Stephanie
What started as TextStyle - a daily documentation of my adapting style, has now grown - over a year - into Positively Melancholy. Positively Melancholy is quite literally a map for the left side of my brain, a creative playground in which I unravel both myself and my greatest loves: design, fashion, photography and life.
The 'Dossier' section is a simple collection of things - art, print, interiors - that I have found around the internet and have fallen in love with. Things that might not necessarily intercept the category of the main blogs. Fashion has always been the epicenter of my posts and my entire reason for creating a blog in the first place. But before I fell in love with fashion, I fell in love with clothes. I see a garment in the same way I would see a piece of art, I love the science behind it all... I love deconstructing clothes in my head to figure out how they are made and how that affects our attitudes, our self esteem and our lives on a whole as wearers. Combining all of this together, my outfit posts are regularly fused with edits of my personal style and my favourite up and coming designers and collections.
I am not a person that grew up with a love of fashion. I developed one during some difficult times. For three years now, I have been immobile and I depend on my wheelchair to get me out and about. I have a condition called CFS which I began suffering with when I was 16. Since then I have experienced highs and some serious lows but I have gone through them all being open and honest about my condition and the affects it has on my life in the hope to spread a little awareness and - to be frank - to help me cope with it all a little better. For the first several months of getting progressively worse, I thought that staying in my pyjamas would comfort me and make me feel better. It didn’t. In fact it didn’t take long at all for my self esteem to hit an all time low. I turned to fashion to help me find myself by finding my own sense of style. Getting dressed allowed me to be creative in a way that I was too ill to do elsewhere in my life. But after many years of my condition being poorly understood, I decided to start Life. Documented - a day to day documentation of my life through words and photographs to not only tell people what CFS is, but to show them.
Photography is another great love of mine. I carry my Canon EOS450D, Panasonic Lumix and iPod Nano with video around with me as if it they a fifth limb and I am known widely for my incessant, and often inappropriate, photo taking.
So that is Positively Melancholy and throughout this site, you will find a little piece of me but in case you wanted a more succinct impression - here are a few words. I live in a small, homely flat filled with eclectic, vintage style furniture that is located at the tippity top of an old sandstone Victorian building. I live there with my boyfriend - Stuart, my partner in crime and in business, my two cats Mono and Smudge and our rabbit, Cadbury - who likes nothing more than chasing each other round and eating my fingers. When I am not blogging or taking photographs, I am working as a web designer, or possibly sleeping. I need a lot of sleep.