tropic blues

"Tropic blues" is a geographically inaccurate but nonetheless beautiful description of the kind of syndrome that comes with living in Las Vegas. To distract you from the desolate landscape are resplendent signs in more shades of neon than Pantone could catalog in a century... and the hotel interiors are decorated in as much maximalist glitz as their counterpart curb appeal advertises. There is little aesthetic or sensory distinction between standing outside on the boulevard or inside the casinos' marble annals. Either way, you're awestruck by the obvious wealth that went into building this place. It's so impressive that it actually inspires you to rescind your cynicism and vest trust in whatever well-insured system is responsible for the whole damn fortress. Whatever it is, it's working! Right?

But then you realize that the infallible size and grandeur of this paradise can only exist given the premise that its visitors always put more money into it than they aspire to take away in jackpot winnings and lucky bets. This city is financially unsustainable without the constant influx of cash from travelers seeking respite. American boredom is exploited by the Vegas big wigs who can offer you a temporary escape in exchange for most of your savings. This city is a business -- no paid representative here will ever encourage you to explore the free activities offered. (Because that doesn't benefit the casinos and also free activities don't exist here.)

There's nothing inherently wrong with vacation. But what's inherently wrong with Vegas vacation is its deceptive agenda. Vegas wants you to believe that this is your chance to finally win big and go home rich. It wows you with size, space, lights, glitter, artificial beauty. It seduces you into trusting that it actually cares about your experience, when the city only 'cares' (requires) that you spend. It's simple psychology: illusion of reciprocity.

You think Vegas is giving you something amazing - opportunities! Sights! Entertainment! The possibility of millions. So you feel inclined to spend more money there to reciprocate the hospitality. But you don't owe Vegas anything. It's impressing you not so that you'll feel more relaxed- it's impressing you so that you'll trust it more. This process of securing your trust exists to compensate for how much corruption and greed it has to hide. How clever. The best hiding place is in clear sight, swathed in a feather boa and rhinestones to the gills.

The power Vegas has over its residents and travelers is physically manifested in gorgeous billion dollar real estate. All of us are individually too small to take it down. That kind of helpless surrender to the mathematical fact that is "The House Always Wins" just might be the foremost symptom of Tropic Blues.



Holes eyewear, Lashes of London bomber jacket, Blackmilk Hex color code dress, O-Mighty skirt, secondhand heels

Everything is infinite^3,

Bebe

paradise.exe

We loooove transhumanism this year, don't we? Something about the possibility of merging our carnal selves with technology gets us legit hot and bothered. And we actually anticipate the invention of sensory assistance implants without ever questioning the practica consequences of having that much power, unregulated by nature. I sense that the consensus is instead "we need something robotic around us now and at all times." Tech is so much more trustworthy than our brains, right? Our minds are too cluttered with moral noise and cultural pollution to organize efficiently -- so reign in the Google Glass! 

It's so clever how we invented a problem just so that we could charge people for a material solution. Tech companies exploit the damages their own products impose on our cognition and stability by generating new ones to alleviate the original unnecessary suffering. This trend in techno-fetishism is essentially a Ponzi scheme of consumerism to medicate any inevitable consequences without drawing from the free healing power of community - or any "real" source of meaning at all.

So is the extent of my paradigm's outdatedness directly or inversely proportional to the extent of my outfit's outdatedness, with each clothing season representing one century?



PVC vinyl jacket c/o Some Velvet Vintage, Blackmilk circuit board swimsuit, Motel Becka bodycon skirt, Boohoo heels

Everything is infinite,

Bebe Zeva

girl gone wild

I think I'm comfortably postfeminist enough to wear this Girls Gone Wild trucker hat. Surely someone will confuse my accessorization of the franchise as a subversive endorsement of women 'just expressing themselves.' But I'm not that optimistic. I think I'm actually okay with wearing this hat because I think "Girls Gone Wild" is just the type of shitty entertainment that deserves to be appropriated into contextless ubiquity, hopefully destroying the fecal aura of its crass origin en route. Lol I'm a little out of control today guys.

No disrespect to the actual girls 'gone wild' (or girls going wild anywhere, I guess) -- whatever your reason for participation, I empathize. My core issue with this franchise is its slimy ideological veneer - the one that tricks people into believing women can make truly independent decisions in a culture so entrenched in discrete patriarchal influence.

That said, I can't be counted on to not appropriate meaningful things because (remember?) I selfishly enjoy holding culture accountable for its terrible entitlement complexes. And I've been known to imitate the masses in an undisclosed, masturbatory situationist charade. The difference between my participation in trends that I know suck deep down and the participation of most genuine 'mainstream apologists' is that

1) I don't sincerely believe that anything popular is good
2) I don't currently appraise the importance of my behavior at an obese overestimate -- one that I've seen lead many unfortunate internet presences to defend their lazy compliance with claims that all life and conversation is "performance art"
and
3) I will admit when something I've said or made is propaganda or pornography (this entire blog and all of my social media accounts)

Conversation over. Oh wait, this was and never will be a conversation because I cannot be persuaded. I'm a petulant 20 year old, people. Lower your expectations.



Vintage cap, Deisel leather jacket, Motel bodysuit from 80s Purple, OMG Fashion disco pants, Missguided heels


Everything is infinite,

Bebe Zeva

de profund-ish

By now it should be obvious that my signature style is neither a floppy hat nor a robe nor a combination of the two, but a pattern of dependably unreliable highs and lows that decorate my ceaselessly evolving moral outfit. It's exhausting to have to annually, biannually, n-annually reason with myself why I continue to blog about fashion when my interests are elsewhere. I'm always taking breaks from my blog and vacations from real life. I travel manically. I jump into unsustainable relationships because I'm a bored escapist. When the going gets tough, I get going. I revel in the social acceptability of "soul-searching" but am usually first to criticize my fellow millennial narcissist friends for griping over the agony of their privileged self-awareness. I'm a lazy hypocrite, and I'm egotistical for even having the patience to take enough free online personality tests to come to that Jungian conclusion.

I won't offer a defense. I will offer an honest explanation of why I (we) continue to blog and what I (we) get out of this. My condition is not unique, and I don't say that to absolve myself of the lone responsibility to change. I say that to draw attention to the lack of control I and a lot of women my age have given the physics of our conscience's interaction with culture.

A vain career is insured by its value to corporations that commercially thrive on feminine insecurity. And I work as an accomplice to these conglomerates because my survival – daresay conditional excellence- depends on the reliability of such a lucrative Idea’s infrastructure. The more I encourage you to value beauty, the more ideologically founded the beauty industry becomes.  And the more money I can potentially make by investing in it. I know better, but I submit regardless. What’s worse is that my submission, though obviously conflicted, is not reluctant. I’m not sure that in fashion blogging I am doing the ‘bare minimum’ to demonstrate my concession to The House. I seem to be giving extra, offering my creative efforts instead of my impersonal and detached labor as a physical employee. But in this context, I can at least superficially play along with the delusion that I am my own boss.

I’m sure some of you are already prepared to undermine my inconvenient proposition with some iteration of postindustrial capitalism's most reasonable self-defense, one that I may aggrandizingly assume I played a role in disseminating: material self-enhancement in the form of makeup and apparel levels out the non-egalitarian playing fields that nature, in its eerily harmonious rhythm between stasis and chaos, guarantees. We don’t all look the same. We’re not all beautiful. Our bodies don’t represent our personalities, only our gene pool.

What I, and what my supporters, fail and have failed to counterpoint is that valuing a beauty standard is not necessary to happiness, that tastes are not indicative of personalities, and that choices are not uniformly representative of our mental process, but instead of our alliances with fluid cultural frequencies and exposure to forces as influential as they are invisible (ergo dangerous, but that’s just my opinion). Our tastes don’t really even belong to us. They belong to the world, and we simply rent them out during our short (and all the while eternal) time on earth.

But in order to feel better about our cooperative roles in such an oppressive system, we re-present the morbid façade to ourselves, more or less hacking the syntax of the process, to protect us from guilt. We talk ourselves out of anxiety because we are infected by an uncanny mutation of Stockholm Syndrome. Somehow, through some series of psychological or sociological impressions, we have learned to romanticize our imprisonment in an effort to tolerate our captor: Materialism.

This blog absolutely cannot be political because it is my job. I profit from this platform. And to assuage my raging cognitive dissonance for choosing to continue bolstering ideology, I offer you the tools to trust that everything you read here is, deliberately or otherwise, corrupt. Know better. 

Everything is infinite (pretty sure this isn't actually true),

Bebe