Chic Pink, & Black With a Hint of Gold

Spring has finally sprung and that means sun, flowers, pastels, and some light layering, well at least it does for me. This year I didn’t get a chance to have some spring fun with my Easter outfit as I was working on some projects last weekend so I figured I should try to bring it to work instead. I’ll admit that until this point I have only had experience working in places with a rigid traditional work dress code so I feel very fortunate to currently work for a company that is a safe space for trying new styles. Ever since I bought this silky pale pink with black polka-dots blouse when I started college nine years ago it has been my go-to spring  work piece that I would normally pair with a blazer and pencil skirt so I decided to give this traditional work outfit a bit of a casual, cute remix. Continue reading

PCA/ACA National Conference 2015

In addition to this blog, I am actually a design and art history historian as well as a cultural anthropologist. It’s a quite a mouthful I know.  Though much of my academic writing and research has taken a back seat since receiving my masters last spring, I have made some efforts in the final months of last year to expand on some projects I had started in graduate school, including my paper on Target, its designer collaboration collections and plus size blogging– a paper I submitted last October  to be considered as a possible presentation for the Fashion, Style, Appearance, Consumption and Design area of the 2015 Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association’s National Conference.

I was told that once you send in your abstract for consideration it takes approximately  a minimum of two weeks to hear back from the area chair, I heard back in two days. From that day I was in crowd-funding and paper editing mode. It was an intensely stressful time given the the other responsibilities I had to deal with such as work, looking for another job, apartment hunting, eventually moving, and starting this blog. It should come to no surprise then that I did my final edits to the paper and accompanying PowerPoint the week before I was set to present. Yet even with all the anxiety fueled by the craziness that is my life, I was very excited to spend Easter weekend in New Orleans for my first (national) conference.

I think my abstract is the longest in history; there was so much to cover in such a little space.

I arrived the day before I was scheduled to present which gave me a chance to sit in other panels for different academic areas, such as Film Adaption, Fat Studies, Tolkien Studies, Material Culture, as well as Libraries, Archives and Museums, to name a few. Admittedly the experience did shake my confidence as I started to question the significance of my paper as the work by my fellow scholars was not only impressive, but presented in such a way that kept the audience engaged for the entire panel. I was in awe of these scholars who clearly have had much more practice than I. Continue reading