usually pay attention to style tips in magazines (professional stylists and I don’t really live in the same planet LOL), but this time I made an exception. I was browsing through a slightly outdated list of winter style tips, and I came across some ideas that didn’t seem too horrible, so I decided to give them a try, just for the sake of experimenting.

The first tip was: "Wear a blazer". “OK”, I said, and I picked up this black blazer from Mango for no particular reason (I have a huge pile of black blazers to pick from), just because I was attracted to its slim fit. I’ve had it for at least a couple of years now, and I honestly can’t remember if I’ve ever used it or not (LOL), but I did it this time, and that’s what counts, aside from the fact that it looks extremely cool.



The second tip was: “Match white jeans with biker boots to give your look some edge”. “Ok”, I chuckled, and I picked up some white slim-fitted white jeans and my favourite pair of biker boots (you’ve already seen them before as a part of my Motor Rebel outfit).

At that point, my relationship with the magazine was over, but it didn’t really matter: I had almost completed an outfit without even using my own brain! That felt quite amazing. I finished it up with my Metallica T-shirt, and tied the animal print scarf in a bow.


I’ve had this Metallica T-shirt for a while, and it’s one of my all-time-favourites. Metallica have some of the best T-shirt and merchandise designs ever, and, of course, they have some of the most flawless and iconic album covers in history as well, so it’s no surprise I’ve got quite a stock of their T-shirts ;) This one is illustrated with an awesome Pushead artwork, and it has a very curious texture, topped by some amazing golden splatters. It’s printed in a really cool black, white and gold colour combination – the overall effect is pretty Japanese.




I added my classic black MNG hat (I’ve used it a HUGE lot during the last seven years – you might remember it from my Punk In The Park outfit) to give the whole thing a finishing touch, and I thought it was pretty much done. This look was obviously going to be a half-dandy half-rocker thing – maybe not the most original idea in the world, but still cool. Everything seemed wonderful until I looked at myself in the mirror.


I liked the overall image, but there was something about the jeans that made me uncomfortable. They were white, just like the T-shirt. Everything fell into a black, white and brown palette. It was technically correct, but, for me, there were at least two problems about that look.

The first one was that the shades of white of the jeans and the T-shirt didn’t match as perfectly as they should have. You might call me crazy, but I’m quite a Nazi when it comes to mixing white: if EVERY piece of clothing isn’t in identical (or, at least, compatible) shades of white, I just can’t stand it, and that was the case here.

The second (and most important) problem was that the white jeans combined with the black short blazer and the hat, and tucked into my biker boots made me look like I was wearing an extremely preppy horse-riding uniform (LOL). Of course, that was a total NO.

Charlotte Casiraghi competes during the Global Champion Tour Jumping 2010 day 3 on July 3, 2010 in Estoril, Portugal

[You don’t expect me to walk out there looking like Charlotte Casiraghi, do you? LMAO 

We'll leave that to Janelle Monáe ;)]




However, I didn’t suffer a lot because of this little setback. Everything had been too easy until this point, anyway, so I couldn’t complain. I quickly went upstairs and browsed through my latest purchases, and I immediately came across these wonderful golden jeans.

I bought them back in March, along with a bunch of other black and gold stuff (including a matching blazer I still haven’t used), and I totally and absolutely adore them. They have a very curious golden cracked paint effect that's very edgy. They are also extremely body-conscious. I must admit I have quite a hard time getting into them, even though not for the reason you’d expect: they fit my legs quite well – the only problem is that they are not meant for people with heels. That’s right: it takes me about ten minutes to get each foot through the extremely narrow bottom of these jeans (LOL), and I have a bit of a hard time finding space to bend my knees too. Thankfully, aside from that they’re totally fine, and look cool as f*ck. AND they make my legs look longer, which is really useful, whenever I get my ‘Bill Kaulitz legs envy syndrome’ (LMAO).



As soon as I put them on, I knew I had made the right decision. They immediately glammed-up the look 100 levels (LOL), and added a new dimesion of chromatic coherence, especially because the cracked effect on the jeans perfectly matched the golden splatters on the T-shirt. It was SO perfect.

I tucked in the back of my T-shirt in order to keep some sense of proportion (fashion magazines might say it’s cool, but I don’t like to have my T-shirts peaking from underneath my jackets LOL), and the look was done.



A few days later, I came across a Juicy Couture ad that spotted a look quite similar to mine… only not so awesome, of course ;) (LOL). It looked like a more mainstream version of the same idea, which felt kinda weird e_e' Anyway, I still found it funny.

You can judge for yourselves:



[The position on this pic wasn’t intentional e_e' LOL]



[Never forget being stupid is my number one hobbie LOL]

While I was out, I also found this 50s diner, and, when I saw the jukebox on the table, I couldn’t keep myself from succumbing to the temptation of recreating this iconic BTK App picture. That’s a big ‘LOL’, just to make you know.



PS. I really like the summer light that’s captured in this photoshoot. It makes such long and stylish shadows! You don’t need photoshop with a light like this! LOL






Here are some funny pictures from Instagram:





And that’s it. Go out and enjoy the summer before it gets too hot! ;) I’ll try to keep you updated with more of my pre-summer looks and purchases ^^



T-shirt: Metallica
Jeans: MNG
Boots: In Extenso
Blazer: MNG
Hat: MNG
Scarf: MNG