issue 25
by A n d r e a Z h o u Works d e r u t a . 1 -Fe T he Ch i ld Out s id it h m y De m o n s e o f Us - A S u m m e r M i s s e d - I m b a l a n c e N o g Tea w n i v a H I t ’s C o m i n g f r o m .2 Inside the House - Noted - Imbalance No o. 3 lance N a b Giving Up Touch m I - B u r n S h i t - A f t e r H o u r s o r W h a t e ve r -
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c n i m b a l a
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Emily Hanson Jonah Thornton
HEAD LAYOUT Virginia Pittman
LAYOUT
Kirsten Holland Annabel Gillespie
HEAD WRITER Haley Joy Harris
DEVELOPMENT/ OPERATIONS Logan Krohn
PUBLIC RELATIONS Simone Hanna
VISUAL ARTS DIRECTORS Kirsten Holland Izzy Jefferis
SOCIAL MEDIA DIRECTOR Erica Coven
DIGITAL DIRECTOR Lu Gillespie
SET DIRECTOR Fatima Garcia
WRITERS
EDITORS
Ellie Epperson Haley Harris Nisha Mani Kennedy Morganfield Emily Spector
Alaina Baumohl Haley Harris Josie Zimmerman
DIRECTORS
Stephanie Chui Erica Coven Carina Greenberg Sophie Goldstein Emily Hanson Logan Krohn Jonah Thornton Josie Zimmerman Isabelle Roig
STYLISTS
Lea Bond Ava Farrar Grace Jaramillo Mirai Patel Virginia Pittman Dylan Stein Jessica Zodicoff Josie Zimmerman
PHOTOGRAPHERS Becca Tarter Anika Kumar Zachery Milewicz Ray McIntyre Anjali Reddy Isabelle Roig
MARKETING
Simone Hanna Brett Davis Sophie Goldstein Fatima Garcia Thuy Tran Thun-Lan Unsoeld
ILLUSTRATORS Andrea Zhou
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CONTRIBUTORS Reilly Brady Annabel Gillespie Erica Coven Ange Long
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Edito
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Our shoots looked a little different this year. Most were held outside, some over video chat, and one was even rendered digitally. For the limited number of indoor shoots that were held, safety was the top priority. Models who posed indoors together were roommates, and every person was tested and received a negative test on the day of the shoot, whether indoors or out. All tests taken after the shoots as a precaution came back negative for everyone involved. A six-foot-minimum distance between model and photographer was maintained at all times, and masks were worn for the duration of the shoot, with models taking them off while in front of the camera as the only exception. Additionally, traditional aspects of an Armour shoot, such as makeup and hair, were put on pause or reimagined (see “Giving Up Touch” on page 50). We’re so grateful for WashU’s same-day testing capabilities that have allowed us to continue creating in this wild time and realize the fortunate position that we as a publication are in to have these resources available to us.
‘In these uncertain times...’ Yeah, we know. We know that this year cannot be put into words or even a single magazine. This fall issue we did not ask to lament on the now but rather the ways in which we have adapted. We pursued the production of this magazine, despite its challenges, because it is a platform for creatives. We peeled away from the gleaming studio lights and asked, “What can we do from here?” This publication presents the innovative answers from those who needed a challenge to create when comforts are taken away. The arts have changed, and this issue joins in the ways in which we take new approaches to conceiving and producing them. Imbalance in many of our lives has been catalyzing, propelling us towards our passions. Imbalance has also been difficult, calling for us to stop and think about the ways in which we frame the everyday. Is it what we want? What we need? Season 25 is the tipping point of restlessness. A scale that has dropped and given us a new perspective. One that longs for the intimacy of spaces but has also learned to explore alone. Evidence that we will not forget the old editorials as we bring in new designs. We miss our community and staff that serve as our inspirations. We know this issue will resonate with you. Despite being a collection of independent projects, we see how kindred we are as the narratives converged. Different does not mean missing, Emily & Jonah
CONTENTS
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Imbalance No. 2 ---------------------------------- 36 Having Tea With My Demons ----------------- 42 Giving Up Touch --------------------------------- 48 Why Can’t I Stop Staring at Myself on Zoom ---- 52 Burn Shit ----------------------------------------- 56 After Hours or Whatever --------------------------- 64
6-35 The Child Outside of Us ------------------------------- 6 A Summer Missed ---------------------------------- 12 Imbalance No. 1 ------------------------------------- 16 Featured Works by Andrea Zhou ----------------- 22 It’s Coming From Inside the House ---------------- 26 Noted ------------------------------------------------ 32
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P. 48
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P. 42
P. 56
P. 58
The Child Outside of Us
WRITING
PHOTOGRAPHY
EDITOR
FEATURING
Emily Spector Alaina Baumoh
Zachary Milewicsz
Kennedy Morganfield Cole Makuch
DIRECTION
Carina Greenberg
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On the day America closed its borders, I packed into a plane filled with evacuating students and flew home from my semester abroad. During my Dublin layover, the customs line didn’t move for three hours. I sat on my suitcase and rubbed my hands raw with disinfectant wipes, crowded between a coughing Italian girl and a couple arguing in vehement French. Flustered airport workers explained the delay was due to taking temperatures—I never saw them take anyone’s temperature—and passed out health screening forms that went uncollected. When my parents picked me up from the San Francisco airport after 20 hours of travel, we decided it would be a good idea for me to stay in my room for a couple weeks, just to play things safe. I spent two weeks, and eventually the rest of spring, almost entirely in my childhood bedroom. At home, I slept under the floral comforter I’d picked out from a catalog at age 12. The string lights I’d pinned along my ceiling a decade ago flickered faintly, bulbs nearly dead. I reread a few of the books on my shelves, for want of anything else to do: The Phantom Tollbooth, Five Children and It, and all thirteen of the A Series of Unfortunate Events books, except one of the middle ones that I’d lent to a friend in fifth grade and never gotten back. Their yellowing, dogeared pages barely clung to the bindings after years of being passed around girl scout troops and book clubs. It felt odd to be older than all the protagonists now. I had finally grown to the age of the apathetic adults, the characters who never seemed to notice when their children vanished on otherworldly adventures. I deep-cleaned my room at least three times. Each time I found new mementos. A crumpled pink post-it note dated February 14, 2007, with wobbly letters spelling out: “I think your pretty. From, Andrew.” A stack of Taylor Swift CDs from back when she had corkscrew curls and an exaggerated Southern accent. My sixthgrade diary, the kind with a padlock on it because I’d believed other people actually wanted to know what I wrote, even though I’m pretty sure it was mainly about how jealous I was of Maddie from English class and her perfectly straight brown hair.
In the back of my closet, lurking behind a cardboard model of a Spanish mission from fourth-grade social studies, I unearthed my senior year Homecoming Week sweatshirt. I pulled it on and was surprised to find it still fit perfectly. Most of my high school clothes did. I wore these left-behind, threadbare items daily, so as not to taint my adult clothes—my “real” clothes. I hadn’t changed as much I thought, or maybe as much as I hoped. I broke the stay-at-home orders once and biked over to my high school track, just to go somewhere outside where I knew there wouldn’t be any people. It wasn’t anything like I remembered. The bleachers used to loom large and gleaming, blinding my eyes with flashes of California sun. Now, they looked cobwebbed and small. I’d never been to the top before, always gazing up at them from below. The sharp scent of rust stung my nose as I ascended the rickety, groaning steps. When I sat down, my shins banged against the row in front of me. A flurry of dust swirled up, making me cough. The sound was quickly swallowed up by the silence of the vacant field. I looked out at the place where I grew up. Smoke lingered in the air, a remnant of fires encroaching nearby hills. The once verdant grass had withered to the point where I imagined it would crunch underfoot. The asphalt track below should’ve glowed an angry red, fresh with scuff marks from hundreds of children running and laughing. Instead, it looked faint and cracked. I returned home just in time to get ready for a call with my upcoming job. It was the first time I’d needed to look presentable in weeks. When I slipped on a blouse and blazer over my sweatpants, they didn’t seem to fit right. The blouse’s silk collar choked; the blazer hung heavy and stiff across my shoulders. My fingers fumbled with the buttons.
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I shuffled over to the bathroom mirror to apply makeup. As I dabbed my lips and cheeks red, a memory rose unbidden in my mind: the time I had snuck into my mom’s makeup drawer at age six and smeared her Clinique lipstick all over my face. I’d fished black pumps out of her closet and teetered this way and that across the tile floor, hands outstretched for balance, imagining I was striding through the imposing sunlit halls of my mom’s Silicon Valley law firm. I had looked in the mirror then, cherry red in the gaps between my teeth and streaking down my jaw, and thought I looked so grown-up. Now, I looked in the mirror and saw a child playing dressup. My too-big blazer draped over my shoulders. I felt like I was younger again, but not in the way the skincare commercials say on TV. It was stomach-churning, like all the glittering nights out and blueberry pancake Saturday mornings and 2:00 AM study session tears of the past three years were a dream, one that I’d been dragged out of and back into reality. It was the same dazed, jarring feeling as the time I fell asleep in high school math class and woke up to the teacher calling on me. I’d stared at the derivative on the board, half-awake and uncomprehending as classmates around me stifled their laughter. I could visualize the exact textbook page where I’d seen the problem before, but I didn’t know the answer. Now I looked at the tall child in the mirror, and I didn’t know her either. I wiped the lipstick off and logged onto my call. We exchanged perfunctory hellos and well wishes. “And how’s it for you in California, Emily?” someone asked. “Oh, you know,” I said. “Good to be home.”
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A Summer Missed
PHOTOGRAPHY Ray McIntyre
WRITING
Alaina Baumohl
EDITOR
Haley Joy Harris
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There is no adequate way to describe what was missed this summer. The societal upheaval caused by Covid-19 turned the world upside down, leaving hardly anyone untouched. Nothing about this summer was “normal,” and nothing about our current reality is either. While brainstorming ideas for this piece, I struggled to balance notions of the negative and the positive—I didn’t want to solely write about everything that was missed or the unsurmountable loss that has taken place. But I also didn’t want to only talk about the silver-linings that came out of a global pandemic. That felt grossly out of touch. I kept returning to this idea of balancing the good and the bad —not letting one overshadow the other. The truth is, working to balance all the good that life has to offer with all the bad isn’t exclusive to life during Covid-19; that’s just life. Right now, the bad is amplified under the microscope of our current moment, tipping the scale towards despair rather than optimism. I think it is courageous to actively seek out hope in a world that currently feels like one very bad thing after another. Personally, I struggle with this because I often fear that embracing the good demonstrates a willful ignorance of all that is not. When this fear creeps in, I “To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. come back to this quote from Howard Zinn’s book, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train:
The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.” And so, in an effort to live in defiance of the bad and to recapture some of the summer fun we all missed, here is a glimpse into our lost yearbook. The following are Armour’s musings about this summer: A summer of isolation and fear, but also of rest, connection, and believing in the future.
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IMBALA DIRECTOR
Josie Zimmerman
EDITOR
Josie Zimmerman
PHOTOGRAPHER Anika Kumar
STYLING
Reilly Brady Erica Coven Mackenzie Llewellyn Josie Zimmerman
FEATURING Reilly Brady Erica Coven Afva Farrar Emily Hanson
NO.
ANCE EDITORIAL ONE
It seems as if our world is dangling by a thread. The uncertainty in the air is looming and there is a new apparent imbalance in our everyday lives. In this editorial, we aimed to convey this imbalance through physically styling looks that were irregular from their asymmetry to the extreme poses of the models. Scraps of fabric were cut and sewn into imperfect shapes and held together with strings that were tied onto the models as threads were dangled through their fingers, holding them together, in an imbalanced manner.
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Featured Works Andrea Zhou
We prompted student artist Andrea Zhou with creating original pieces exploring personal imbalance.
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It’s Coming From Inside the House
WRITING Nisha Mani
PHOTOGRAPHY Anika Kumar
EDITOR Jonah Thornton
STYLING Jessica Zodicoff
DIRECTOR Isabel Roig
FEATURING Noah Ginsberg Olivia Prunier Herman Maya Horn Maria Sekyi
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Quarantine brought out the DIY craft junkie in all of us. Instagram stories were peppered with extravagantly decorated focaccia, haphazardly knit sweaters, and valiant experimentations with oil paint. Tiktok, an app previously relegated to enterprising tweenage dancers, became the cultural centerpiece of a generation. Seemingly overnight, the platform saw millions of new users pouring hours into creating and consuming content. In these unprecedented times, why did artistic undertakings become our saving grace? Looking back at my relationship with art it became clear that art is not only a guiding force in my life but an escape. Just as turtles retreat into their shells or ostriches bury their heads in the sand when confronted with a physical threat, I have a penchant for diving headfirst into art when existence becomes overwhelming.
As a kid, my favorite method of escape was through books; they allowed me to take a break from my life and temporarily live in someone else’s story. The more I read the more I daydreamed, constructing my own stories and realities, allowing myself to become separated from the present. Nisha was sitting on a couch staring out the window, but I was a fabulous Parisian woman being wined and dined by the kind of people that wear ties during the day and tuxedos at night. I wore gowns like the ones my favorite princesses wore and everywhere I turned, a red carpet awaited. My grandpa was a painter so there was always paint and brushes lying around the house. Armed with printer paper and a far larger blob of paint than I needed, I set out to make this woman real. Her dress was long and
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red and flowed gracefully even when there was no wind. A fabulous leg slit parted to reveal a rainbow lining that exploded across the page, and her luscious hair floated around her head as though she was underwater.
consider how being alive has become akin to serving a function. We place all these requirements and expectations on our lives and forget that at our very foundation we simply exist and nothing more.
As I grew older, the connection between art and my fantasies became less literal, but on some level, I always recognized art as an escape from the many monotones of life. Art isn’t beholden to anything; it doesn’t care about age, money, or status. It transcends the limitations of the mind and allows us to explore the unknowableness of what it is to be human. We choose to paint, to dance, to sing without an expectation of anything in return. I often point to the time I spend creating art as the only time that I exist purely for myself. This leads me to wonder if the time I spend making art is the only time I am living. Before you write this sentiment off as a self-aggrandizing frivolity,
Thus, our current approach to life can leave us feeling unsettled at times. The spiritual, physical, mental, or psychic strain, brought on by quarantine, magnified this feeling and left many others feeling, as I did, that something was missing. Art fills all these gaps in our lives, making it the perfect salve for our frazzled state of being. Uneasiness, dissatisfaction, uproar, panic, and anxiousness are the driving forces behind art. With quarantine exacerbating these feelings it is unsurprising that we experienced a collective explosion of creativity. As we adjust to the new normal it will be interesting to see how the role of art is redefined in this post-covid world.
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Noted*
Do you ever sit back and wonder if the past seven months really happened? Like maybe you’ll wake up and this pandemic will have been nothing more than a fever dream? We asked armour staff to contribute moments and screengrabs to form a found-object collage.
DIRECTOR
Sophie Goldstein
EDITOR
Haley Joy Harris
CONTRIBUTRS
Haley Joy Harris Sophie Goldstein Thea Portnoy Emma Sheldon Maddie Savitch Brooke Hailey Carly McClanahan Olivia Prunier Herman Emily Hanson Jonah Thornton Morgan Batley Gwen Klein Ebee Grellier Andrea Zhou
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IMBALA DIGITAL ART Ange Long
POETRY Haley Joy Harris
EDITOR Alaina Baumohl
NO. 38
ANCE EDITORIAL TWO
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Teetering Sediment and sidewalk teeter at every moment. Watch your step. Open the manhole and pour in a bucket of light. Seeming to be one thing often means something else entirely. Yellow raincoats contain androgyny. A change purse is also a fence. Tell me, is a conductor still a conductor once trading a stick for a broom? Sludge turns to stone turns to stardust. If the boxer stops boxing and the waddler stops waddling and the tapshoes stop tapping, then, my friends, we might become salt water. Keep up the box and waddle and tap. But scrape, too, and see what plaque protects and conceals. Try to define permanence—try, and the birds and bark will deride such presumption. How embarrassing. Against purple pavement, body and cosmos collide and dissipate into copper coins, broken bottle shards. Lavender sprigs in concrete gutters.
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Having Tea with my Demons
WRITING
Haley Joy Harris
COLLAGE
DIRECTOR
EDITOR
PHOTOGRAPHY
Haley Joy Harris Emily Spector
Emily Hanson Zachery Milewicz
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I’m addicted to blue light and scrolling. I know that too much of it is bad for me, and I know that it takes a toll on my heart. That it depletes me. I know, too, that it has rewired me and everyone I know—our psyches— in ways we do not yet fully understand. Like clockwork, I gaze, I compare, I wilt. *** It’s late summer. My foldable metal companion sits in my lap. My incessant blue-lit scrolling lands me in a virtual room filled with invisible strangers: a Crowdcast meditation session, organized by a guru I found on Instagram. We (100 strangers and myself, to be clear) do not show ourselves, but are encouraged to type our thoughts in chat bubbles. We do introductions, tuning in from Los Angeles, São Paulo, Tokyo, Denver, Charlotte, St. Louis. I watch the Instagrammer close their eyes, inhale, exhale. I do the same. We’re here tonight to conjure our Inner Demons. We describe them. What do they look like, sound like, seem like? The Crowdcast chat becomes a canvas for confessions. 7:05 PM Mine is blue and oozing....jagged It is something towering that casts a wide shadow The skin is like TV static and it NEVER STOPS TALKING TO ME 7:06 PM Pincer-clawed-beetle-creature A winged succubus with amazing style and elongated nails... liiike, kind of hot ?? Mine is myself as a child. half demon, half wounded 7:07 PM My apathy is my demon… It looks like me with wings, but the wings are clipped. Defeated.
7:08 PM I swear it is lurking in every scene, big and ominous, whispering into the wind and telling me all the ways I am not good enough or have done wrong My self-betrayal is gray bleeding to deep red, blurring clarity & motivation. Its feet are stuck in place. Mine is a purple, hazy creature that hovers between my temples. It floats back and forth and mulls over any and all of my decisions At 7:11 PM, a final submission appears in the chat: This oo zing monster emits a gross but kind of sparkly gas. Cool shades. Its name? Nightclubbin’. It sounds like white noise when it moves...it engulfs my brain *** Verging on a demon requires confronting a dread often felt but rarely named. It necessitates opening the boxes of one’s most burdensome beliefs, about oneself and the world, in the dusty basement of the mind. Clearing away the grime. When approximating a demon, remember two things: 1. Demons are shapeshifters. They hide in shelves and take many forms. 2. Demons do not tell the truth. Because I have found myself here, and because the Instagrammer tells me to, I descend to face my demon. It is perhaps one of my oldest friends, and has been dear to me. It has given me the illusion of safety. Like many of the people I’ve let close, it has both helped and hurt. But, after many go-arounds, I’ve begun to recognize the parasitic nature of relationships like this. I understand what it demands of me and what I have long delivered on: In order for this to work between us, you must make yourself quite small.
*** The Instagram guru tells me I should make a date with my demon to sit down for a cup of tea.
*** There was a time I almost merged with my demon completely, and its residue may linger. I know this won’t be our last time sitting down for tea. Like anything worth reconsidering, worth casting out for good, this will require ongoing conversation. Doing away with a past self means grieving a long while after surrendering it to the universe. Ghostlike, selves reappear unexpectedly.
There are many ways this meeting might go. I fear the things my demon has said and will undoubtedly keep saying. It will remind me of times I’ve felt utterly, completely alone. It will tell me that this feeling will not pass. It will tell me silly things, like if I hope to feel less utterly alone, I had better not have that slice of cake with my tea. As if the two are contingent. While I’m at it, I should skip dinner, cancel everything, stay in my room and lock the door. I should look at old pictures of myself in the moments before sleep.
*** A third note worth bearing in mind: 3. Demons will try to keep their spot on the shelf. They will try to convince you they’re worth holding onto.
Tonight my demon stumbles over smelling like the cheap floral perfume I wore in middle school. We sit across the table from one another. I pour steaming hot water. There is silence. Pretending like we don’t know each other as well as we do, I attempt small talk. I realize it’s not listening to me. It has never, not once, been listening. The longer we sit here, the more my demon begins to look like me. A version of me I have been and hope to never be again.
Sometimes I let my demon convince me. Sometimes I think what hurts must necessarily stay. My demon often appears over my shoulder in the middle of the afternoon, when my defenses are down. It asks me why I’ve been ignoring it. It demands my attention. It’s at the moments I most want to push it down that I know I must sit with it.
“There are so many things I’d like to do,” I manage, finally. -“With?”
I indulge it for a moment. I thank it—really thank it— for the things it tried to offer to me. For the things it helped me uncover.
“My life.” -“And?” “I know I won’t do them with you hanging onto me like this.”
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*** The Crowdcast meeting that brought me here comes to a close. I log off. Walking away from my demon, the dusk presents itself. It occurs to me that each of the ways I hurt myself, and in fact, wished myself to be hurt, were ways of denying more deeply nestled fears. I can imagine how this last bit of sun, the same sun which once felt scalding, now peaks gently and earnestly through the trees. I imagine safety. The kind of safety that comes from listening, intently, and from telling the truth. I imagine my body as an anchor to this world. Steady metal, something to tether to. Not deceiving, simply holding. I ditch the deal I struck with my demon many years ago. I pursue fresher mantras. I make a promise to myself and my body. To those I care for, and to those I have not met yet but will one day care for: I will not hurt you based on my inability to control you. I will watch passing boats, and if they feel like stopping then we can plunge right into the depths and explore the ocean floor. I imagine tenderness. I will roll over to face a person I’m beginning to love and say, “I’m hungry,” knowing it is a problem we can, and should, fix. We will pull ourselves out of bed and stand in the kitchen, hair tousled, cracking eggs into a pan. We will not worry what shape they take because we’re busy laughing and adding too much salt, which is, of course, the best amount of salt. We’ll leave our metal blocks with the blue lights in a different room. We will be glad to eat our eggs, and while we’re at it, thick slices of toast, too, with jam. We sit down at the table, which is small. It’s morning now, and I only allow space for us.
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Giving Up Touch Giving up touch
WRITING
Ellie Epperson
EDITOR
Emily Hanson
WRITING
Ellie Epperson DIRECTION
PHOTOGRAPHY FEATURING Isabelle Roig
Sofia Angula-Lopera Cecilia Liu Stephanie Chui FEATURING PHOTOGRAPHY Sofia Faith Phillips Angulo-Lopera Isabelle Roig Ziyan Zhang STYLISTS Cecilia Liu Reilly Brady
IRECTION Virginia Pittman Stephanie Chui
Faith Phillips Ziyan Zhang
STYLING
Virginia Pittman
CONTRIBUTERS Reilly Brady 50
Technology has become a facet of nearly every part of our life. It’s no surprise that it is also impacting the way we interact with beauty. From filters to apps, technology can morph the way we see ourselves. We wanted to flip the switch and use the art of projections in order to emphasize the beauty that’s already there. Tech isn’t going anywhere, but we owe it to ourselves to develop a deeper relationship with it.
From learning Tik Tok dances to embroidering to binging Tiger King, most of us did what we could to stay sane during quarantine. But just one more unintended consequence of the pandemic is the loss of a form of creativity. While previously creativity could be funneled into make up or glamour, we are limited to our houses, distanced. This shoot presents a new form of creativity. We focused on intertwining lights and projections to create socially distanced make up looks. Rather than focusing on what we’ve lost, we wanted to focus on the possibility of what can be created in that same space. When this issue rolled around, resident makeup artist Stephanie Chui began to get creative with her ideas surrounding makeup. Rather than being discouraged at obvious obstacles associated with doing creative looks, an idea bloomed in her head. The models were asked to wear a natural look, while Stephanie drew one real time. She then projected the look onto the model’s faces. Not only did this shoot represent a new outlet of creativity during the pandemic, but it further encapsulated our relationship with connection in general. We aim to posit the question of what human connection really means. Does it have to be sharing physical touch with another? It seems that we as people living through COVID 19 are a resilient breed, creating new ways of connecting with one another using the technology at our disposal. The use of the projector also highlights the distance between each other. 6 feet is the general rule. The projector can change lights and shapes based on how far it is from the model. We used it to highlight how distance can shape our relationship and perception of one another.
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Why Can’t I Stop Staring at Myself on Zoom?
WRITING
Kennedy Morganfield
EDITOR
Emily Hanson
DIRECTION
Jonah Thornton
FEATURING Isa Zisman Izzy Jefferis
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But why, O foolish boy, so vainly catching at this flitting form? The cheat that you are seeking has no place. Avert your gaze and you will lose your love, for this that holds your eyes is nothing save the image of yourself reflected back to you. It comes and waits with you; it has no life; it will depart if you will only go. — Echo and Narcissus, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses “I hate it’s called that—a vanity.” Mom shakes her head. I’m placing jewelry boxes and books on either side of the mirror. Cherry red, purchased in 1986 by my self-indulgent equal, Great-Aunt Lilly. “Purchased” isn’t the right word. She’d precariously lowered the vanity onto a teetering tower of credit card statements and assorted impulse buys. But “vanity” is the right word. Derived from the Latin vanitas, defined as empty, aimless falsehoods. It’s said that if you ran into yourself on the street, the mirror would never prepare you to recognize the person you confront. How old were you when you learned that years of dragging your finger across the contours of your face in the glassy pond have taught you nothing about yourself? And how devastated?
“I am Narcissus and my little Zoom square is my pond.” It’s an instant retweet from me. Variations of the modern myth proliferate online at the start of the semester, are then swallowed by the 24-hour news cycle. So why can’t I stop staring at myself on Zoom? Nothing about this is new to me. I’ve adapted to collegiate cyberspace, though I find virtual learning unpleasant at best and surgically painful in general. Poke and prod around Canvas to locate the Zoom link. Primp in your grainy laptop camera that was once a sacred tool reserved for FaceTimes and maybe the occasional stint in Photo Booth. (Alternatively, Join without Video.) Pray you haven’t turned into an ogre in the 10 seconds it takes for your preview window to vanish and reappear in the gallery of grainy laptop camera views. The TA thinks your shirt is cool, notices your makeup. So you unmute to acknowledge the acknowledgement of your cool shirt or the color smeared across your lids. And then back to mute. It’s a whole thing.
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BUrN SHIT DIRECTION Logan Krohn
EDITS
Logan Krohn Isabelle Roig
STYLING
Grace Jaramillo Mirai Patel
FEATURING Ana Perreira
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After Hours or
WRITING
Meyme Nakash
EDITOR
Josie Zimmerman
STYLING
Ava Farrar Dylan Stein
DIRECTOR
Josie Zimmerman
FEATURING
Ava Farrar Dylan Stein Meyme Nakash Lea Bond
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Whatever
We all have our guilty pleasures. In terms of fashion, this could be an expensive pair of trendy sneakers or an illustrious, sherpa overcoat. Mine: platform crocs. That’s right. You heard it here first: Platform. Crocs. Hear me out. Sure, the last time I donned a pair of crocs was when I was ten or eleven years old. And yes, I was far more concerned with trading “jibbitz” than I was with the question of whether my glittery, plastic footwear actually matched my outfit on any given day. But now that crocs are on the fashion periphery, they seem to signify something much greater than a mere recess activity. They are evidence of the clothing imbalance revolution. In our shoot, we experimented with various locations and poses in an effort to confuse the relationship between setting and clothing choice. As I modeled a baggy t-shirt in the elaborate halls of Weil, I found myself indulging in the chaotic comfort of dressing in discord with my surrounding environment; I suddenly questioned why we place so much weight on where we are going when determining what we wear. Our sartorial choices have always been driven by purpose. Whether it is the attire for an event or a meeting we have, or simply the weather outside, we naturally base our outfits on some external force. But now that we are in the midst of a global pandemic, these forces have become moot—distorting our sense of purpose. With practically every aspect of our lives upended, there is almost no need for us to distinguish between clothes that are either “fancy” or “casual.” We study, work, and date from home. As such, we are given the unprecedented ability to wear what we want, when we want. For a college student, this might mean going to the supermarket clad in a leather blazer and combat boots. For the CEO of a company, it could be showing up to a business meeting via Zoom in a sweatsuit with their hair up in a messy bun. In a year from now, showing up to a job interview wearing loungewear might be de rigueur. A professor might not so much as wince at the click-clack of a student’s stiletto boots as they rush in at the start of lecture.
Dressing up in casual settings and down in fancy settings has blurred the lines between purpose and desire. The result? A pair of platform crocs. While platform crocs are not projected to become the hottest trend, one thing is for certain: our once guilty pleasure will now be regarded simply as pleasures.
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IMBALA DIRECTOR Erica Coven
EDITOR
Jonah Thornton
PHOTOGRAPHY Anjali Reddy
STYLING
Lea Bond Jessica Zodicoff
FEATURING Lea Bond Olivia King James Vadasz
NO.
ANCE EDITORIAL THREE
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