Rights of Passage

So as a girl who's journeying her way through learning about the fashion world, I only naturally subscribed to Vogue. Pretty much the fashion magazine of all fashion magazines I would say. 

Anyways in this months issue (June) I was leafing through its wonderfully glossy pages and read the Up Front and Nostalgia columns. I really enjoyed them. Both individuals (women) went through, I guess you could call it, a Right of Passage, as everyone does. For some reason both stories spoke to me. Maybe it was because the first one (Up Front) was about a girl, Gully Wells, moving to France, and practically living on the beach, and having a seemingly magical life, and one day she meets a boy. It may have been the wrong guy, but it was a guy whom she shared her right of passage with (if you catch my drift).

"I, on the other hand, had been transformed. Surely everybody could tell just by looking at me? I lay down on a towel and began replaying scenes inside my head, amazed and thrilled by my own nerve." 

The second, is about a woman, Julia Glass, who shunned fashion. After years of having people tell her how beautiful she was and looking endlessly at fashion magazines, she realized something, "When those models made eye contact beyond the page, it wasn't with me; it was with someone male standing behind me." After that she dressed as much against the grain as she possibly could. Julia's right of passage came about while at an exhibition of Norman Parkinson's. As she gazed at a photo of a female model, for the first time, "That smile, half obscured, turned away from the light, says not 'Choose me' but, rather, 'I choose myself'." Soon after this realization, "I began to dress as I had never dressed before: to please myself." Her right of passage came in the form of a picture, a picture that reminded her of the happiness one obtains when dressing for oneself and nobody else.