ISO: Alien Mary Janes
An analysis on quiet complexities in the age of "Bloquette"
Sometimes a Depop listing is a Mad Lib and sometimes it is poetry. I am perpetually grazing Depop for comfortable, cute shoes to haunt around the city in. Though I am usually on the hunt for precision — only buying items I have had my eye on for some time — I am willing to be surprised by a miscellaneous pair of Mary Janes. In fact, the more random the Mary Janes the better. Recently, I’ve noticed something strange going on in the Depop Mary Jane Industrial Complex. The listings for the type of shoes I am In Search Of refuse to be pinned down as any one “aesthetic:”
If it wasn’t clear from “Avril Lavigne kawaii mushroom asymmetrical” — these are the shoes that the post above is advertising:
If I were advertising these shoes I may instead write “Near identical copy of classic Prada Sport Mary Janes.” I’d also probably write “So comfy!” and perhaps throw in a single “#balletcore” tag.
Apparently, Off Duty Ballerina does not hold the weight that it once did. It’s too singular. In fact, nothing suffices as a singular “aesthetic.” This is perhaps most evident through the rise of the term “Bloquette.” “Bloquette” is a portmanteau used to describe the combination of the popular aesthetics Bloke Core (wearing like, a European soccer jersey) and Coquette (wearing like, a vintage pink silk skirt). “Bloquette” would be wearing the European soccer jersey with the vintage pink silk skirt, the shoes shown above, and your hair in two long braids with bows tied at the end to boot.
One part of me thinks this is all incredibly heinous and knows that my brother is going to text me something like “I don’t know any of the nouns you use in ISO” but the part of me that loves teen culture, semantics, and the feminine need to never be misunderstood makes the analysis of “Bloquette” so ripe for me. I find it really tender that the vernacular has evolved quick enough to keep up with the nuance of these trends. The language adapting to meet the need to be understood as not just one type of look, but the combination of two, I think points to a bigger infatuation with aesthetic complexity. Another Depop description for similar Mary Janes contained following: “Mary Jane flats with a ballet core and a gorpcore aesthetic.”
Whenever I read this sentence, my brain reads it wrong. I think the sentence is meant be read “Mary Jane flats with a ballet/gorp core aesthetic.” But I can’t help but read it as “Mary Jane flats with a ballet core and a gorpcore aesthetic. And that is simply so beautiful to me :’) I would hope that someone would describe me as having a ballet core and a gorpcore aesthetic.
Putting on clothes, for me, is a delightful exercise in duality. As I wrote in the first ISO, I like to play with contradiction. I would like my style to be the core of one thing and the aesthetic of another. If you were able to describe the way I dress in one word I would probably ask you to take it back. To me, the fun of getting dressed is keeping that word at a distance. I like that word to be up for debate. I feel this way about most of the facets of my personality and my clothing is one of the best tools I have to communicate this discomfort with singularity. Ruby put it best in her Defense of a Chaotic Closet: “How can I best reflect the blustering hurricane of ideas churning inside me?”
Something about this specific style of shoe — an alien Mary Jane — settles this discomfort for me. It checks off so many of the quiet complexities I factor into my style equation. These shoes are femme but importantly, weird. Nobody tells you that you are supposed to dress the right amount of weird! There are so many learned subtleties that go unspoken. I like that these shoe descriptions are bringing these quiet complexities out. I like saying them out loud even if they are “asymmetrical patchwork deconstructed witchy goth pastel emo scene Tripp school girl kid core miss sixty ballerina sleaze indie sleaze Bella Hadid save the queen.”
As a treat for being a loyal subscriber here are some perfectly weird Mary Janes I have found on the world wide web just for you. If you are not a subscriber don’t even think about clicking on these links…