Dressful

After a busy Christmas/New Year break I spent with my family hopping between Slovenia, Croatia and Italy, I'm getting back in the game in London for the second term of my MA Fashion Journalism course at London College of Fashion. My life here is happening so fast that I barely have time for introspection, let alone trimming it down and polishing it into personal posts I feel comfortable sharing with a wide online audience. Paradoxically, when my life was uneventful (save for my biannual pilgrimages to fashion weeks), I filled dozens of moleskines in attempt to discover who I really was, perhaps overlooking that it's your actions that define you, not stagnation; now that my life is moving forward irrevocably, its pace sometimes seems to be ahead of myself.

Photo from my first magazine MAD MUSE.

On fashion journalism school

I've dedicated a significant portion of my time on this Earth to hobbies-that-could-become-professions (I don't actually remember a single hobby I had just the fun of it), from music to film, but all these years I was yearning to be swayed off my chosen path by something different and experience a life-changing revelation as boisterous and beautiful as midnight fireworks. However naive these hopes might have been, fashion eventually settled my insecurities. Still, I was afraid that getting into the industry "for real" (moving to London, starting my MA, getting into the mindset that I'll have to make a living with writing and fashion relatively soon) would break the spell. Quickly after my course began, I realised I was in fact more excited about working in fashion than ever before. I created my first magazine MAD MUSE in December and for once felt pleased with something I'd done, all in the face of my anxious perfectionism. In the creative sense, 2012 ended unexpectedly well.

Introducing sponsored posts on Dressful

As a fashion journalist, I'm open to commissions from different publications and clients. I've decided to extend that to my own publication, which means that I'll be accepting a limited number of sponsored posts on Dressful from now on. I'll always write these articles myself and they'll be disclosed as sponsored. If you're interested in running a sponsored post on Dressful, please contact me for more information. I'm looking forward to featuring brands and products that fit Dressful editorially, with emphasis on beauty and great design.

Today was my first proper day off in I don't know how long, so I grabbed my camera and headed off to Kingly Court to check out the College Shop. This pop-up shop sells clothes, accessories and illustrations by London College of Fashion students. Don't you think it's splendid that fashion illustration – an often neglected field – has its own table? My favorite pieces were the necklaces in the fourth photo. If I return, it'll be because of them.

Location: Kingly Court (off Carnaby Street)
Opening times: 12:00 – 18:00 until November 1, 2012

After two weeks of inductions and introductory meetings my classes at London College of Fashion finally begin next Monday. I've somehow managed to miss all freshers events, but I did attend a great networking session with MA students of fashion photography, styling, fashion media production and fashion journalism (my course) yesterday.

The session took place in the MA room at LCF's John Prince's Street location (as the name suggests, the MA room is a designated oasis for MA students, but what it doesn't suggest is that you can only access it with a code – spiffy!). At first everyone had awkwardly chummed together with people from their course, avoiding other groups altogether – i.e. the exact opposite of what we were supposed to be doing – but then one of our course leaders saved the day proposing we break the ice by telling others what makes us smile, what makes us nervous and something people don't know about our home country. These short introductions led to spontaneous, yet intense mingling – I've never introduced myself to so many people and vice versa in such a short time.

We spent the rest of the morning memorizing names (and pronouncing them with various degrees of accuracy), promptly adding each other on Facebook and exchanging business cards on which our new UK phone numbers were mostly written by hand.

The vast majority of the MA students I've met come from abroad (Colombia, China, Norway, Spain, Italy, the US, Greece, the Netherlands, Thailand, Taiwan, Estonia, South Korea, Romania …). Lots of them have lived in several countries and/or are of mixed nationality, and not everyone's background is in fashion. Looking at photographers' and stylists' portfolios, it didn't escape me that their work is as diverse as the places we come from. The point is that each of us is bringing in something new. And when we immerse ourselves in the melting pot that is London, I'm expecting mad alchemy.

With my departure for London just around the corner, the "Are you excited?" inquiries – the standard in almost every conversation since March – have all but subsided. My logic being that if I hadn't been excited about the big move and studying fashion journalism, I wouldn't have applied to London College of Fashion in the first place, I find the question amusing.

Still, no amount of excitement can change the fact that the process of moving abroad is difficult, too.

Original photo by Peter Lindbergh

I've never felt attuned to my hometown (much less country) and I knew I was going to leave since my mid-teens. On the other hand, this city is where I've spent the most of my life and where my family continues to live, so it's imprinted into me regardless of how distant it is to my beliefs and ambitions.

With a temporal distance of months and years, writers of expatriate novels and stories succeed to translate the initial tangled bundle of emotions into poignant strings of sentences and articulate coherences. My experience is still in the early stage; as the plane has yet to take off, there's no romanticism, no poetics, just quiet turbulences.

At first, this strange state misled me because it's not as (melo)dramatic as the previous complicated situations I had found myself in, but the truth is that this summer has been the most confusing time in my life. I worked rigorously for university in spring so that I was able to graduate early (I'd have to defer my entry to LCF for a year otherwise) and fell completely out of touch with myself as a result. I believed I'd finally have a chance to repose and regain my sense of self in July and August. I didn't. The summer ended up being a long wait, anxious as well as excited, but most of all disoriented.

My flight will be on time, but my sense of self is delayed indefinitely. Hence this is not a big, epic post that has it all figured out, one that I once expected I would write. I can only hope this transitory period is a rite of passage to new and possibly beautiful things that lie ahead.

I got accepted to London College of Fashion to study MA Fashion Journalism two weeks ago. Since then I've been experiencing a burnout further intensified by seemingly endless pages of uni work. You can always choose a few different paths in life and all of them will be relatively good, but studying fashion journalism at London College of Fashion was what I was putting the majority of my hopes in for the past year, there weren't really any other options. When I got accepted at the interview with the course director in London, I was thrilled that now I had a future and a chance to learn, improve professionally and do much more than I could ever do in Slovenia. It also meant, however, that the once vague idea that my life would change drastically one day suddenly became reality, hence the burnout. Whenever you work hard for something, regardless of whether you succeed or fail, in the end you're left with this vast nothingness. I suppose the next half a year (I move to London in September) will primarily be about adjusting.