The future of Eva Internazionale

I've realized that my vision of what I want to share online and how has begun to differ from what I've been doing with this blog so far, so I've decided to split Eva Internazionale, i.e. my two main topics (cities and clothes), into two blogs. I will be keeping Eva Internazionale as a fashion/style blog and expanding it with new features, but soon I'm going to launch another blog where I will primarily write about cities.

Recently I've reached the 100 followers milestone and I'm really happy that the number of RSS subscribers is growing too. Whenever you put something out for the world to see, you want people to respond to it, so I would like to thank everyone who gets something out of this blog. My wish to connect to others is why I started Eva Internazionale in the first place and in this sense my expectations have been fulfilled, although it's really a never-ending process.

I'll let you know as soon as the new blog about cities goes live while Eva Internazionale will continue being updated as usually. Stay tuned for the news!

When clothes make you feel shy

Then

Now

blouse Yohji Yamamoto
This is the blouse I mentioned in On Fashion (Part II). I didn't start wearing it until 8 months after I had bought it because I thought its elegance and delicacy were beyond me. Oddly enough, even then I knew my shyness towards it would dissolve with time.

It did take a while, but I'm glad to say we've been on excellent terms ever since.

How I learned that nostalgia romanticizes the past

Dubrovnik was the first city I fell in love with. After spending a week there with my family in 2003, I vowed to return with a one-way ticket. Like many times before and after, my love for Dubrovnik was painful. I was so enchanted with the Mediterranean joie de vivre, old ladies in cafés with small dogs in their laps gazing into the distance as if trying to recall their lost youth, stone and marble, the hustle and bustle of restaurants on Prijeko Street and red brick roofs shining under strong sun that I wanted it to become my life. It couldn't because I had to return home, but the images of Dubrovnik's summer decadence remained etched in my mind.

When I came back a few years later, I was disappointed. Stradun, the Old Town's main street and the soul of the city, wasn't nearly as wide as I remembered and there weren't many people despite it being the peak of the season. Early in the morning I sat in a café next to the bus station and the atmosphere was beautiful in the way only Croatian coastal cities are beautiful in summer, but even more than beautiful it was mediocre. Drinking warm ice tea and watching tired tourists getting off non-air-conditioned buses, I thought, "This isn't Dubrovnik." But it was. It was just different from the fairy tale I had made up during the time of my absence, yearning to return to the city that gave me memories I couldn't forget.

It was the first time I consciously learned that nostalgia romanticizes the past. This knowing has continued to accompany me through life (I also wrote about it here) and although we have grown close due to my habit of constantly returning to my favorite places, it always surprises me with the same intensity as that morning in Dubrovnik. It is now as much a part of me as my cities. Ironically, it also appears to be one of the rare static, never-changing elements in my life even though it deals exclusively with the fleeting.

Topshop disaster

Add me on Twitter!




dress custom made, fox Almira Sadar, shoes Emporio Armani (close-up)
My friends and I went to see La Bayadère on Friday. I'm not very good with ballet because my "opera deformation" always makes me wish someone would start singing, but it wasn't boring and one of the male dancers looked exactly like one of our high school teachers wearing blue pyjamas. We are still very silly sometimes, so things like that can easily make our evening.

I had this dress custom made by a local seamstress after having tried on a similar one at Topshop. It was one size too small and at least 15 centimeters too short, so upon seeing me in the dressing room my mom remarked that I looked "cheap". This is probably only my millionth little black dress.

On hotel rooms

I have a habit of taking photos of hotel/pension rooms before I have desanctified their immaculateness by placing my belongings all over. It's probably because I never see such neatness otherwise, my own room being as estranged from order and logic as possible. I like to have everything perfectly folded, but I won't do anything for it. On the rare occasions when I do tidy my room, I move stuff only to discover I have misplaced it later when I need it. If I hadn't gone against the natural state of things, it wouldn't have taken me 2 years to find my pastel crayons on the highest shelf in my closet.

Hotel rooms don't subject you to that confusion.