Dear Reader,
The Her Campus Texas website is very pink and the font is often festive. We feature snapshot stories with celebrity makeup how-to’s and offer tips on how to perfect the 5 minute up-do. We cover transitions, whether it be from high school to college or how to transition an outfit from day to night. As I sat in my 8 AM Thursday morning, I was going through a transition of my own. It was my first class in my new major; journalism. I awaited my professor with shaky fingers scrolling through Twitter, inevitably eavesdropping on the more experienced conversations around me. “This professor is…interesting,” the girl next to me began to the boy in front of her. “The first class I had with him, he told me I was dumb for having a fashion blog.” The girl next to her chimed in, “yea, I heard he was strictly against entertainment news.” It was then I emerged from Twitter. “He considers fashion reporting entertainment?” I asked, and they nodded sympathetically. I noticed the first girl’s handbag complemented her outfit. I also noted the clothing choices my professor made.
They were plain and nonchalant and in stark contrast with the coordinated outfit I, and the fashion blogger next to me, had planned for the first day. During lecture, he interwove comments on how he was deficient in all cultural segments that could fall under “pop.” He didn’t know how to take a selfie, didn’t understand the need for Facebook. He was teaching a subject that relies on telling stoires, without realizing that his clothes were telling one of their own. He was trying to send the message that he didn’t care, and apparently, those of us who write about fashion and makeup and DIY projects, are put at a disadvantage because we do. We are put at a disadvantage because some of the most poignant thoughts and quotes on fashion come from movies and TV shows that have names like Gossip Girl. “Fashion,” Blair Waldorf began in Season 4 of GG, “is the most powerful art there is. It’s movement, design and architecture all in one. It shows the world who we are and who’d we like to be.” My professor’s fashion, or purposeful lack there of, is in itself as big a fashion statement as the blogger’s handbag.
Our clothes will always say something about us. The degrees in which one wishes to participate in fashion is the only choice we have. Like Coco Chanel said, it is just a matter of proportions. The stories our clothes and our makeup tell are the stories that I, and Her Campus, investigate because we understand their power. Our choice is to cover collegiate women in a way that advises them and allows them to focus on whatever story they choose to tell, in whichever way they choose to tell it. So, I would like to encourage anyone who likes to write and share to apply for Her Campus Texas, where you can write about what is important to you and can be a place where you will never, ever have to apologize for pink.
HCXO,
Your Editor