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.

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.

Viktor & Rolf, "Long Live the Immaterial", Fall/Winter 2002/03

Gone are the times when New York City and Yohji Yamamoto were a novelty, something unreachable. I have lost a good portion of my proverbial naivety, my notebook holding the words "I guess I'm no longer a dreamer". Perhaps the hibernation of poetic thoughts has sharpened my senses in a different way. Why are the most crushingly immense transitional places always metaphysical?

I often talk about fashion blogging with people who once heard about bloggers who receive expensive clothes for free, launch their own lines and collaborations, fly business class, get paid €5000 per appearance and make millions in ad revenues (OK, I made that one up). While I love discussing fashion blogging, I don't love it when people think this kind of success is what every fashion blogger is aspiring to. Telling them I don't subscribe to the same blogging rationale leaves them in shock. They think something is wrong with me because surely I should be aiming to become a Famous Fashion Blogger, bathing in designer goods between paid flights to glamorous events all over the world.

There are as many reasons for having a fashion blog as there are fashion bloggers. The degree of monetization that allows the blogger a comfortable lifestyle (I'm vary of "luxurious" over "comfortable"; a blog is not an accurate representation of the blogger's life because it only shows what the blogger wants you to see) is widely regarded as the peak of fashion blogger success. However tempting it sounds, there are bloggers who would actually not be interested in dropping everything on the spot to become the next Famous Fashion Blogger for reasons such as being in school, having kids, enjoying their current job etc.

Why do I blog?

My motive for starting this blog was essentially what I've accomplished in the past year: 1. establishing myself as a relevant blogger and writer attending major fashion weeks and 2. being accepted to London College of Fashion to study fashion journalism. It was through blogging that I realized I want a career in international fashion. In order to land the kind of jobs and projects I'm interested in, I need to be physically present in one of the four fashion capitals. I have a blog, but nobody is going to hand me a career, let alone my dream job, over the internet because thousands of others have tried harder, moved to New York or London and relentlessly started working their way up the fashion ladder. In this industry trying harder often pays off better than being talented.

Though the purpose of this blog has been partly fulfilled with my acceptance to London College of Fashion, quitting blogging is not on my agenda. In fact, one of my dreams for Dressful has always been to publish exclusively original content (photos and writing). I think that's the number one thing a quality blog should have. I don't post outfit or street style photos, so creating original content that fits the theme of this blog constantly is only possible in a city with a huge fashion scene and many events. Therefore the fulfilled blogging purpose opened the door to a new purpose. Let's hope London will be everything it's cracked up to be and more.

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.