allison: dilatory

i just wanted to show off my friend's skill at making gorgeous clothing...

allison's blog/links to her etsy store

allison wu. sometimes menswear inspired, i guess, and just generally fabulous. allison was in beijing with me in the fall and i believe she bought some of her fabric there for her most recent pieces. i wore her clothes with several of our other friends in a school fashion show which i'll blog more about later.

in addition to making pretty clothing that is made to be actually worn, allison also has great personal style. knee socks? weird puffy plaid skirts from a haggle market in beijing? oversized sweaters? she does it all perfectly.

i get to walk for allison again in a few weeks, and this line is themed around sideways and upside-down clothes!

here's some of the gang at the march fashion show, photos courtesy of photographer and friend gloria tsan.

allison in the middle!

jackson towers

dinner party. wow, these pictures are several months old...oh well.

norma on the phone, navy blue dress and boots.

chef emily rocking an apron and miniskirt in the kitchen

i'm wearing a disturbingly yellow dress from a neighborhood church rummage sale. it has lace cutouts on the back and also came with a shoulderpadded short-sleeved jacket! extreme...too extreme for me to wear as a set until i'm about 60 years old.

marie and lizzie, pondering in glitter and blue and black.

striped glynis and plaid flannel todd.

the general scene

princess day

this ancient denim skirt is so flouncy i always feel like a ridiculous princess wearing it. a cowboy princess?

cheap old heels, big h&m shirt, messy bedroom.

ladies who lunch

we lunched at a perfect french restaurant...bethesda, maryland. blazers, pommes frites, catching up on gossip.

denim jacket

i apologize for the silliness of me and my camera self-timer.

i've gone for the longest time without a denim jacket, and finally i got to the point where i saw one and snapped it up. it's tight around the elbows but worth it.

also, me and my ladyfriends from work kinda made a pact during winter term...we decided not to wear pants. it was all skirts, all the time. since i live in chicago, it was also all two pairs of tights all the time.

superb harold washington shirt from when my mom lived in chicago. and my favorite cowboy boots.

hootenanny

some shots from a few months ago, the last time i was in dc. i am still, amazingly enough, friends with basically the same group of people i loved in ninth grade and before.

andrew, intent on his banjo, and in plaid.

a few of my favorite gentlemen. sean looks crisp; teddy looks quizzical.

lovely cory, also in plaid!

i hammed it up in two vintage sweaters (it was cold) and a vintage shirt, with micah.

scarves en chine

a couple of my last outfit pictures from china--i think i wore a scarf there every single day.

at the terra cotta warriors in xi'an. i bought this scarf in shanghai, and lost it in beijing at a concert about a month and a half later. depressing. it was my favorite for a while...i had a tempestuous love affair with gray and yellow.

at the temple of the eight immortals in xi'an. when we first got there, it was fairly warm; i didn't even bring a coat from beijing. yet literally on our last day there, it got disturbingly cold. i was wearing all of the clothing i had brought. in this picture, i look cold but happy. the scarf is from a brilliant 10-and-20-kuai (up to about $3) scarf shop in downtown xi'an.

the smell of chinese ink of the stone carvings was indescribably rich and dark and perfect.

i went twice to the great wall at jinshanling, outside of beijing. it's my favorite site by far on the wall: wild and lonely, and only partially restored. i'm wearing chinese pink pearl earrings--there have been stretches since then where i haven't taken them out for a couple days at a time!

backpacker

ah, tourism.

this was from the lovely champagne-colored elevator in my shanghai hotel...who says that i can't wear a nice big ring and a good scarf at the same time i am toting a giant backpack?

a western peace

xi'an 西安 means "western peace." i went twice this past fall/winter. i really love it, especially the part of the city within the stone walls. the muslim quarter and its bazaar are brilliant, packed with history and food and shiny things...i'll post more photos of the night bazaar later, from my second trip to xi'an.


i fell in love with this moon door while exploring an old courtyard house complex in the muslim quarter. while it's impossible for me to blend in as a local in china, it's fun for me to try not to dress like an american tourist. that means linen pants instead of jeans or short-shorts, neutral colors, and puma sneakers. people usually presumed that i was french or russian.

costumes were available for tourist photos on the drum tower at the heart of town.

gilded blue

this was my museum-visiting outfit. i thought i'd never say this, but i miss the shanghai heat and cozy smog.

skirt, purse, and omnipresent black flats are secondhand; shirt is a north face hiking shirt that i like to travel with because it fits perfectly and refuses to get stinky or dirty; little cut-glass earrings are from the yuyuan bazaar; gold-and-blue scarf is from suzhou.

inside the shanghai art museum. it says "the people."

burgundy

i haven't done a good-ol'-fashioned outfit post in a bit.

here is what i wore to the first day of school this term: vintage black dress (long-sleeved with really thick fabric); beloved burgundy sweater that used to belong to my grandmother; scarf i bought at a "yard" (apartment) sale last year; thermal bottoms; and my favorite favorite boots, whose appearances i struggle to limit to a couple per week.

i'm in my new bedroom in a new apartment in this photo! my sadly white walls have, by now, been covered in posters.

shanghaied

, some shots from a trip to shanghai this fall...

it's surreal that i took this with my own camera:

at yuyuan bazaar. i'm wearing a scarf from suzhou. my cloisonne bracelet provides that essential little orientalist touch.

everyone's favorite japanese-h+m-type-thing on nanjing road, shanghai's actually charming hypercapitalist pedestrian street, which is similar to the more soulless wangfujing in beijing.

taking in the afternoon:

bar rouge, on the bund. some bits of shanghai were a little too shanghai for me, and the clubs fell into this category: compared to beijing, things were often too shiny, too westernized, too populated by expats--not beijing-y expats (NGO people, students, diplomats, artists), but really stereotypical expats (english-only, business, finance, real estate).

the forbidden city

photos from a day, long ago, this fall...when my class went to take in the forbidden city, beijing's old imperial palace. today the palace is still at the physical and political center of the city. tiananmen square takes its name from the outer southernmost gate of the palace.

in my autumn tourist's uniform: korean cardigan from the wholesale market near the beijing zoo and my university; vintage blazer (over my arm) that i got for free from a church basement sale in chicago, and puma sneakers from another similar charity sale...to me, the forbidden city is less about the spectacular architecture (my chinese art prof would call it "monumental") and more about the contrasts between the weird, super-flat, wide-open plazas between all the central buildings and the narrow, high-walled alleys in the imperial court quarters along the sides of the area.

the maze of red-walled side alleys. one of the best parts was the accidental plants growing on the gold roofs.

getting crazy in one of the museum rooms...blazer plus zoo market scarf.

we went to a charming alley/hutong near the lama temple for dinner. it is apparently the "next nanluoguxiang," but fortunately it's still got a bit of grit and funk to it. the alleys around it are not yet tourist-ified at all. if i move back to beijing (which i hope to), this is one of the neighborhoods i would like to live in:

we ate at the superb western-food vineyard cafe for dinner, in a gorgeous old courtyard house.

miaofengshan

we visited a huge number of temples in china this fall. here's the hike up to miaofengshan temple.

i love jimin's outfit. in the left of the photo.

at that point, we were still enjoying the gorgeous fall weather...we hiked all the way up to the buildings on top of that mountain!

 

 

a favorite chinese scarf, bought at the dongwuyuanr (beijing zoo) clothes market for 15 or 20 kuai, which translates to less than 3 american bucks.

schoolday

this exemplifies my average roll-out-of-bed-and-sprint-to-classroom outfit in beijing, at least before it got cold. i was spoiled this fall because our classes and dorm rooms were in the same giant building.

secondhand sweater and flats. dad's t-shirt. h&m mirror necklace and lace shawl.

that excellent little scar on my leg? from doing a cartwheel in my living room last spring and landing on an armchair...doesn't matter how many rocks i climb, caves i crawl through, or parties i dance at; it's always the weird small things that get me.

lama temple

a few extra shots from my visit to yonghegong, a lamaist temple in beijing, and the nearby confucius temple earlier this fall.

chic monk?

at the confucius temple/imperial university...scarf from beijing zoo market, old-school georgetown hoyas t-shirt.

798

at 798 art district. wearing a fake hermes scarf, plus an american apparel t-shirt and a seconhand skirt.

flowers in individual plastic pots are all over china's public space in pretty displays, but as an environmental studies student it feels like a toothache to see so many disposable containers everywhere...

reflected in an exhibition piece at the "voyage/disintegration" show at 798 space.

purple bamboo

i visited the big local park with friends last week. it is only ten or fifteen minutes away on foot and is gorgeous and large--we were there all afternoon and i could probably spend several full days there getting lost and taking boat rides on a number of little lakes. it was hot and clear outside (clear probably due to the the fact that it was near national day--things were still pretty shut down).

american apparel t-shirt (it fits perfectly--how cliche!), chinese scarf from silk street, vintage skirt, trusty black rocket dog flats. glass earrings from my parents.