This is not a dirty blog.
Subtle Harlot was never meant to be a public name. It started as a joke in a WhatsApp chat with my best friend, and the story can never truly be explained.
But somewhere in its ancestry is a Christian upbringing that taught me women were responsible for leading men astray.
I spent too many years trying to bend my weird, often accidentally unfiltered personality into the shape expected of me. Eventually I stopped.
Enter: sewing slutty dresses.
I'd never been particularly comfortable in dresses. Religion was part of it, but so were fit, insecurity, a tomboyish adolescence and never knowing where the fuck you're supposed to put your arms.
Then one year I decided to wear dresses every day for a few weeks. A lot of them were short or booby. Why not?
Somewhere along the way I stopped feeling quite so weird in them. I also started shedding the idea that enjoying looking cute or hot made me responsible for anybody else's response to it.
Clothes became a place to play with contradictions instead: covered and exposed, practical and ridiculous, traditional and irreverent.
I live in the Scottish Highlands, in the city I left and deliberately came home to. That's another place full of contradictions: old and modern, romanticised and inconvenient, beautiful and harsh.
I sew because I love clothes. But making them also gives me space to sort out my thoughts.
This blog is for some of those thoughts: sewing, clothes, place, expression, and life in the contemporary Highlands without the rose-tinted glasses.