mermaidens.blogspot.com was a fashion and beauty blog created by Kailey Flyte to document her favorite outfits and beauty products. With her retro-inspired and pastel-drenched looks, Kailey's style is exactly the vibe I'm trying to channel this summer:
It's high time I shared some Olivia Bee photos on here, right? I think anyone who's ever used pinterest or tumblr will recognize her work. For the uninitiated, Olivia became flickr royalty when she was in middle school after she accidentally signed up for a darkroom class and started posting her original photography to the photo-sharing site. Soon, she began garnering attention from magazines and brands, most noticeably Converse, who took her under their wing as part of a mentorship program. Olivia was a regular contributor to Rookie, has had her work shown in galleries, and has collabed with brands like Adidas and Fiat. Nowadays she's still living in the PNW, still working as a photographer, and has a farm.
Truly, there are so many gems in her photostream, and her talent at such a tender age is mind-boggling. She has such a sweet, wide-eyed way of capturing the innocence of youth, almost as if she knew how quickly it was slipping through her fingertips, and how precious it was to preserve. Nowadays, it's the norm for kids to have their own cameras and smartphones, but there's something about Olivia's eye that just stands out from the rest. Looking at her photos gives me that bittersweet pang of nostalgia for things I did and didn't experience in my adolescence, and I hope she knows how loved her early photography continues to be:
I can't help but miss the original iPhone of 2007. It seems that with every launch, Apple makes it bigger and more awkward to hold, which is extremely annoying as a grown adult with baby-sized hands. These photos from Geeksugar retrieved from the almighty web archive show the OG iPhone's size in comparison with everyday objects—an orange. and iPod, a TV remote, a Blackberry Pearl, and Motorola Razr—assuring readers that "it's slightly larger than the RAZR and Blackberry, but it's also thinner." Imagine that.
On this day in 2011, Lady Gaga put out her third (and imo her best) studio album, Born This Way. To say this era was anything less than a cultural reset would be an understatement. Gaga literally changed everything overnight with her pop-perfect anthems that celebrated loving yourself, being who you are, and overcoming your insecurities, and all of the songs of this album hold up even though they were made over a decade ago. I think Born This Way perfectly encapsulates the optimism of the start of the 2010s, before we saw how ugly the internet could truly become and how bad politics were going to get later on in the decade. With the death of monoculture, it's hard that this album would make the same impact on today's society—it was truly a once-in-a-lifetime cultural event that you just kinda had to be there for.
This dreamy editorial was put together by photographer Masha Mel, who cites her main reference point as Sofia Coppola on her blog: “Being always inspired by Sofia Coppola films, i decided to do story about the innocence of age. In this shoot I wanted to show the wonderful mood and melancholic atmosphere which are shown in her films.” The result is a series of photos that are hazy, vibrant, and romantic all at once. The Lisbon sisters would have definitely approved:
