Shopping#10 — Skull Kitsch

Before we proceed with the ever-growing queue of still-to-be-posted outfits, I’ll show you some of my (relatively) recent purchases for the summer season. They are not the hippie sort of thing that I usually wear when the temperature goes above 25º, but they definitely have the adequate vibe for the pre-summer months (a.k.a. that time of the year when I mostly wear cowboy stuff).

Bershka ‘Our Lady of Skulls’ tank top

A grey tank-top from Bershka with a fancy comic style Our Lady of Guadalupe/Santa Muerte print that looks pretty cool. It’s quite big, but not impossible to wear with some adjustments… and with something underneath, preferably — I’m honestly not prepared to try the Taylor Momsen nipple-tape thing… especially in summer LOL

 

 

Skull & roses T-shirt

This is an extremely cheap T-shirt from the flea market, but that’s exactly what makes it so perfect. Only a genuinely cheap design like this one could capture the skull kitsch concept in its full dimension. I mean, come on: it has a huge skull; it has roses; it has tiny crystal incrustations... What else do you need? The only problem about this T-shirt (aside from it being extremely flammable LOL) is that it’s huge like a f*cking sheet! And it doesn’t have the easiest colour palette either… I’m gonna have a bit of a hard time trying to figure out how to wear it, but I’m sure the result will be awesome :D

[If you’re wondering why you didn’t see the crystals on the skull T-shirt in the picture above, it’s because I accidentally hung it from the reverse side. It has the same print on both sides, so I didn’t even realize until the mess was done LOL]

I bet this T-shirt would look awesome with my denim New York dream-jacket. One day it’ll be mine – I promise! LOL

Misc. bracelets

All these bracelets come from the flea market as well. They all have a really cool, very Motörhead-friendly biker/cowboy/rocker design, which encompasses quite a wide range of my styles. Something tells me I will be using these a lot… In fact, I already have :P

[“WTF you’re looking at?” LOL]

Prince Not-So-Charming

As you might have already noticed, it’s the season for Metallica T-shirts and Metallica-inspired titles and concepts for posts, and so here comes another one!

This is an outfit I wore about a month ago. It’s a bit outdated already, in the sense that it’s not exactly a summer look, but who cares? It looks cool anyway, and that’s all that matters in here ;)

I started this look from the animal print scarf (I’ve been using it for a while now, even though none of those outfits have been posted on this blog yet for reasons I have repeatedly explained, but I promise they will see the light sometime! LOL), which I chose mainly because it matched my metallic brown nail polish.

The truth is I’ve been allowing my weekly nail polish to determine the colour palette of my outfits lately. It gives me a cool starting point, and it adds a conceptual unit to the whole thing that extends beyond the clothes. Crazy, right? :P Anyway, the metallic brown nail polish gives this particular outfit a cool twist, straying away from the more predictable black/gold combination.

I didn’t really know what to do with the scarf in the first place, so I just left it there and waited for the inspiration to come.

I don’t usually pay attention to style tips in magazines (professional stylists and I don’t really live in the same planet LOL), but this time I made an exception. I was browsing through a slightly outdated list of winter style tips, and I came across some ideas that didn’t seem too horrible, so I decided to give them a try, just for the sake of experimenting.

The first tip was: "Wear a blazer". “OK”, I said, and I picked up this black blazer from Mango for no particular reason (I have a huge pile of black blazers to pick from), just because I was attracted to its slim fit. I’ve had it for at least a couple of years now, and I honestly can’t remember if I’ve ever used it or not (LOL), but I did it this time, and that’s what counts, aside from the fact that it looks extremely cool.

The second tip was: “Match white jeans with biker boots to give your look some edge”. “Ok”, I chuckled, and I picked up some white slim-fitted white jeans and my favourite pair of biker boots (you’ve already seen them before as a part of my Motor Rebel outfit).

At that point, my relationship with the magazine was over, but it didn’t really matter: I had almost completed an outfit without even using my own brain! That felt quite amazing. I finished it up with my Metallica T-shirt, and tied the animal print scarf in a bow.

I’ve had this Metallica T-shirt for a while, and it’s one of my all-time-favourites. Metallica have some of the best T-shirt and merchandise designs ever, and, of course, they have some of the most flawless and iconic album covers in history as well, so it’s no surprise I’ve got quite a stock of their T-shirts ;) This one is illustrated with an awesome Pushead artwork, and it has a very curious texture, topped by some amazing golden splatters. It’s printed in a really cool black, white and gold colour combination – the overall effect is pretty Japanese.

I added my classic black MNG hat (I’ve used it a HUGE lot during the last seven years – you might remember it from my Punk In The Park outfit) to give the whole thing a finishing touch, and I thought it was pretty much done. This look was obviously going to be a half-dandy half-rocker thing – maybe not the most original idea in the world, but still cool. Everything seemed wonderful until I looked at myself in the mirror.

I liked the overall image, but there was something about the jeans that made me uncomfortable. They were white, just like the T-shirt. Everything fell into a black, white and brown palette. It was technically correct, but, for me, there were at least two problems about that look.

The first one was that the shades of white of the jeans and the T-shirt didn’t match as perfectly as they should have. You might call me crazy, but I’m quite a Nazi when it comes to mixing white: if EVERY piece of clothing isn’t in identical (or, at least, compatible) shades of white, I just can’t stand it, and that was the case here.

The second (and most important) problem was that the white jeans combined with the black short blazer and the hat, and tucked into my biker boots made me look like I was wearing an extremely preppy horse-riding uniform (LOL). Of course, that was a total NO.

[You don’t expect me to walk out there looking like Charlotte Casiraghi, do you? LMAO 

We'll leave that to Janelle Monáe ;)]

However, I didn’t suffer a lot because of this little setback. Everything had been too easy until this point, anyway, so I couldn’t complain. I quickly went upstairs and browsed through my latest purchases, and I immediately came across these wonderful golden jeans.

I bought them back in March, along with a bunch of other black and gold stuff (including a matching blazer I still haven’t used), and I totally and absolutely adore them. They have a very curious golden cracked paint effect that's very edgy. They are also extremely body-conscious. I must admit I have quite a hard time getting into them, even though not for the reason you’d expect: they fit my legs quite well – the only problem is that they are not meant for people with heels. That’s right: it takes me about ten minutes to get each foot through the extremely narrow bottom of these jeans (LOL), and I have a bit of a hard time finding space to bend my knees too. Thankfully, aside from that they’re totally fine, and look cool as f*ck. AND they make my legs look longer, which is really useful, whenever I get my ‘Bill Kaulitz legs envy syndrome’ (LMAO).

As soon as I put them on, I knew I had made the right decision. They immediately glammed-up the look 100 levels (LOL), and added a new dimesion of chromatic coherence, especially because the cracked effect on the jeans perfectly matched the golden splatters on the T-shirt. It was SO perfect.

I tucked in the back of my T-shirt in order to keep some sense of proportion (fashion magazines might say it’s cool, but I don’t like to have my T-shirts peaking from underneath my jackets LOL), and the look was done.

A few days later, I came across a Juicy Couture ad that spotted a look quite similar to mine… only not so awesome, of course ;) (LOL). It looked like a more mainstream version of the same idea, which felt kinda weird e_e' Anyway, I still found it funny.

You can judge for yourselves:

[The position on this pic wasn’t intentional e_e' LOL]

[Never forget being stupid is my number one hobbie LOL]

While I was out, I also found this 50s diner, and, when I saw the jukebox on the table, I couldn’t keep myself from succumbing to the temptation of recreating this iconic BTK App picture. That’s a big ‘LOL’, just to make you know.

PS. I really like the summer light that’s captured in this photoshoot. It makes such long and stylish shadows! You don’t need photoshop with a light like this! LOL

Here are some funny pictures from Instagram:

And that’s it. Go out and enjoy the summer before it gets too hot! ;) I’ll try to keep you updated with more of my pre-summer looks and purchases ^^

T-shirt: Metallica

Jeans: MNG

Boots: In Extenso

Blazer: MNG

Hat: MNG

Scarf: MNG

Ride The Light(ning)

Hello everybody! It's been a while since I made my last outfit post, but, after a few busy months and tons and tons of failed attempts (I still have about half a dozen yet-to-be-posted outfits patiently waiting in line T_T), I've finally gotten to the painful task of writing a full blog entry!

I started this outfit from this Metallica long-sleeved T-shirt. I don’t even remember where it came from, but I think I’ve had it for more than six years already. I had never used it before, mainly because it has a quite a strange shape, and it’s not exactly suitable for all sorts of weather. However, it fits my body really nicely (a bit too nicely, I have to say – I still feel kinda strange in tight-fitting clothes since my ballet days LOL), and it looks great with my Road Rage nails.

The T-shirt was obviously asking for an edgy punk look. I immediately came across this extreme Harajuku punk outfit I had discovered a few weeks ago. Of course, the overall concept was a bit too extreme for me (even for me LOL), but the idea of an unorthodox necktie with a certain S&M vibe really got me. I didn’t know what to use for that purpose, so I tried a couple of things until I found this grey belt from Mango. I’ve had it for a couple of years already, but I had never used it until now. It feels like suede (even though I don’t think it’s genuine leather) and has a nice concrete colour. I tried it just to see how it would look, and I really liked it. The combination looked quite powerful.

I didn’t have a specific idea of what I wanted to get (aside from the punk thing), so I just started messing around to see what would happen. I discovered this jacket from Mango still in its shopping bag (I keep there with a bunch of stuff I bought the same day because I want to make a shopping post about that at some point, even though I don't know if that's ever going to happen LOL). I didn’t even remember I had it, but it looked awesome straight away. I love its peculiar slightly-oversized shape and its unusual waxed paper texture (which turned out to be a great advantage, considering the fact that I had to deal with unexpected rain on that day T_T).

With these three elements in place, my Menkes cap was a natural choice. I knew I was slightly repeating the concept of my Road Rage outfit, but I didn’t care. This cap is so versatile I just can’t get tired of it.

I was starting to see another biker look coming... But this one was going to have a pilot twist.

Once I had the top, I had to go for the bottom. I didn’t have a hard time picking up the jeans because they came to the look quite naturally (once again, I was reusing a Road Rage element e_e’). However, it was a little harder with the boots. I tried on my brown cowboy booties and my studded biker boots, but neither looked good enough, so I decided to take a risk and see how the whole thing would look with the über-cool cowboy boots I used for my A Cowboy In The Court Of Louis XIV outfit…

I wasn’t too sure about it, at first. It took me a few minutes of analyzing myself in the mirror to figure out if I liked how the boots looked or not… but I did! And, the more I looked at them, the more I started to see a certain Bill-Kaulitz-ness in the whole thing LOL This outfit certainly reminds me of Bill’s 2010 Audi A1 photoshoot look. However, I have to say that, for once, this similarity was not intentional :P I didn't even remember  this particular look while I was styling my own - I promise! 

The whole look was already kinda finished, but I was still not completely satisfied. There was something missing in the middle section, and I couldn’t really tell what. I spent another half an hour (not literally LOL) staring in the mirror trying to understand what it was, until I finally got it.

I always thought that there was nothing in my body I particularly disliked, but I was wrong: I do dislike my hips. It’s not that I dislike them in absolute terms, of course, but I don’t like the way certain trousers fit on them. That probably explains why I always feel the compulsive need to add big belts to my outfits when I’m not wearing oversized looks, in order to give them some extra structure. And that’s exactly what I did this time. I tried on a few belts, but none of them worked like the classic Commando/Goth For One Day leather belt did, so I just put that one on and, after a few adjustments, the look was ready.

As I said above, I had to deal with heavy rain (you can see some of it in the instagram collage bellow) and cold wind on the day I originally wore this outfit... which wasn't exactly the most exciting experience in my whole life (LOL). I had to wait one whole week for the rain to stop in order to to be able to actually take some pictures of the outfit, but, thankfully, there was a nice afternoon sun shining on the day of the photoshoot that created some really curious effects on the pictures ^^

As you can see, my boy Quicksilver wanted to be in the pictures too ;)

And, now that we're done with the fashion, let's get on with the music!



Metallicaaaaaa! \m/ ;)

T-Shirt: Metallica

Jeans: MNG

Boots: Vogue

Cap: Menkes

Scarf: MNG

Belt: vintage