The Backstory on TQMT, Arielle, & Where We Are Today

The re-introduction, seeing everyone's doing it

As I am writing this, we're getting toward the tail end of a year that has held more surprises than a Lady Gaga outing to any event involving awards. That being said, I (Arielle) am stuck at home with far too much time to sit, think, process and write. Besides bringing vibrance to a mostly-dead world, I also enjoy reflecting & writing (especially on topics concerning myself). Maybe you didn't know that about me. That's kind of the point. I never would have requested the current quantity of time in which to do this, but here we are.

I've been seeing several small businesses on social media taking this time to re-introduce who they are to their audiences—primarily, the newbies who have joined them recently. I think of The Queen Midas Touch (TQMT) as mostly a "queendom" of friends who are following along with my adventures in personal style & maker-ship to the end that they will each pick up their own gilded gauntlet. In the year and a half of building this brand, it's about time to get a bit unbuttoned and show you my true colors.

So, if you really are new (or even a long-standing periphery person of my life), you're about to take a plunge into the past, along with present ponderings—some quite personal. How many 'grammers do you see digging up old photo albums just to bring you the best? Ha. Yeah, we've never been like those other girls. Here goes.

The pirate days, dangerous pants & watch out for the dress

Let's grab the reins of our time-traveling bears and all go back a bit in time. The short story of how I got to be the free-spirited dresser that I am begins with having been homeschooled. I guess we'll have to see what happens to the youth of 2020 in another 20 years, because it seems for the first time in history, learning at home is trending. That being said, after two rounds of UNIFORMS in private schools over a four-year period, I was set free into the public school system half-way through middle school: exactly at the formative, pubescent year where seventh graders in New Jersey study Romeo and Juliet and consider taking drastic actions in their own lives.

For me, public school meant the freedom to truly dress. I knew myself; I knew what I wanted to say. I was both old and wise enough to match my ideals to my wardrobe. Much of it involved color, volume, and DIY details galore that included safety pins on safety pins. I was even sent to the vice principal's office in high school for wearing "unsafe pants." I had taken a pair of my dad's old Levi's and slit them all the way up the front on both legs, pinning all the way back down in one-inch intervals. That day I was also wearing Adidas sandals I had duct taped over entirely.

I never wanted to wear what other people were wearing, once I was freed from the school uniform. Even worse, I soon discovered that most people wear the same thing as everyone else by choice! No matter how terrible (or flattering) designer leggings-as-pants or denim booty shorts (also a school dress code violation, but not enforced) with beige Birkenstocks and Juicy sweatshirts or Abercrombie T's with stick straightened hair looked on everyone—that's what the majority of classmates wore. If you've been following TQMT, hopefully you have gotten up a bit more courage to find yourself, what you like and look your best while doing it.

You can imagine how upset I was when I found out that as a clarinet player, band concerts required me to wear the standard white top and black slacks or skirt on stage. My newly-freed self rebelled in every subtle way I could: pink bandana, converse sneakers, loud undershirt, skater ball necklace and rainbow makeup on stage. My first prom dress was a strapless, full-skirted gown fashioned from caution tape—the result of a spring break home with pink eye AND a preference to spend $16 instead of 10x that. By the time I got to senior year, I had conditioned my high school to understand that when I showed up semi-regularly for the day in a blouse, braids, burgundy vest, and printed pantaloons, "Arielle was having a pirate day."

THE Coat

Fast forward from moving to Midtown Manhattan at 17 years old, and I was leaving the creative industry and relocating to San Francisco from Brooklyn. After five years, I changed pace for family and landed briefly in Ohio while making my way steadily toward my geographical end goal: the Middle East. In both California and the Midwest, I needed a social and creative outlet.

I started gathering people together to craft. We would meet, munch, collaborate, create, and refuel ourselves on the weekend, perhaps preparing for a busy week of mostly non-maker-ing. We used up materials together. We made new things. Some people even water colored or painted. The thing is, I art wearable things. I art-ed this coat.

I made this coat in the spring of a year that I was supposed to have already moved abroad. It was my "bonus year" in Cincinnati, Ohio. I had the late winter to work on it as I pleased, and in the course of a few sessions—many of which in the company of my crafting crew—I had made an ode to both New York and female strength.

My strong female friends were pushing me to make what I did with clothes into an actual thing. It was my bonus year. I had access to an amazing network of local small business owners (photographers, vintage & designer goods retailers, even cheesemongers!) with whom I connected and drew inspiration and motivation. I will always be grateful for their incubation and encouragement.

The start of TQMT as a business

Starting spring of 2019, and through the end of the year, The Queen Midas Touch morphed into a pop-up retail experience and a local movement to be a little bolder while adding quality, beautiful pieces—vintage, pre-loved or art-treated—to the lives of those around her. It brought back to life many pieces of me that had been stifled or sewn over in my day-job-driven earlier twenties: a truly glorious season.

The crossroads of 2020

If you've been paying quite close attention, you may have noticed that I moved. I've moved several times. Most recently—to Israel—before that, from the suburbs to the city, from the East Coast to the West Coast, and from Silicon Valley to "Silicon Prairie." I landed in the Jerusalem area on New Year's Eve 2019, and jumped into an intensive Hebrew class while getting acclimated to my new surroundings.

I thought I would open a storefront in Jerusalem (I still may) and give clients a true in-depth brand experience, focused within a killer brick-and-mortar space. Enter, COVID-19 and a host of minor inconveniences. Needless to say, been making TQMT a beacon of fashion-geared inspiration, still with style & editing tips, but mostly with the end goal of showing my queendom of friendship what it is I'm continuing to add as much "gold" to, by hand. That's where we're at currently. Like most garments in my life, everything is subject to change.

The fire in me

In my unpacking of the closet that is my life for you, for your reading pleasure, I found something. Well, some things, but here is some thing. It's a statement I wrote in 2009, right after I had finally gone from having the longest hair of my life, to none at all. I'm sharing it because it's clear that the core of The Queen Midas Touch is fully who I am.

To say [shaving my head] is completely for myself would be disingenuous. I’m not that kind of person. In the general goings-on of my life, I’m not one for subtlety (usually). I speak and live boldly. However, I have grown to appreciate and incorporate tints rather than hues as I’ve matured. This particular instance—shaving my head on Saturday—isn’t necessarily representative of that.

I like shock value. I like using myself as a palette for the change I would like others to experience on a smaller scale. I test conventions in the hope that others will, too. This is me.

I don’t question the meaning of life or how the universe got here, but what can I do differently? I am not a philosopher; I am part thinker, part doer. I double-dog dare myself into action. I sport caution tape, wedding dresses, and renaissance apparel when I should be clad in formal wear. I shave off my eyebrows, have pirate days, paint my face white[r] and walk to the library, make pants into dresses, make special occasions into themed events, and dress mannequins naked. I am a designing, singing, styling, thinking, writing person who often wishes to know more (if not everything). I cannot stand stagnancy. I need movement. Like all the other conventions I try to break, shaving my head is primarily for me and primarily to mix it up.

This could be my climax. I am 19 years old: supposed to be challenging the norm, right? Well here is something that I’ve wanted to do since my bat mitzvah, and it’s definitely abnormal. Most people never fully know themselves. They are afraid to explore: mentally and physically. I want to know me. I want to know everything about my head: the shape, the imperfections, the grays (if any). I’ve held out seven years for the opportune moment—for the opportune moment and the nerve. This juncture couldn’t be more perfect.

So, instead of making a long-form post where I try to get more engagement on social media, I much rather let those of you who click through, to have this fuller experience. You get to actually know me and how it is that TQMT exists. I'm not looking to sell you a shirt (currently), I just want to have a deeper experience with the queendom, especially while I'm perpetually in a state-ordered lockdown.

Other fun facts & noteworthy details

I've taken day trips to another continent twice: Europe to Africa and Europe to Asia. Both cases were by ferry, and in both cases, more time was needed on the receiving end.

I am married to another creative powerhouse who constantly pushes me to up my game (& vice versa). He's truly "my Marty," as in Martin David Ginsburg, as in the late great RBG's late great leading man. We're city-action-fun people. We also are fully convinced that life on earth is meant to be lived in perfect union with the Creator, who tells us how to do this via the Hebrew Scriptures paired with the New Testament.

All in all, I feel extremely blessed to have lived the life I've so far been given & worked to have made the most of. However, too, I constantly feel the truth of the C.S. Lewis quote from his classic Mere Christianity:

“If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.”

The life we've been given is inherently a rough one, even with the best of circumstances & experiences. Whether through The Queen Midas Touch, or just actual living, to find a golden lining, to inject color, levity, joy and realness into the everyday in order to cope with the essence of this world, that's what I have been, and will continue to be, about.