Welcome to The Epiphanist

Thrilled and panicked all at once.

I may be a writer living in DC right now, but I was once a sixteen-year-old girl in Utah who had access to the internet and therefore created a blog where I posted pictures of my outfits. It wasn’t just outfit pics though—there were also diatribes about vague annoyances and friend conundrums; I was sub-blogging as if it were as prevalent as sub-tweeting. The blog did get me in trouble. And it was called—you guessed it—The Epiphanist.

This was the era of belts in random places, coral and turquoise, bird necklaces, and ballet flats. I experimented with layering and silhouettes all within the confines of Mormon-girl modesty, and I posed in my front yard or across the street in an empty lot with the I-15 as its backdrop. Sometimes I set up my camera—a Nikon I begged for and eventually got for my eighteenth birthday—on rocks or nightstands and sometimes I had my mom take the photos. The blog continued into college, where my style ebbed and flowed depending on how much time I had to sit in front of my closet each morning, conceptualizing outfit ideas in my head. Outfit posts went from daily to weekly to monthly until they were basically non-existent. Now, Blogger has somehow deleted all of the photos; in their places are gray exclamation points with white backgrounds.

A pic from Facebook that also made it onto the blog. Note three of the fashion trends I mentioned above: belts in random places, bird necklaces, and ballet flats. The freeway is beyond this fence.

After my freshman year of college, I went on a Mormon mission to Houston, Texas. Missionaries are almost comically modest; our rule book—and underwear, called garments (look it up)—declared that even in the hot, humid Texas sun, I had to be covered from the neck to below the knees. While shopping for my mission, I snuck a few pieces in that skirted the line of mission propriety: skirts with hems that just barely passed my kneecaps, Anthropologie dresses that were long enough but had wide necklines. The result was a lot of tugging and adjusting throughout the day, covering my ever-tempting and unholy skin. While on the mission, I experimented as best I could with pattern mixing and color blocking, trying to maintain some individual style in a world which asked me to look and act like all the other missionaries around me.

One of the aforementioned skirts that *technically* wasn’t long enough—and also apparently was spilled on several times throughout the day. And a peak at the greatest fashion accessory of all time: a missionary name tag.

After the mission, I never wanted to look at long hemlines again, even though maxi skirts were prevalent, and in Utah, Bermuda shorts still ran supreme. I went out and bought mini dresses that I could wear if I wore petite-sized garments, I borrowed clothes from friends, and I tried to dress a body that had fluctuated sizes so much in Texas I had stretch marks on my thighs. I had lost a bit of my personal taste and ended up following trends like everyone around me—that’s what happens when you live in an extremely homogenous society. (Utah State University has 81% white students, and more than a third of students are Mormon.)

It wasn’t until I moved across the country to Fairfax, Virginia for grad school that I started to remember how fun it could be to get dressed. It really only took one compliment from a new friend to make me get back into experimenting with shape and style. I started layering tank tops over dresses, mixing hi-lo brands to create new dynamics, and buying pieces that didn’t feel so on-trend. And this is about the same time that I—surprise!—left the Mormon church and—thank heavens!—left the restrictive garments behind.

A few moments where I did my best with the modest standards thrust upon me...

…and the first time I left the house without garments. I was so nervous about it, I purposefully cut off most of my shoulders from the picture. The distortion feels very metaphorical.

All this to say, my sense of style was restricted by my beliefs for most of my life. I am proud of how I made it my own even in such set confines, but I’m still not totally comfortable with my new fashion freedom. My body is kind of a foreign thing to me—having not seen it in tank tops and short shorts for most of my life, wearing those pieces makes me see myself as a vast expanse of skin, and I get dizzy with the body dysmorphia. It seems that no matter what phase of life I’m in—inside the church or out of it—the religious mindset still infiltrates my own ideas, views, and wants.

With this newsletter, I’m hoping to unwrite that narrative. I’ve been posting outfit pictures on my Instagram for about a year now, and I thought I might as well expand to a place where I can also chat about all things fashion, whether that’s more post-Mormon fashion soliloquies or shopping sagas or lists of what I’m coveting and why. I’ve always loved fashion as a creative outlet—a way to express myself while living in a box—and I want to honor that piece of me. That little sixteen-year-old blogger version of myself wrote a lot of nonsense, but she was also onto something.

Here's a bit of what I've been wearing lately.

I’m not putting too much pressure on myself to keep this newsletter on a set schedule. I expect this to be an ever-evolving project, and I want it to remain a creative place—and creativity takes time and effort and rest. That said, I do have a few ideas stacked up and ready to go, so you can expect some sort of regularity for the next little while. Thanks for being here! I hope you have as much fun as I do.

xo,

Abi