Unconventional Trailblazer

So what everyday trends have the trailblazer set for the Gaga style? Inspired by 90s scampi fashion, Gaga reemerged the baby tee and booty shorts in 2016. We can also thank her for helping our braless-baby tee become an acceptable “going out” look. Gaga takes her fashion outside of music productions and onto the streets. Her running errands outfits are just as important as a Grammy look for Gaga. During she didn’t leave the house without a hat on. Besides western Joanne we have seen multiple eras from Gaga. Early in her career she explored pop burlesque and highlighted trashy glamor. She brought BDSM clothing to mainstream markets in the 2000s, and now latex and bondage can be found at your local Target

The blueprint has been set. Gaga’s radical and unconventional wardrobe continues to make statements and set a path for us little monsters. Our Mother Monster does not hide behind her outlandish looks, she

by Polly O’Neal

felt like mistakenly walking into a wall built by a version of me that wasn’t even half of who I was to become. Yet, it was only the slightest smell of tea olive. But with it, the wall came crashing down bringing it all back. Your olive skin soaking in the midday sun that would inevitably scorch me. I wouldn’t care, and neither would you. The sounds of children and teenagers walking by on the middle-class wooden pool deck, but my drifting mind tunes out any distraction. It is fully focused on where my eyes steadily gaze. Which is you. Dark hair, green eyes softly smiling at me in a way only I can recognize. Always letting me know that none of me was too much for you. Your perfect nose with its perfect freckles. Just us, sixteen years old with not a clue of the overflowing days of unimaginable experiences that lay ahead. We both know we could sit on those pool chairs for hours just looking at each other. At least I know that. But you. You’re too fun for that. Too fun to just sit and be. So we swim, and we dance, and we eat, and we live. We do this over and over because how could it ever get boring? How could one of us ever not want this? Life will always be this kind, this ethereal, this simple. You are home to me, my friend. I tell you this too but I am not sure if you understand what that means. Do I?

Tea olive trees grow where they please. I can move on, and I can move out, but this earth will choose where that tree must be. It will always hold a power over me that I cannot outrun, cannot outwork. You see, when that smell meets me where I am, no matter where that may be, I am brought back to a time such as this. With you. Or someone else entirely, it really isn’t up to me. So as much as I progress and grow into who I am at age twenty, the movement of memory still relentlessly circulates, swirling me back to sixteen. Never allowing the thoughts of you to fully melt away. The potential for them to completely dissolve does not exist. Instead, they live as reminders to me that the joy of moments long gone are still full of life

Itsomewhere. It must remind me as that is half of the purpose of joy in the first place, is it not? Some for now, some for later. Would these days have even been worth it if I couldn’t experience them again, years later, in a summer that no longer revolves around you? A summer revolving around someone entirely different. Someone with different colored eyes, different colored hair, even though I know I’ll never forget yours. And it will never cease to bring me delight when its affixed scent wafts through the air. The joy from this memory moves within. Among the nostalgia, the longing, the hatred, the tenderness. I even still see pieces of you when I look at my own reflection. What I once imagined my forever looking like comes rushing to my mind as if it is in a hurry to meet me with what no longer awaits. Or exists. Yet somehow, miraculously, to my own astonishment, I am perfectly okay with that. And I now know that romance does not only exist inward in reciprocation with another, but it also exists outward. In music, written word, strangers, eyes, mugs, clouds, curls, and the softness of a peaceful morning. And I am okay with this.

When that smell reaches me, the emotion that wins among all the emotions stirred is fondness. The details of this memory and its accompanying emotions are in all honesty far too intricate for my novice writing skills to articulate in a way that makes sense to many. This may only make sense to a few. And I am okay with that. But I can plainly say one thing; when days like this find their way to my mind, the same lyric from Les Misérables follows, “You filled my days with endless wonder.” That’s exactly what you did. It was everything, everywhere, all at once. Then nothing.

This is it. Love, loss, and living with the memories.

MODELS: Kayla Hillman & Julianna Roseland

PHOTOGRAPHY: Naima Sutton

STYLING: Sophie Trew & Priscilla Martinez