not in kansas (city) anymore

I've been keeping these inspiration notebooks since I was about 14. Motivated by a compulsion which I've come to realize isn't all that weird (but seemed like it at the time), I started gathering images from books and magazines which made me feel something-- at first, mostly clothing or hair that interested me. Over time, the scope of the images expanded to include family photographs, drawings by friends and myself, found images, scraps of trash I picked up, etc. In a way, they are more revealing and more personal than the journals I keep. On the occasions when I travel for styling assignments, I always lug these along to flip through. I've found that inspiration for an outfit can come as easily from a faded book of matches found on a sidewalk or an image of a motorcycle than from a picture out of French Vogue.

First, compilation; image from Selvedge; the reverse of a piece of embroidery from the 1700s (isn't the reverse usually so much better than the front?); fashion magazine; page from a 1970s science fiction enthusiast magazine; sixth, image from an old book of my mom's called "Encyclopedia of the Strange"; next, self-help pamphlet from a local college; images from Discover, then Selvedge, then Zing; lid to a yogurt container my dad brought back from Moscow in the 70s; image from an Australian fashion magazine, and image from an old French textbook. At the bottom of the page, something I found in the local newspaper with a note I wrote to my then-boyfriend, but never gave him because I like it too much.