Happy Pride and Fictional Problems and More Stuff About Fashion & Clothes

I feel like a niche interest and also somehow I aim to please????

Some stuff is too much, even behind a paywall!

Dear Readers,

Happy Pride! Remember!!! Celia Laskey and I, along with Allstora, launched the Sweet N Spicy Sapphic Romcom Book Club! Every month (or every quarter, etc., whatever option you choose), you will get a fantastic sapphic romance novel in your mailbox (or wherever you get your mail), or every new membership signup, Allstora donates a book to an LGBTQ+ youth in a state with book bans, which I think is extremely rad.

Learn more, sign up today (new members can get the first month for only $1!), read along with us each month!

Always but especially during 2025, a time of tremendous and horrific pushback on LGBTQ+ rights, it’s important to support queer folks — LGBTQ+owned businesses, queer art, etc. It’s a great time to purchase one of my books!… or a book by any queer author! But also it’s important to read queer all year, to support authors of color all year, to keep marginalized people in mind as you make your reading choices, given how white/straight/etc. publishing remains!

Thank you to everyone who said nice things to me re: my last post or, coincidentally, to me re: fashion and style recently. I get a lot of questions about clothes, and because things have never been fantastic for fat fashion but are for sure getting worse, I like sharing this intel. Sometimes I do feel at odds with myself; I deeply believe that late-stage capitalism is at the heart of so much of what’s wrong with this current moment (and many moments leading up to it), but also I do like fashion, so, like, here we are. I am deeply committed to buying from as many independent brands as possible, local when I can. I have not entirely cut out fast fashion but I’ve made a huge dent and am closer and closer!

(I’m also keeping this in front of the paywall because I don’t like gatekeeping fat fashion info! Also I should say that most/all of the brands I wear are size-inclusive so smaller people can wear them too. Not saying I worry about what straight-size people wear but like also you should also be supporting size-inclusive independent brands!!!)

Most of my dresses are from Nooworks! Most of what I own is from Nooworks tbh! Their preowned Treet portal is fantastic, and I’ve also scored plenty of items from Poshmark and eBay.

My other favorite small brand is Tuesday of California, which stopped making clothes and is soon going to start again? For now, though, Treet, Poshmark, eBay.

I’ve been getting very very very into Dressed in Lala, and always get tons of compliments on everything of theirs that I wear, like, so many compliments. Their pieces are compliment-generators!!!

My jeans were all from Madewell (curvy cut!) but I started wearing Levi 501s lately and I like them more?? Everyone recommends Universal Standard but I don’t want thin stretchy jeans material, I want low-stretch denim that makes me feel tough and cool (and also like my jeans aren’t growing one-to-two sizes while I’m wearing them, though friends do report good results from Universal Standard as far as that aspect goes).

You didn’t ask but: my bras are all from Elomi, underwear from Tomboyx, under-dress-and-skirt shorts from Snag, tights all from Snag as well, glasses from Dita and Valley Eyewear (hunt down the styles you like on Poshmark and eBay, make friends with your local glasses guy, almost any pair of glasses can be prescription/sunglasses/non-sunglasses if you know the right guy (my guy is Scott at Cateye in East Hollywood), most of my shoes are Converse platforms/hikers or Nike AF1s, and if I had unlimited storage space I would be even more of a sneaker guy than I currently am.

I want anyone who cares about how they look to get to have fun with it!!!! This is my dream for you and yours!!!!!

I think I will do a follow-up post at some point about skincare for greasy rosacea-y aging faces like mine, so, I dunno, get excited about that???

I wrote down some things about therapy here and then immediately was like I AM NOT SHARING ANY OF THIS ON THE INTERNET EVEN BEHIND A PAYWALL so I quickly deleted all of it. But I guess the point I was trying to make is that I am constantly trying to work on things but it is all a journey. And part of the journey is literally putting all these fashion-related things on my Substack and barely apologizing about it. If you don’t care JUST SKIM IT and also I would like to get to the point where I don’t even include that instruction. Y’all already know about skimming. It’s just very important FOR ME to TELL YOU that I KNOW I AM NOT FOR EVERYONE which is funny because do any of us assume that anyone thinks this to begin with??