Hello! It’s Louise 🙂 I turned 20 yesterday and as the old person I  officially am now I had mostly money for my birthday. However, my favourite thing about having a boyfriend is that I still get presents from him!;) okay… it’s not my favourite thing about having him but it is really nice to get presents. He asked me what I’d like and I asked for a few books that were on my reading list. Can’t wait to get reading 😀

  The first book I’d like to talk about is a fashion journalism/ writing textbook (how boring am I?). It’s called Writing For The Fashion Business. Inside it has a guide to pretty much any piece of writing you would have to do within the fashion industry. As of right now, I have no intentions of going to university or working in the fashion industry, so the content of this book isn’t hugely useful to me, but it will still help me a lot. Even though I don’t want to have a degree doesn’t mean I don’t want people to think I’m skilled and intelligent. I think that writing is one of those make or break skills that everyone will judge you on. Somewhere in the future I’d like to start writing essays and publish them here, I actually enjoyed writing essays in college and I really don’t want to lose my essay writing skills. Even if I don’t, I’m hoping that this book will help me with my blog posts, especially ones where I would want to include references and sources.

The next book is Vivienne Westwood’s autobiography written by herself and Ian Kelly. I don’t know enough about Vivienne and I really would like to. When I was in college studying BTEC fashion, the girls in the year above had done a project on Vivienne Westwood and they were always talking about her. It made me really want to learn more about punk fashion and I had always been fascinated by the punk movement anyway. If you’d like to learn a little bit about it quickly I watched a brilliant youtube video about punk fashion a couple weeks ago. You can watch it here, it’s part of a collection of videos by a college professor called Amanda Hallay, her youtube channel is AMAZING for anyone wanting to learn fashion history. Her videos are in lecture format with powerpoints and it really does feel like you are taking a university class.

This is the last of the books I actually asked for (he bought me one extra, so cute) is To Die For by Lucy Siegle. It is about the horrible conditions inside the garment factories in countries like Bangladesh and Cambodia. I’ve been interested in the ethics of the fashion industry ever since college where I was asked to do research on child labour in the fashion industry. The things I learned really changed the way I think about my clothes, and I haven’t bought any brand new clothes ever since. If I do buy something brand new, it will either be really high quality and made to last, or from an ethical fashion brand. I decided to read this book in particular after watching a documentary called “The True Cost.” It’s a really great documentary exposing the human cost that our cheap clothes have and it’s available on Netflix. I’d also recommend this documentary on youtube.

The final book I’m going to talk about is one I didn’t even ask for but he got me so that I could have a surprise:).  It’s a recipe book called Keep It Vegan by Aine Carlin. I was really surprised that he got me this one as I was looking to buy my first ever vegan cookbook and this was the one I decided to get, I just never got around to ordering. I’m a very new vegan (about 2 months in) and the cooking side of things is great but I’m awful at it. Her book seems to be full of normal foods that aren’t too different to what I am used to eating. She’s Irish and I’m Welsh so we probably grew up on similar diets. I’m looking forward to making the Shepards Pie with a sweet potato topping, and the stuffed mushroom burgers. I love this book so much and I love Ryan so much for getting it for me 😀

Thankyou for reading my blog again, I very much appreciate anyone that takes the time to take a look at it 😀 Oh and thanks to my boyfriend again for the presents, I love you 😉