5-31-2026 MY INSPO: kiki and bouba

 if you're chronically online as much as i am, you might've heard of kiki and bouba on your feed, perhaps even a representation of the two words. 

if you're not online as much as me, and you're wondering why i'm sharing this gibberish, here's a paragraph from wikipedia defining the bouba/kiki effect:

the bouba–kiki effect is a non-arbitrary mental association between certain speech sounds and certain visual shapes. the most typical research finding is that people, when presented with nonsense words, tend to associate certain "soft" sounds (like bouba and maluma) with a rounded shape and other "hard" sounds (like kiki and takete) with a spiky shape. its discovery dates back to the 1920s, when psychologists documented experimental participants as connecting nonsense words to shapes in consistent ways.

 when sib and i were kids, an aunt assigned clothing patterns we should wear "for the best physique". i was an underweight, stick figure kid, and was assigned stripes, as stripes would bring out "more feminine curves" to ten-year-old me. therefore, a striped tunic top was gifted to me. sib was gifted a polka dot top, as she had baby fat and "the polka dots will visually make you look skinnier". thank god this woman wasn't our mother, we'd end up with worse body complexes today. 

i thought of this memory when i was typing up last week's look rundown, and how many stripes i truly own! not to mention the brief marine phase i had dressing up like a sailor because of louis tomlinson from one direction, red pants and all... that's a topic for another time.

sib has been really into polka dots, searching for polka dot fabrics, and often borrowing polka dot items from my closet. physically, sib and i are pretty much indifferent, i think these two patterns are our kiki and bouba.

i asked sib to style bouba polka dot fits using her own polka dot collection, and i followed suit by styling kiki stripe fits from my striped collection:

i don't know if our personalities match with the whole "kiki/bouba" effect. we people are much more complex than just blobs and shapes. i love my stripes, but i also dot my i's. sib too, counts her stripes on some occasions.