LONG LIVE BAD TASTE!

Dedicated to all the beautiful outsiders: you are not a misfit toy. You are haute couture, one of a kind.

Somewhere along the way, we were brainwashed into believing that restraint is the same as refinement. What a horrid, brutal lie.

Do you believe our brief, incandescent lives were meant to be spent shrinking from view? To blend in? To be the same as everyone else?

This propaganda of minimalism as self-expression is nothing more than the erasure of spirit: an aesthetic death masquerading as sophistication.

We were not born into this world to drape ourselves in oatmeal tones. To treat our personal style as a mode of discipline, something rigorous and unyielding.

You may be wondering, as I stand here in all black, how I could possibly be the harbinger of such a proclamation.

Black is a color of deep delight; it speaks to my soul. I do not drape myself in darkness because I fear the spectacle of my presence, I allow for black to be the obsidian mirror I gaze into! It is my velvet rebellion, my cheeky snarl made of satin, my ember that will not be snuffed out.

My dear friend, bad taste is nothing more than a testament to fearless trial and error. There are a million ways to be a maximalist. It’s all about heart.

You can whisper it, you can scream it, you can stitch it in secret linings no one else will see. Bad taste isn’t about neon or sequins alone, it’s about refusing to starve yourself of expression. If like me, you choose to wear all black, my wish for you are ideas so vivid they make the monochrome quake.

Be free from the insidious thought that there is a right or a wrong, and adorn yourself in whatever causes you delight! Rage against the algorithm that feeds on the sad desire to belong by vanishing; starve it of your attention, deny it your obedience.

Go forth, my friend! Adorn yourself in whatever palette, texture and chaos your spirit desires. Be lavish. Be peculiar. Be strange, unique, daunting and daring. Let your taste be a glorious betrayal of all expectations.

May you never shrink to fit the smallness others project onto you. May you never apologize for your hunger to be seen in your most unruly form. May you become a living testament to the beauty of too much, and may you act as though it is your god-given right to glow.

Death to minimalism, and everything she stands for! Long live bad taste! Long live the individual, with choices strange and chic! Let the ghost of restraint be exorcised by sequins, tulle, fringe, may she choke under the weight of clashing styles and mountains of cubic zirconia. Long live the beauty in imperfection, the utmost glory of expressing our human soul!

There is no higher purpose than to bring your imagination to life.

With great personal aesthetic,
Alexandra Diana, The A List