as a tween / teen in south africa, growing up without the internet / blogs / tumblr meant gaining inspiration from sources you physically had to get your hands on. we used to peruse the paperweight shop and buy outdated issues of foreign magazines by the bag full. and then what would we do with all those mags? we’d cut them up and make collages in our school diaries. hell yes! i never wrote down a single task in my diary at school, it was all full of CK one ads (thanks kate moss). once my parents friends came to visit from america and some allure magazines got passed onto me – with actual perfume samples. my diary smelled great that year.

it’s not like we were living in east berlin, it’s just that south africa wasn’t super cool in the mid-nineties. things only started picking up closer to 1999 – by then i was actually printing stuff from the internet to stick into my diary (a futile exercise if there ever was one…) the point of this ramble is that sometimes i miss sitting on my bed, cutting out pics from magazines and trying not to get glue all over the duvet cover. simple times. so i made a good old inspiration collage.

this contains all the elements that would have gone into a school diary. something hilarious but also awesome (man & dog painting), inspiration for my room, a handsome man (hello don), something i’d like to own but probably won’t buy (shoes), an impossibly cool girl i’d wish to emulate, something old and therefore cool (vintage stamp), something quirky (bearded fellow), something cute (origami fox) and something to do with nature (nice trees ; backpacker looking at nice trees and possibly don draper)

did you have any strange habits as a teenager?