On the brink of turning twenty, I’ve found myself reminiscing about my pre-teen and early teen years.

Garb Writing Team’s weekly blog!!! This stop… Fashion Houses Then & Now!!!

No disrespect to anyone who is playing sports in college, but thank god that s*** is over. A childhood of club sports, from soccer to lacrosse, shaped the person I am today - a college student with spunk and style and, sure, maybe a persisting love for male athletes.

Today, if you ask a girl where she got her pants, there's about a 50% chance she’ll tell you that she thrifted them. This seems an absolute cultural 180, as thrift shopping has historically been stigmatized as a sign of economic hardship–even seen as unhygienic or dirty–but is now probably the most on-trend way to add to your closet. 

I walked by a chalk drawing on Telegraph Avenue this morning.

Vintage clothing. How do you see it? Understand it? Is it about art? Creativity? Is it about sustainability? What if the answer is all of the above? Tristan Thompson says, “Yes, it has to be all of the above.” 

Imagine you’re at a museum with one of your friends, and you are just blankly staring at a canvas that has paint splattered on it. Your friend nudges you and says, “Wow, this guy’s a genius,” but you can’t help but think that this can’t possibly be art. How can someone think that something so mediocre is “art?”

I always used to say if you see me without my necklace, that’s not me. Either I’d been Avril Lavigne-d, and you’re talking to a bare-necked, Roman poser clone, or… no. There’s no other reason you’d catch me without it.

Clothes sprawl across the room, hanging off my closet doors and the couch. My rings and necklaces, scattered everywhere, glimmer. I roll out of bed, clump a couple of rings into my palm, and grab a knitted shirt off the couch. Holding it up to the sunlight and letting the rays shine through, I smile. Woven in the blue cami’s weaves are stories of nights and people nobody will know about as I strut around campus for the rest of the day.

Europe, grandpa’s closet, Marlboro Reds, and matcha lattes have all made their resurgence in the fashion community as of late. While at face value, they may seem to have nothing in common, they are united by a certain je ne sais quoi they exude. Responsible is a genre of fashion on the upturn: Formal Streetwear.

To live in the present is to emulate the past. We float through an obscure river of nostalgia every single day, is there any wonder we yearn to return? Do we wish to escape to a time we can never have back- a time we may not have known at all, or do we simply find comfort in wearing its garments as they were worn by our foremothers and fathers, and theirs before them?

The microcosm that is the Berkeley 51B.