Silly Little Outfits: Kelly and Larissa of Poetry Trapper Keeper!
Silly Little Outfits: Kelly and Larissa of Poetry Trapper Keeper!
Inside all of us is a girlboss, a Gaylor, and a traumatized Neopet
This first SLO of 2024 is also my first dual interview of the series, featuring one of my first-ever Substack crushes! BUCKLE UP 💖
In their own words:
Larissa Fantini (poet/bullshit artist). Kelly Mullins (poet/ex-girlboss). Together, they run Poetry Trapper Keeper, an online poetry magazine for hot people that celebrates our inner tweens, the color pink, and un-precious poetry.
Jenna: I have so much to ask. But first—Larissa, what’s your dog’s name?
Larissa: It’s Sagu!
J: Hi Sagu! THE LITTLE CLOTHES!!
L: He’s wearing his airplane and boat pajamas.
J: I’ve never had a dog that tolerates clothes.
L: He loves them. I have to keep them hidden. Otherwise he’ll be pulling things out of the drawer to get me to change his clothes like 4 times a day. We have matching rain jackets.
J: What is your current favorite outfit?
L: Easy. My favorite outfit for the past 2 years is heart pajamas that I bought at the grocery store. It’s pink, a shirt and bottoms, with red hearts all over it, and I wear it everywhere, all the time. I’ve worn it to work, then to clubs… and people will just look at me, and they’re like, yeah, it makes sense.
J: Pink and red, a criminally underrated color combo.
L: It’s lovecore! I like to wear that set with a red work jacket that has two patches: one says “I cry every day,” and one says “good girl.” I got that one from a pet store. It was meant to like, put on your pug’s bandana. And then a red bucket rain hat.
Kelly: [My favorite outfit] changes day by day, hour by hour. But I did really like my Pride outfit from last year, and I really wanna wear it again to Milkshake—I bedazzled this black mesh see-through jumpsuit and rhinestoned it. Took me like 3 days to hot glue it.
J: Rhinestoning mesh. That’s rough.
K: I know. I developed a lot of empathy for my mother, who did this for all our dance costumes for like 10 years.
J: You were a dance kid?
K: I was pretty much Dance Moms. That’s my trauma that I’ve yet to fully process. So maybe I was reclaiming that part of me when I was like, I need to rhinestone my costume. And then I wore a bright bikini underneath. I might do nipple tape or pasties this time. I had pink and green gloves, a pink bucket hat that I also rhinestoned. I felt very much myself in that outfit.
internet friends <3
J: Do you feel like you know each other’s style pretty well, regardless of having never met each other in person?
K and L: [EMPHATIC NODS]
J: How did you gain that insight?
K: Our style has influenced and riffed off one another already. Larissa has definitely, I don’t wanna sound corny, but… ~inspired me~. We met in a poetry workshop during [the height of] COVID, where there was absolutely no reason to wear any sort of cool clothes, and Larissa would show up in full Euphoria makeup, cool outfits, colorblocks, monochrome.
L: I was losing my mind.
K: I think it’s a healthy coping mechanism! To do your makeup or put on a cool outfit for no reason, just for your own sense of joy. There’s literally no one to see it, except for the 5 people in the room. But yeah, I definitely have a sense of Larissa’s style.
L: Same. I feel like I’ll see things when I'm shopping, and I'm like, that’s so Kelly. Especially when it’s like a colorful 2-piece suit.
J: Do you send Kelly pictures of this when it happens?
L: No, I send them mentally. I visualize it.
K: Telepathic.
J: Asking because I’ve been on the receiving end of those kinds of things, the this is so you, and then it is the most vile shit I’ve ever seen. If you were shopping for each other and picking out outfits, would you be successful?
L: Are you trying to sow discord?
J: No :)
L: It’s easy for Kelly. I will wear anything. Kelly is transitioning out of Corporate World right now. I could pick out an outfit for Kelly, but not one that would suit the former Corporate Kelly lifestyle.
J: What’s Corporate Kelly vs. Current Kelly like?
K: The corporate world really sucked my style out of me. I literally went to fashion school [Parsons]. And then made my way into working in tech for the past 10 years. And then I moved to Amsterdam and was at a real tech company where it was just like… jeans, hoodies. I went through a phase at the beginning where I would have what I called Standup Outfits, where I’d wear a robe or something ridiculous to kind of just scare the developers.
J: Relatable.
K: If you wore [something like that], like a skirt or a dress, they’d be like oh my god, you’re dressed up, and then say inappropriate comments. I got to a point where my wardrobe was bad skinny jeans and pullovers. Nothing fun.
J: So eventually it ground you down?
K: Yeah. It’s like, do I have the energy to explain why I'm wearing a joyful outfit today?
J: How would you describe your style now?
K: Definitely more colorful, and also interestingly more so getting back to my roots. When I was a kid, I loved thrifting, and I’d make my dad drive us to the Salvation Army like an hour away, and he’d be like what the fuck is this, and me and my friends would go in and buy a bunch of random shit. When I worked in tech, I was like, I have money now, I don’t need to thrift. But it’s more of a creative thing, you know? So getting more back to that. And also doing open mics was fun. It’s almost creating this character or alter ego—I have a reason to get stuff that’s less day to day, but fun.
J: Performative!
K: Yeah. [Doing open mics] gave me permission to buy funner things. Bright, colorful, shiny, rhinestones, fur.
Peeling the nostalgia onion
J: As you may know, I have a complicated relationship with nostalgia. But I think Poetry Trapper Keeper (PTK) embraces nostalgia in a really effective way that doesn’t feel disingenuous and is strangely as removed from capitalism as possible. Have you given much thought to that interplay between stuff-and-things nostalgia and the actual content and themes on your blog?
L: So I had a really weird childhood.
K: [lol]
L: I grew up in Brazil until I was 9, when we moved to Indonesia. Then we moved to China, then Uruguay, and then I went to university in France. And throughout this time period, I ended up being homeschooled and then going to a weird Evangelical missionary school hidden in apartments in China, where we had to memorize the Bible in Chinese and English. It was a bizarre childhood. [laughs/cringes]
J: Shake it off.
L: There was very little to ground me in a culture. I was in multiple cultures, always removed from the culture of my birth. And because of the hegemony of American culture, I was raised on its culture without ever being a part of that country. So I have this almost thirdhand nostalgia. Like, I saw characters on TV eating Pop Tarts, so I was like, oh, I bet Pop Tarts taste good. So when I meet American people, I tend to have this bizarre commonality. Like, I was playing Neopets, I was on Facebook, while all my friends in Brazil were on Orkut.
I was raised by this American identity that was not mine, and it was bizarre to move past. It took me a long time to realize like, no, this has nothing to do with my life, why do I act like I go to a high school like the ones on TV? So, literal brain rot from TV and the internet—that’s who raised me.
K: I don’t think we ever had a super intentional conversation of like… this thing has to be about nostalgia. Our first idea was pretty much “It’s like one of those emails you’d get in 2007 where it says you’ll die in 7 days if you don’t forward it to all your friends.” And we found we had a similar family dynamic growing up despite having very different experiences. So we had a lot of the same reference points.
J: Are those reference points rooted in the kinds of things you tend to feature on the blog itself? Are they objects, more abstract things?
K: Paris Hilton, a Razr phone, mall culture, stuff like that. Larissa, your poem about deconstructing the color pink—that kind of kicked off that theme. [PTK became] a way for us to kind of heal that aspect of ourselves. When we were I guess 12 to 16, we liked all this stuff, but we weren’t really allowed to like it.
L: It was our way of reclaiming these aspects of femininity that we pushed away as we grew up, having to distance ourselves from what is “girly” to be taken seriously. Kelly and I had a conversation early on where I was like, I am so done convincing people I'm smart. I'm done convincing people that I’ve read these philosophers, I'm just gonna write a poem called “Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment but the crime is I’ve been a very bad girl.”
That’s where Kelly and I really met, this point in our lives with me coming from a conceptual art academic background and being around really pretentious people every second of my life, and Kelly coming from a tech world hypercapitalist girlboss background, also being around horribly pretentious people, but in a different way.
We were just like, let’s make something that feels true and authentic. Well, to me it’s always a projection of authenticity, because I did not live it. I had my first Pop Tart at like, 19 years old.
J: But you lived watching the Pop Tart! So you did live it, in a way.
L: Exactly! I felt the projection of how they would taste.
K: You astral projected into eating a pop tart.
[all cackle]
Timefulness
J: Let’s talk about timelessness. A lot of times when people describe a work or an outfit as timeless, it’s a) framed as a good and marketable thing, and b) often due to a lack of certain markers than anything else—a lack of references, lack of ornamentation, things like that. Do you see PTK as a reaction against that?
K and L: Yes.
L: 100%. From the jump, we were not trying to write timeless pieces of work. We were almost trying to be the gossip column version of poetry. We’re writing about things that might not be relevant in 5 years, but they’re relevant this week. We wrote a poem response to one of Kanye’s initial mental breakdowns on Twitter years ago, for example. We’ve written direct responses to the Euphoria finale as it was happening. I think PTK is timeful rather than timeless.
K: It IS timeful!
L: There’s also no such thing as timelessness. It’s impossible, you know? I’ve thought about this in art making. What I love about the current trend cycle is that it’s horribly fast. If we go back 100 years and we see a historical costume, we could date it to within a few years. But nowadays, if you show me a fucking screenshot, I could date it to the month, or to the week. Like, this is when the Selkie dress popped off..
J: The strawberry dress…
L: Exactly. There is a sense of a loss of collectivism when things happen so fast, but it’s still just interesting to see how quickly things are no longer timeless. The same goes for poetry, and media in general. You need to keep up with this stuff, and it doesn’t make sense for us as poets to not do that. With PTK, we do as we do with other aspects of our lives. The same way we share an outfit on Instagram, and maybe it’s not perfect, and we look back and it’s like, that outfit wasn’t great. Or maybe we share a poem, and later I'm like, Kelly can we put that poem behind a paywall please because I don’t want anyone else to ever read it.
J: I really like embracing that timefulness. It’s another form of paying attention, which is a huge part of poetry and any other art form. That attention and care.
Lookin’ cute feelin’ booboo
J: Do you dress differently when you’re having a great time versus when you’re having a shitty time?
L: OK, to go back to March of 2020—I’ve struggled with disordered eating my entire life. Until [the pandemic], all I would wear was a button-down and jeans, not anything to draw attention to my body. And a week before lockdown, my ex broke up with me over email. My friends were like, let’s go out, let’s kiss some people. and I was like, no, I want to stay in, but next weekend let’s go out, let’s go to the gay bar! …And then lockdown happened. So then I spent 3 years without kissing anyone.
J: F.
L: So I was extremely depressed and stuck at my house with my eating disorder. And then my grandma passed away. I was a mess! I spent 3 months in bed eating Funyuns and watching Nancy Drew playthroughs that were like 12 hours long. I woke up one day, and I was like, I need to get my shit together, because I'm going to kill myself. This is not a life. So I got into an ED treatment, and as I was doing that, I got into the poetry workshop. And I realized I have all these fabulous clothes in my wardrobe. So I started putting on party dresses to go to the bakery. I’d show up to the bakery at 7 AM with a face mask, full-on glitter eyebrows, a tutu, leather jacket.
It was the only way I found to not rot in bed anymore. All the therapy and eating disorder work I was going through forced me to change my perception with my body so much that I was like, these clothes are so fucking pretty, I'm going to wear them. And that’s when Kelly met me, and everyone started thinking I'm a very fashionable person. It’s because I lost my fucking mind!
J: It’s also interesting to me that all these things you were letting yourself wear for the first time were kind of hyperfemme, which is an interesting parallel to the PTK themes. And also, congrats!
L: I’ve been officially in remission for like a year now. That’s also been a shift in how I approach dressing. I went so overboard for so long, that now if I wear the house not wearing Euphoria makeup and a tutu, people are like, are you OK? But sometimes all I want to wear is a leather jacket and a button-down shirt.
K: I think it’s kind of similar for me. If I'm feeling anxious or depressed, I’ll lean into the fashion more, probably because it’s one of the things I can control. If I'm feeling like shit, I can put on a really cool outfit, and walk into the room and be the really cool person walking into the room, even if I'm really anxious and having trauma farts. If I look cool, it’s a way to trick my brain into thinking that I am cool. And when I'm more calm and happy, maybe I'm just reaching for my staples, the things I know I feel good in. I'm not architecting an outfit, putting on armor for myself.
Les Artistes
J: Kelly, I’m really interested in your recent art installation-turned-team building activity, The Algorithm. It was a huge collaborative effort, and I admire your dedication to building creative community and challenging ways people have traditionally thought about art and literature and what that looks like today. Do you ever consider outfits and style to be collaborative?
K: Definitely. Even with the exhibition itself, with the outfit and the campification aspect, the performance of it was very collaborative—I think it was your idea, Larissa, you were like, you need to get a hat that says The Algorithm on it. And I was like, yes, like a baseball cap, the corniest, the dad-iest thing possible. For the exhibition, I wasn’t even considering the sartorial or performance part of it—that I could be part of it too, with what I wear as part of the exhibition. I wasn’t considering that until Larissa sat me down and was like, you need to fucking figure this out.
J: How’d that go?
L: I gave Kelly a lecture on how to be taken seriously in the art world.
K: It was my first exhibition! So I’d never done anything. I was like, how do I deal with a curator, do I be pushy, do I not be pushy. All I’ve ever done is write poetry, I’ve never set it up in an installation!
L: Kelly was like, I want them to follow instructions, and I was like, you need to have headphones with the instructions. People do not read instructions on a wall. People need something nagging them.
K: And they loved it! They were so delighted. And it really mimicked how it feels when you’re on your phone.
J: Relatedly, I love PTK’s goal to make a space for unprecious poetry. Do you ever feel there’s a way you’re expected to dress when you’re presenting yourself as An Artist™?
L: I just had a studio visit with a curator of a contemporary art museum here, and when she showed up and saw my house, which is very much an extension of myself, she was like, this all makes sense! People think you’re a character, but you’re not a character! You’re not putting on an act! And I was like, people think I’m putting on an act?! But then sometimes I'm tired and I don’t want to put effort into my outfit, or like right now my clothes are all in suitcases—it’s like you’re not allowed to be multiple things.
J: You would think that at least in the art world there would be a bit more of a grasp of that, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true. A lot of people I talk to encounter the same weird kind of expectation of a baseline you don’t deviate far from.
K: Yeah, kind of like the opposite of tech. It’s like, you’re not wearing cool clothes, so something’s wrong! Whereas in tech, if you are wearing cool clothes, something’s wrong.
L: But in the art world, there’s also the “right kind” of cool clothes. There’s the wrong kind. Sequins and tulle is the wrong kind.
K: Trying too hard.
L: The right kind of cool is like, docs and a work jacket.
J: Timeless!!!!!!!
L: I feel like I dress inappropriately for the event a lot of the time. So I’ll either be way overdressed or way too casual, just because that’s what I want to wear that day.
K: I'm the opposite. I’ll think of the occasion and the setting, but almost in like an avatar type of way. Like, who am I tonight? What type of girl do I wanna be tonight? I'm too anxious about it sometimes. Am I gonna be comfy? What’s the temperature gonna be? I wish I could put on clothes just based on how I felt in the morning, but that’s definitely not the case.
J: Larissa, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the grapevine.earth project. I think it’s really interesting to look at that side by side with PTK. They’re both kind of coming at the same thing from different ends, turning late capitalism in on itself.
L: For sure! Grapevine is a project from Olivia Abando, a curator from London, and she found me on Instagram in 2020. I was recently about to enter another Nancy Drew Funyun era, I was at peak neurodivergent burnout, and Olivia messaged me about doing another residency on the website. So we decided on following The Artist’s Way, as both an attempt at actually utilizing it to get out of burnout, but also a critique of self-help as a hyperindividualistic process which doesn’t acknowledge any kind of systemic issues. And at the end of that book, in the last chapter, the author’s like “I was sitting at the table with my ex-fiance, Martin Scorcese, and his best friend, Stephen Spielberg,” and I was like, it all makes sense! This is why you write about prosperity gospel and how you can manifest everything! You’re Martin Scorcese’s ex wife! You’re a rich white woman!!!
K: Just don’t be poor!
L: She’s like, you just have to believe in your projects and your movie will get made! [lol] Anyway, it’s been a really wonderful process. So much self-help is just repackaged tools that are helpful but sold through a different format. But it was kind of nice to [go through this process] at my parent’s house, because I wasn’t thinking about what I was wearing every day.
J: I think that relates to how westernified zen retreats are so popular, especially among like, high-powered executives. Kind of the more bullshit version of what you’re describing.
K: We need to do a retreat like that for PTK! All-pink temple outfits.
L: We have discussed starting a cult quite a few times. I think it’s a backup plan.
PTK & permission
J: Content-wise, a lot of what you publish on PTK can get pretty dark. There’s a non-zero amount of death and suffering, but with the trappings of a Zac Efron binder I had in 7th grade.
K: What? It’s about lipstick and glitter.
[all lol]
J: And it always feels very genuine, never glib. I was wondering how that balance between intense vulnerability and 😘✌️😜 has surfaced at other points in your life, including how you dress.
L: You know that meme that’s like, men will literally take psychedelics to have the emotional intelligence realizations that I had in 7th grade slumber parties with my friends? I feel like PTK very much has those vibes. You’re in a sleepover with your best friend, and one second you’re eating Cheetos and talking about your period, and the next second you’re like, I really think what happened with me and that teacher was inappropriate. And then you’re like, let’s sing a song!
K: Or play light as a feather, stiff as a board! And then your dad comes in and yells at you. Anyway, a lot of that balance really started with PTK, when we both gave ourselves permission to be like this. And now it’s spilling out into other aspects of my life. I was just at a 2-week writing workshop, and the critiques of some of my poems were just we don’t understand any of this or what this means. And I was like, that’s okay! It’s not for everyone!
But I was also thinking like, shit, if I had gone to this workshop 3 years ago, without having this relationship with Larissa and having this validation that what we’re doing, I would’ve gone to this workshop and thought I was a fucking idiot. I would’ve thought like, I'm awful at poetry, I am just a silly girl. I can go into this now like, it’s not that serious, but what I'm saying is serious, but not everyone in the room needs to get it. It’s silly, yeah, but it’s also deeply cathartic and healing, and it has value. And I did meet people in the workshop who did get it, and it was wonderful. I like to subvert the expectation of what poetry is, away from the whole I did an MFA and now I’m publishing a book model.
J: How often do you find yourself dressed like PTK?
L: I had an exhibition about the girlboss, and I was a walking version of PTK for like a month straight. I had a pink blazer that I wore over a bra, black pencil skirt, pink pumps, a little scarf tied around my neck. I don’t really dress like PTK normally. It’s my outlet—I'm not like this in real life. Sometimes I feel like a fraud! I'm only fun online!
J: It’s ok! you can contain multitudes!
K: You can! For me, it depends. I know I'm going to be reading my poetry, I like that alter ego. I’ll try to look very PTK, so people kind of get it. That’s been fun, because it’s been an online project for so long, so it’s fun to really embody it and represent who we are. It’s fun being like, which poem am I gonna read? What’s the vibe? How can I match that? I got this sweater that’s black with lime green that said “burnout,” with green flames on the arms, And I was like, I'm definitely gonna read one of my burnout corporate disillusionment poems in that.
Sometimes it bleeds over into real life [outside of open mics]. I'm excited for when Larissa comes to Amsterdam. I feel like it’s gonna get out of control.
K: We’ve talked about having a sorority closet where we share clothes.
VACATION BABES
In July, Larissa came to Amsterdam to meet Kelly for the first time. She stayed in Europe for three months, and what started as PTK healing their inner sorority sisters ended with a Poetry World Tour in Amsterdam, Berlin, and London!
J: How was your Hot Girl Summer-Slash-Winter-Slash Beginning of Fall?
L: It turned into Healing Girl Summer.
J: How do you define that?
L: A Healing Girl sits on the couch and cries. A Healing Girl says, “You acted like this, and it reminded me of my dad,” and then the other Healing Girl says, “omg, you triggered me because you acted like my dad.” So Healing Girls sit on the couch and hold each other and say I’m not your dad! I’m not gonna hurt you! And then we build an empire. A fempire, if you will. But yeah. Crying on a park bench, fighting next to a pub. It was very, very beautiful.
J: Y’all fought in front of the pub?
K: Yeah. Then we went into it for lunch. It was in this tiny little village. They saw us all week, and they were probably like what the fuck is going on.
J: So uh… How was all that?
L: It was fabulous!! It was pretty crazy. Like, I went to meet a person I met online! But then when I got there, it was so comfortable.
K: We watched a lot of Gaylor crack videos.
J: Do you think that’s real?
K and L: Yes.
L: In the way that I think capitalism is real. Kelly legitimately only listens to Taylor Swift. But then she made fun of me because I cried while one of the songs was playing!
K: We were like, let’s go back through every album and rewrite the lore from a queer perspective.
L: It was the song where she’s surprised the other person didn’t walk away…? I was in Kelly’s bed weeping to a fucking Taylor Swift song.
K: So the first third of the trip was like, healing the college experience we never had, since we both went to weird art schools.
L: It felt like a sorority house. Kelly still has some of my clothes in her closet.
K: The closet broke because there were so many clothes hanging on it.
L: It was really fun—it was a trip that had so many different cycles.
K: Yeah, [after the college phase], we went off and had our little study abroad phases. We each went off and did our own healing thing for a month. [Kelly went to Ireland for a residency, Larissa did the Camino de Santiago.] Then the third phase was like our senior year, or even graduation—we did all these events, did the poetry tour, hung out with the rest of our friends. It was very heartwarming.
J: Anything that surprised you?
L: I’ve always used my outfits as a very strong form of self-expression and creativity. But I’ve also realized that I’ve been a very lonely person my whole life, and when I’m getting my fill of that from other people in real life, I don’t need to dress up as much. It just becomes more of a fun option, not a necessity. [Doing the Camino,] it was nice to view an outfit as something that is of use to me, not something that is of me. The whole summer was about realizing that there are many things in my life that were filling the need for community. Oh my god, I’m gonna cry talking about clothes.
K: I might’ve had the opposite experience. I leaned more into my inner maximalist. Especially when I was looking through photos for this, I looked up all the photos of when I worked corporate. And it was really bad. And then I went back and found photos from when I was a teenager, or even a little girl. I had this alter ego called Miss Molly, where I’d just put on everything. Gloves, bag. I don’t know where the fuck it came from, but I’d come down, and I’d be like hi, I’m in my cunty little outfit. So now, every time I leave the house, I wanna put something extra on.
L: It does come down to choice, I think.
K: Yeah. I don’t have to strip down myself to be like, palatable for the people I’m surrounding myself with.
L: And I don’t need to dress myself up to make myself palatable!
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 | A guest post by
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Inside every one of us is a pop-tart, internet nostalgia, and AN UNDYING LOVE FOR JENNA/SILLY LITTLE OUTFITS!!! tysm for featuring us <3333