If You Can't Get a Cab, You Just Can't Get a Cab...

When we were about 16, my dear friend, Alexa, and I took a trip to New York by ourselves. Alexa's mom sat us down before we got on the plane and gave us some important traveling pointers. The grand finale of it all went a little something like this: "...And just remember girls, sometimes if you can't get a cab, YOU JUST CAN'T GET A CAB!"

We died laughing. It seemed so ridiculous..."Obviously!" (We were 16 and from Southern California, so it was probably more along the lines of "like, duh!") And yet, these words seem to manifest themselves over and over in my life.

Like, for instance, over the past week with this project. I found myself trying the same things over and over. The same sketches, the same ideas, with the same inspiration in front of me... I was, as my boyfriend put it so well, "Lost Meninas". Until it hit me....If you can't get a cab, you just can't get a cab...So you find other means of getting from point A to point B. You take a bus, or a train, or you walk. In any case...you get there. Or, alternatively, you stand in the same spot on the side of the road repeating the same cab-hailing motion over and over again (or, i guess, in my case...drawing the same ugly jacket over and over again).

So I took matters into my own hands and made two new inspiration pages. I felt like they better represent what this project means to me at the heart of it all. Because when it all comes down to it, my collection of childhood dance portraits are saturated, drenched, soaked in unmitigated irony...because my childhood wasn't sparkling at all; and in my opinion neither was the Infanta Margarita's (damn...she wanted out of that corset and onto the playground)!

Here is the new inspiration:


And Color Palette for the collection:
Some fabric manipulations I worked on this weekend...
And a few of the sketches that came out of it all... So here you have it....the ebb and flow of the design process. Changes happen along the way...and I'll be sure to keep you posted (pun absolutely intended) as to how things progress. For now... Consider me, Found Meninas!!!