About

The Flaneuse Journal. It’s as simple as that. It’s the daily undertakings of a 20-something year old that observes life and all of its surroundings at an excruciatingly microscopic and kaleidoscopic level. This is not a blog just about style and fashion, even though some will staunchly explicate that I can spend hours discussing why chiffon is better than silk. Or the profound affect a Zuhair Murad, Georges Hobeika, and Giambattista Valli collection have on me despite not having the closet or the budget to actually own an original. Leaving aside my love for couture fashion and brand names, I want to stretch outside the horizons of normalcy and borders of sanity–reach a little further and delve a bit deeper into literature, art, architecture, decor, travel, food, and so forth. And of course women’s fashion and beauty time to time. Because you can take the girl out of couture but you can’t take couture out of the girl.–I’m 99.99% positive someone totally famous and fabulous said that.

Anywho, this idea, which now I call my baby, my child, forever labelled my first-born–this idea was conceived roughly a year ago as I looked outside the 5th floor window of my office towards Willis Tower. It dawned upon me at that very instance that we go about our daily lives with that 9-5 schedule, then head to class or run family errands. But did I even know that there was a little French Market maybe a few blocks away that make fresh croissants or served wine from Bordeaux? No. Despite spending nearly two decades in Chicago there was so much I had yet to experience, to see, to engage in. I was following this rigid academic and career path that I forgot to participate in life. I kept telling myself how time is just flying and I still haven’t done a single thing on my bucket list.

That is the purpose of The Flaneuse Journal. It’s the notion to be a “Flâneur“. Charles Baudelaire, a French poet, first introduced this term as “the casual wanderer, observer, reporter of street life, and a symbolic archetype of the urban, modern bourgeois lifestyle” aka new money meets urban street life.

Think of Gustave Caillebotte’s masterpiece, Paris Street Rainy Day (1877), where the gentleman is both an observer and a participant. He confronts the complexities of modernity yet views it as transient. A flâneur is highly self-aware and engages in a transformative process of creating new bonds and social imprints in accordance to time and space. When you’re a stroller, an observer, a lover of life you’re forced to constantly engage in quiet introspection and evaluate your individuality. You look past the materialistic and sometimes use the materialistic to change. You experiment, and grow. You make mistakes, but then you learn. You take risks and you fail or reap in the rewards of your hard work. But that’s the essence of it. That is the soul of TFJ. Go into the world, explore everything, unleash that inner wanderlust, have a deeper instinct, live by impulse, be a winged creature by soul and substance who is not afraid to fly into the new. Don’t be deliberately aimless, but feel unencumbered by the societal norms, ethnic obligations, and preconceived image ideals.

I swear by these ramblings (even though I never mean to be such a bumbling fool); living ecstatically and seeing life in more than one dimension–musically, lyrically, aesthetically, artistically. To be consumed by other passions and be driven by the urban experience. Be a connoisseur of the streets and of life itself.