Statement of purpose

I'm constantly tickering with this blog because I really don't know yet what I want out of it.  Originally, it was a fashion blog, but I found myself bothered by my contribution to the endless consumption of fashion and trends.  The thing is, I enjoy fashion and clothing and beauty, but the enjoyment of those things too often veers into a mindless cycle of coveting and (over)spending.

My newest idea is that I would like to be a bit more conscious about what I bring into my life, starting with fashion but also branching into my everyday experiences.  I think the blog could help me do that.

I read an article recently in the NYT about women who limit their wardrobe to six items, or who vow not to spend money on new acquisitions for a year.  There's definitely something in the air.  And while I don't want to commit myself to anything so structured as those projects, I would like to use this blog to record my own project of self-discovery.

I'm thinking this blog could record how I relate and respond to fashion. I think about brands and trends, but more as a milieu from which to create a distillation of personal style. My intent is to move closer to the "French method" of shopping: less items, but with more purpose.* The blog will mostly track my progress with that intention. My goal is to have a streamlined wardrobe that perfectly meets my desires for self-expression. As you might imagine, then, this blog will always be a work in progress.

Somehow, I trust that simply by recording observations in my blog, I can get closer to an understanding of how I would like to express myself through my clothes and in my experiences, and how I am to be in the world.

After all, personal style is a rhetoric of its own. The clothes we wear can tell others at a glance what we do, who we are, who we align with, etc. We communicate through our clothes as we do with our words. Our clothes both reveal something about us, but they conceal things as well--literally and figuratively. And clothes contain a history of our different selves (Birkenstocks remind me of college in Austin, always), just like a diary might.

Whoo!  I think I wrote most of this for myself rather than anybody else, but if anyone read this far, I congratulate you.  I think this is just about how far I'll cast my net.  

* Thanks to Dead Fleurette and the TFS thread for the inspiration!

And as a first marker of the old, here's my old statement of purpose for this blog:

I live in the Pacific Northwest. I'm a teacher and a hobbyist. I keep all manner of rodentia.

I think a lot about the inconstancy of memory--how the things that seem indelible eventually fade. So I have started this blog in part as an attempt to pin down some of the ephemera of my daily life.

I used to focus on fashion, but lately I find that I'm often more interested in other things.

There's a little bit of backstory in my now-defunct fashion blog, Destitute Fashion.