For as long as I can remember, I've loved being different. I love loud colours, and going against the grain. My youngest memory of discovering my style was dressing in boys board shorts on holidays with my family, when my girlfriends would be in frilly bikinis. As a young girl, I'm not sure where this desire came from, but it's what I loved at the time, and I was lucky enough to have a family that didn't care what I wore as long as I was happy. Wearing boys board shorts escalated to an obsession with fedora hats, and skull patterned everything. I would collect fedoras, and had one to match every single outfit imaginable. Around this point in time is when I discovered rumours and gossip, and developed a strong desire to fit in, or else be talked about. I started to wear what everyone else wore, started wearing makeup, started wanting to talk to boys. I fell into the trap of trying to be like everyone else, so that I didn't stand out as a target. As I grew older, this style evolved into low cut tops and outfits showing more skin than necessary. I always loved attention, but at this point of my style I hadn't figured out what kind of attention I was searching for yet. Eventually I got sick of this in high school, and although I was still trying to fit in the social sphere of things, I discovered op shopping. At the time this was something a lot of people did, and was (still is) a popular style of dressing. I still try to incorporate second hand and op shopped pieces to this day, however I style them very differently to how I did back then. When I discovered streetwear about a year ago, no one around me dressed in anything similar to what I was seeing and loving as a new style. Growing up on the Gold Coast in Australia, there is a very specific style of clothing everyone around me wore, and for a few years there, I did too. Once I discovered that the attention I was seeking from my outfits was more about coordination, loud colours and always mixing my outfits up, I really started loving my style and feeling more confident in myself. Nowadays, I feel more confident strutting around in a fully coordinated tracksuit with brightly coloured hair and chains around my neck than I do in a white tee & a pair of blue jeans. I definitely don't think I'm anywhere near discovering my true style yet, but I'm on my way and loving every minute of it.
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