i've often said the best thing i've done for my personal style was getting top surgery. i was too seperated from my body due to dysphoria to even recognise how clothes looked on me before it, to be honest, so how could i tell if i liked the way something looked on me?

shortly after top surgery (which i got last year) i fell back in love with 00s era myspace emo/scene aesthetics. to be honest i've always liked them, and i never stopped using XD in an i-guess-mostly-ironic way, but the way my depression manifested over the last however many years was to dress very plainly. i was sort of post-emo i suppose (in my pre-teens i had a ludicrous emo collection of band tees, black and bright skinny jeans fingerless gloves, etc), i wore a lot of black and have often still gone through phases of dyeing my hair, but i always felt that the way i dressed was 'very nothing'.

last june i gave myself rainbow hair, then i made neon green my signature colour so far as my boyfriend is concerned, and all throughout the last ~16 months or so i invested in emo belts, some graphic tees, black skinny jeans, and i started wearing vans in my daily life.

check out my extremely cool spacehey profile photo (i should get back into using that site, i just don't really have a need for it currently...)

shortly after i moved in with my bf (which happened last october) i started parring back my outfits a little. we started co-ordinating our outfits subconciously, and when we noticed it then became very much a concious thing. because his style is very much not emo, my style also stopped being quite so.

for chinese new year (because i chickened out on western new year) i shaved my hair clean off in order to grow it out without cutting or dyeing it at all for a full year. this has been a really fun and interesting experiment so far (about 8 months in), but it has also meant it made my outfits look more normie again. this hasn't much bothered me, but there have been some times where it has.

in the middle of the year i flirted with the idea of dressing sort of 'trad goth' but i really don't think it's for me. as a young teen i always saw myself maturing from emo to goth, and maybe it'll still happen one day, but currently i'd feel like i was playing dress-up. i did however start wearing alllllll black a lot.

lately, i've been decluttering because i've realised a lot of my clothes simply aren't being worn, even though it feels like there are giant holes in my wardrobe. lots of things that maybe worked for me before but i never wear because it clashes with my bf, or simply because the cut or a detail of it annoys me. or maybe because i don't have anything it goes with, and don't really have an interest in anything it would go with.
i'm selling a lot stuff on depop currently. but what about those holes in my wardrobe i mentioned? just decluttering isn't going to fix that.

also, i've long been into a very different style that is more light. i mostly like the idea of glowing in photos... but also of incorporating internet/anime/etc motifs into outfits. i recently learnt about the terms tenshi kaiwai and mizuiro and have fallen in love with this sort of style... here's a screenshot of one of my apparently three boards that fit.

i've gathered my lighter clothes together and my mission is to grow the collection

so basically what i'm doing now is giving up on my 'perfect capsule wardrobe' dreams of the last ~3 years, and giving in to the truth that i enjoy a couple of vastly different styles, and it's probably better to just embrace that instead of swinging from one to the other all the time.

part 1: sort out all the clothes i don't wear much and donate, sell, or put away (to see if i decide i actually seriously need) them. organise the remaining ones into different styles

part 2: create the two wardrobes which will be...

one:be minimalist, 97% black 2% grey 1% other (brights), and somewhere on the emo-goth continuum. this will also have my more formal clothes

two: along the lines of tenshi kaiwai/mizuiro/tasteful cyber y2k. it'll be largely white and light blue. i'm still figuring out the deatils, but i'm excited to be trying it!

i'll still be growing out my hair until the 22nd jan. 2024, and after that i fully intend to have an authentic emo swoop. also, somewhere along the way i've got more into wearing dark eye makeup, and i'll probably still with that even while wearing all white, because i think that's a cool look!

???? the end