Cross Marketing

Fashion in clothes has been important to me since I was a kid. Back then, it was more just a preoccupation with clothes, since much of my day was spent scavenging my older brothers' and sisters' closets for hand-me-downs and pending hand-me-downs (they hadn't given permission yet only because I hadn't asked them yet). Shoes, jeans, shirts, coats. Maybe that's why I still like shopping in Goodwill even when I could afford to go elsewhere.

Even once it got beyond mere survival - even when I was actually assured clothes that would fit me - and later when I started buying my own clothes, I was very concerned about how I dressed.

Anyway, I've spent the last three months more alone - and lonely, truth be told - than I ever have been in my life. The people in my life who've helped me through are my daughter, my friends in Missoula and elsewhere, and my family. But when I've been by myself, I've played a lot of guitar, and I've taken lots of photos. Many of those photos have been of my apartment, and of myself.

So I started taking fashion blog pics of myself. I had started another blog about a year ago, but never did anything with it. It was - and still is - called "LL Being". After the colon: "Life on The Lake: The Unwearable Lightness of Being". It was going to consist of scans of pages out of LL Bean catalogs, with really snarky, witty, sad dialogue between the models. The byline is: "Where topsiders and cotton blends cushion the blows of middle class living". I've kept the title and the byline, but the content is fashion for men, where my fastidious sense of men's clothes reign, but where my educated and pessimistic wit and my incorrigible romanticism get free play as well.

I've heard it said that it's what's in your heart, not what's on your back or around your waist, that makes you who you are. And I've heard that the world around me - including the clothes on my back - are a reflection of my inner person. Don't know what to make of all that. Hmm... got my next post topic.