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#vintageclothes / breakfast / calvin klein / cheapfashion / cheap fashion / death valley / featured / food / hot / kiwi / peaches / Pendleton / strawberries / thrift store clothes / thriftstorefashion / thrift store fashion / thrift store fashoin / velvet jumpsuit / vintage fashion / western fashion / yard sale fashion
  • “To be or not to be in Death Valley” outfit

    by Jessica Holmes

    My longstanding quest for Cheep has been to capture the look of a disinterested bohemian model in an Anthropologie catalog. She side eyes you in her cotton patchwork gown against a distressed backdrop—fingering strange, decayed objets d’art—like an end-of-times queen of leisure. At long last, a solid decade into thick of Cheep, I finally reached my goal in a ghost town in Death Valley...

    March 31, 2022
    Fashion, Travel + Place
  • “Electric Kool-Aid acid test site” outfit

    by Jessica Holmes

    Two camo jet planes flew in between the Panamit Dunes of Death Valley directly behind me as I stood for the shot. I didn’t notice until the first one passed my line of sight. Then the second came through sideways beside me before horizontally sweeping below me through the desert floor. I’ve encountered this once before in the dead silence of the deadest of...

    March 29, 2022
    Fashion, Travel + Place
  • “Military fatigued” outfit

    by Jessica Holmes

    I was into dystopias before dystopias were de rigueur. Among the things I carried on a spur-of-the-moment exchange trip to Russia in 1998: worn-out copies of A Clockwork Orange and The Gulag Archipelago. Dumb American style, I unwittingly landed into political and economic turmoil. The ruble was in freefall. Yeltsin’s rule…spiraling too. Putin, then head of the ruthless FSB, would soon take his place....

    March 8, 2022
    Fashion
  • “Quitting cherry bomb” outfit

    by Jessica Holmes

    My first real quit: DirecTV call center, February 2002. Crippling social anxiety and a lifelong phone phobia had my number, so I excelled at awkward pauses, nervous laughter, and average call times. Even if custom designed by the damned to torture me singularly, no greater corporate hellscape could exist. With its fluorescent lighting. Forced cheery attitude. And “this call will be recorded for quality...

    February 18, 2022
    Fashion, Travel + Place
  • “Soy el amor de mi vida” outfit

    by Jessica Holmes

    I wondered as I wandered solo down the boardwalk on Isla Mujeres in Mexico… in a wave-like refrain while staring into the “where is my mind” Caribbean… who will be the love of my life? On the next turn, in a splash of spray paint and Spanish, the concrete answer: “Soy el amor de mi vida.” I wasted many years steeped in a bitter...

    February 14, 2022
    Fashion, Travel + Place
  • “Joan of Goat (Jeanne d’Chevré)” outfit

    by Jessica Holmes

    “To believe yourself brave is to be brave; it is the only essential thing.” – Mark Twain, Joan of Arc Sometimes, I feel the undying urge to stoically 1000-yard stare into the distance. I’ve learned that this is a sign to go into The Wilderness. Because if you don’t stare awestruck at nature, you end up staring at the back of your skull—into the...

    October 22, 2021
    Fashion, Mind, Travel + Place
  • “Bloom (in the desert) where you were planted” outfit

    by Jessica Holmes

    My pale flesh and potatoey filling were genetically designed for perpetually overcast and infinitely melancholy Irish scapes. Yet here I am, planted in the unblinking desert. I had two (2) semi-disastrous / semi-humorous Sunday desert sojourns in just the past two (2) weekends. Desert misadventures…ill advised. But for me, constantly attempted. As if I am doomed to be spectacle for scavengers someday. One misadventure...

    June 15, 2021
    Fashion, Travel + Place
  • “Ice scream” outfit

    by Jessica Holmes

    I scream. You scream. We all scream. (Dead stop.) This would be the tagline for my nihilistic ice cream store called Waiting for Fro-Yo. (With tortured irony, we would not serve frozen yogurt. But will perpetually imply it’s coming soon.) The sweet shop’s staff would posit in a monotone Werner Herzog droll: “Yes, we all scream for ice cream. Yet, do we also not...

    June 7, 2021
    Fashion, Travel + Place
  • “Stewardess for the Galactic Federation” outfit

    by Jessica Holmes

    Put your tray tables in an upright position, and prepare for departure from 2020. On your right, a once-in-a-millennium scene of cosmic proportions and galactic significance. Though a rather shoddy photo of it (as I took it myself, handheld, shaking in the subzero temps of the Utah high desert). In a spontaneous gambit to witness the Great Conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, I rented...

    December 27, 2020
    Fashion, Travel + Place
  • “Out of Africa” outfit

    by Jessica Holmes

    “Perhaps he knew, as I did not, that the Earth was made round so that we would not see too far down the road,” – Karen Blixen, Out of Africa Before I left for Kenya, I read Karen Blixen’s (nom de plume: Isak Dinesen) book, Out of Africa. Taking place at about this time 100 years ago, the Baroness owned a coffee plantation just outside of Nairobi....

    March 28, 2020
    Fashion, Travel + Place

Fashion Backwards

March 31, 2022

“To be or not to be in Death Valley” outfit

My longstanding quest for Cheep has been to capture the look of a disinterested bohemian model in an Anthropologie...

by Jessica Holmes
March 29, 2022

“Electric Kool-Aid acid test site” outfit

Two camo jet planes flew in between the Panamit Dunes of Death Valley directly behind me as I stood...

by Jessica Holmes
March 8, 2022

“Military fatigued” outfit

I was into dystopias before dystopias were de rigueur. Among the things I carried on a spur-of-the-moment exchange trip...

by Jessica Holmes
February 18, 2022

“Quitting cherry bomb” outfit

My first real quit: DirecTV call center, February 2002. Crippling social anxiety and a lifelong phone phobia had my...

by Jessica Holmes

poor attitude?

Cheap thoughts by Jessica Holmes.

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Quote bomb

Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit.

Hosea Ballou

a secret decoder ring to life on the cheap

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