STYLE GURU BIO: Merilyn Chang

September 3rd, 2015 at 2:00am

If you’re mourning the end of summer and the arrival of the school year I can offer you nothing other than the reassurance that ‘sweater-weather’ is now approaching and mosquitoes are now dying. In the case of the former, you can now adorn your body in whatever mock-tribal print, and hipster (grandpa) print sweater you might find at the dark side of your closet. In my case, the ‘dark side’ features a wide array of hand-knit sweaters from my grandma whom I begged, at the meager age of 12, to stop knitting as they began to resemble Holi, the Indian holiday, gone wrong. In short, colors were exploding on my sweaters. Having taken a class in psychology during my senior year of high school, I then learned to attribute this childhood trauma to the formation of my current character; one who wears black 90 percent of the time (and chokers).

If you look at the photos above you can see, quite clearly in fact, that other than my shoes, my hair and my heart (not pictured), there is no other trace of black in the outfit. That is me taking a chance and stepping out of my comfort zone. Which is something I’ve done quite often since coming to college. Currently, I’m a sophomore at NYU where I study comparative literature and film production. Having taken several classes in the creative writing department, it seems that I will have accidentally acquired a minor in that as well. This proved to be quite the difficult concept to grasp as my Asian parents brought me up with the dream that I would become some type of doctor or perhaps an accountant—businesswoman if nothing else. I have disappointed them time and time again. Now, getting my writing and fashion snaps published online, I can perhaps redeem my standing in my parent’s hearts (jokes aside, they have been rather supportive despite my capricious nature and odd writing hours).

Fashion, and the business of it, is something relatively new to me but I’ve been a lover of such for quite a while, having gone through several experimental stages in fashion (my monochrome phase in the fifth grade, and my ‘sad-girl’ punk phase of the 8th grade which was preceded by a hippie phase that lasted till my Junior year in high school). I compensate for my relative lack of experience in fashion business with a long standing interest and appreciation for the arts. Fashion is an appreciation for aesthetics and just as one would admire Caravaggio’s oil paintings in the MOMA or Thom Yorke’s seemingly incessant creativity in his musical endeavors, I, and many of women on this website alike, admire the attire of women who walk down the streets of Soho, Madison Avenue, or Brooklyn. It’s a different type of enjoyment—one that would illicit a restraining order if we stared too long—but nevertheless one that is enamored with pretty things. We are all human, after all—a species enamored with beautiful things.

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