a philosophy of fashion
I have been thinking about clothes a great deal lately. Not merely because I am a Girl and rather fond of the stuff -- I had a brief struggle with being a Geek Girl and yet being so terribly fond of clothing (though not Fashion as such, as the fashion industry frightens me rather a lot, as does spending inordinate amounts of money on the stuff) -- and then I said "fie upon that!" and continued on my merry way. No, I have been thinking about clothing in a philosophical manner.
You see, I am the sort of girl who, as you may have guessed from photographic evidence, has a taste for the eccentric, and also for wildly disparate styles, which I have rarely felt badly about. I will wear my black skinny jeans and Threadless t-shirts one day and my vintage Montgomery Ward dress another and on yet another day have black lacy skirts and fishnet stockings and military vests. However, when I come across People Like Me in fiction, this is usually presented as... a personality defect?
Yes. The girl who wears long dresses to the supermarket or harbours a fancy for plum-coloured eyeshadow is usually compensating for something, such as shyness and an uncertain sense of self; the girl who can be romantically gothic one day and quirkily businesslike the next simply needs to settle down and Find Herself, and then she will spend the rest of her life happily in comfortable trousers. When I dress the way I do, it is clearly a cry for attention, quoth the stories, and as a sign of confidence in myself, I will stop wearing outlandish things to the store. There is also an underlying sense of how this girl is acting out of her insecurity and insisting upon Not Being Like Everyone Else, but when she finds her confidence, she won't need that front anymore. Clothing that is out of the ordinary is nothing but a Costume.
Now, there are parts of this which hold true: especially when I first began to be interested in doing unusual things with my clothing, I was extremely awkward and insecure and lonely, and I definitely had conversations with myself about how I didn't want to wear the same things that everyone else was. I wanted to dress like me. And perhaps some of it began as a plea for attention -- I have found myself ignored and overlooked seemingly without explanation for a lot of my life, and it is definitely harder to overlook me when I am wearing turquoise stockings -- but it grew into sheer, simple fun. I love what clothing can do for you, how putting on different sorts of things can give you different kinds of feelings, cause you to think about yourself in different ways. I like wearing a pretty dress and heels to an occasion to give myself confidence (i.e., why I inadvertently wore a bright, beaded dress, jewellery, striped stockings, and high-heeled granny boots to the SATs last spring, because bright happy colours make me feel more awake and confident, and heels make a clicking sound which is also very confident-sounding... and then everyone else was wearing old jeans and sweatshirts -- really, I do not exaggerate! -- and had not brushed their hair, and I felt that I looked rather as though I were trying to show off, eep).
I enjoy the freedom that comes with not confining myself to any particular clothing subculture, because I don't really conform to any specific ideological subcultures, and so there are a lot of different facets of myself, and it's tremendously fun to bring different ones out. The eyelinered, lace-punk me is just as much me as is the Peter Pan-collared garden-party me, the Converses and quirky t-shirt me, the urbanly eccentric me, or the freak-folk hippie-of-the-moors me. And while elaborate clothing-play is not something that appeals to everyone (nor do I think it ought to!), I think that everyone has multiple, seemingly contradictory facets of their personality which, instead of attempting to conform to one thing, they should celebrate and rejoice in. Yes, I'm a sensible romantic! I'm a wary idealist! I'm a free-spirit and an intellectual! It's okay!
And who says that putting on a costume is necessarily hiding oneself, anyway? Even a Halloween costume, I would submit, is less about hiding one's true self than bringing it out, revelling in a side of oneself that one doesn't often let out. Dressing up as a princess or a ninja or an evil Alice in Wonderland or a lobster says something about who you are. And so when one dresses in a theatrical manner, or in a way that one even admits is a sort of costume, that does not necessarily mean that they are hiding themselves in an unhealthy manner: merely, that they are playing with their own perceptions and imagination. I like to pretend that I am different parts of myself! There are certain things that I can put on, particularly when paired with a certain pleasantly battered sea-green sweater and some boots, in which I can happily imagine that I am the protagonist of a 1960s or '70s YA fantasy novel of the Diana Wynne Jones or Susan Cooper variety. I had a phase for long skirts, things that lace-up, and flowing sleeves during my initial Tolkien romance, which never quite went away. Last month I dressed up specifically for NaNoWriMo -- not every day, but not infrequently, either -- donning things that related to my story and its universe, which usually meant things reminiscent of Edwardian fashion or vampires. (It did help me get into the right mental space for writing, too. ^-^)
I also realise that there are certain times when it is appropriate to, you know, dress a little more like the people around you, so that you don't stand out in the wrong ways, make yourself seem unapproachable, or, um, actually breach etiquette (such as when you have A Job) -- so I can wear jeans and sneakers or flats and a nice shirt that still feel like me without alienating the people around me. I've gotten better at this, too, as my confidence in myself has improved: because, yes, one can dress outlandishly out of a sense of pride or insecurity, or to buffer interaction, and perhaps partly because one doesn't quite know how to make oneself comfortable to other people without losing that sense of unique self-ness, which does come with more confidence. (I still vacillate on this one a lot. "La la la, I shall wear these most outlandish things because they make me happy, and this situation is sure to be trying! ...Oh, wait, now I look as though I have wilfully separated myself from everyone else in the room, which is awkward.")
In conclusion, some odd things I have learnt about Dressing Eccentrically: fewer people will stare at you than you think, or maybe this has to do with how you wear your clothes; if you look comfortable and happy in them, nobody will make a big deal out of it. Except for old ladies. Somehow, my sense of fashion makes me an old lady magnet, and I have got so many gleeful compliments on things that I would not have suspected were especially septuagenarian friendly, such as green and black striped stockings and purple hair. I am... not exactly sure what to make of this.
You see, I am the sort of girl who, as you may have guessed from photographic evidence, has a taste for the eccentric, and also for wildly disparate styles, which I have rarely felt badly about. I will wear my black skinny jeans and Threadless t-shirts one day and my vintage Montgomery Ward dress another and on yet another day have black lacy skirts and fishnet stockings and military vests. However, when I come across People Like Me in fiction, this is usually presented as... a personality defect?
Yes. The girl who wears long dresses to the supermarket or harbours a fancy for plum-coloured eyeshadow is usually compensating for something, such as shyness and an uncertain sense of self; the girl who can be romantically gothic one day and quirkily businesslike the next simply needs to settle down and Find Herself, and then she will spend the rest of her life happily in comfortable trousers. When I dress the way I do, it is clearly a cry for attention, quoth the stories, and as a sign of confidence in myself, I will stop wearing outlandish things to the store. There is also an underlying sense of how this girl is acting out of her insecurity and insisting upon Not Being Like Everyone Else, but when she finds her confidence, she won't need that front anymore. Clothing that is out of the ordinary is nothing but a Costume.
Now, there are parts of this which hold true: especially when I first began to be interested in doing unusual things with my clothing, I was extremely awkward and insecure and lonely, and I definitely had conversations with myself about how I didn't want to wear the same things that everyone else was. I wanted to dress like me. And perhaps some of it began as a plea for attention -- I have found myself ignored and overlooked seemingly without explanation for a lot of my life, and it is definitely harder to overlook me when I am wearing turquoise stockings -- but it grew into sheer, simple fun. I love what clothing can do for you, how putting on different sorts of things can give you different kinds of feelings, cause you to think about yourself in different ways. I like wearing a pretty dress and heels to an occasion to give myself confidence (i.e., why I inadvertently wore a bright, beaded dress, jewellery, striped stockings, and high-heeled granny boots to the SATs last spring, because bright happy colours make me feel more awake and confident, and heels make a clicking sound which is also very confident-sounding... and then everyone else was wearing old jeans and sweatshirts -- really, I do not exaggerate! -- and had not brushed their hair, and I felt that I looked rather as though I were trying to show off, eep).
I enjoy the freedom that comes with not confining myself to any particular clothing subculture, because I don't really conform to any specific ideological subcultures, and so there are a lot of different facets of myself, and it's tremendously fun to bring different ones out. The eyelinered, lace-punk me is just as much me as is the Peter Pan-collared garden-party me, the Converses and quirky t-shirt me, the urbanly eccentric me, or the freak-folk hippie-of-the-moors me. And while elaborate clothing-play is not something that appeals to everyone (nor do I think it ought to!), I think that everyone has multiple, seemingly contradictory facets of their personality which, instead of attempting to conform to one thing, they should celebrate and rejoice in. Yes, I'm a sensible romantic! I'm a wary idealist! I'm a free-spirit and an intellectual! It's okay!
And who says that putting on a costume is necessarily hiding oneself, anyway? Even a Halloween costume, I would submit, is less about hiding one's true self than bringing it out, revelling in a side of oneself that one doesn't often let out. Dressing up as a princess or a ninja or an evil Alice in Wonderland or a lobster says something about who you are. And so when one dresses in a theatrical manner, or in a way that one even admits is a sort of costume, that does not necessarily mean that they are hiding themselves in an unhealthy manner: merely, that they are playing with their own perceptions and imagination. I like to pretend that I am different parts of myself! There are certain things that I can put on, particularly when paired with a certain pleasantly battered sea-green sweater and some boots, in which I can happily imagine that I am the protagonist of a 1960s or '70s YA fantasy novel of the Diana Wynne Jones or Susan Cooper variety. I had a phase for long skirts, things that lace-up, and flowing sleeves during my initial Tolkien romance, which never quite went away. Last month I dressed up specifically for NaNoWriMo -- not every day, but not infrequently, either -- donning things that related to my story and its universe, which usually meant things reminiscent of Edwardian fashion or vampires. (It did help me get into the right mental space for writing, too. ^-^)
I also realise that there are certain times when it is appropriate to, you know, dress a little more like the people around you, so that you don't stand out in the wrong ways, make yourself seem unapproachable, or, um, actually breach etiquette (such as when you have A Job) -- so I can wear jeans and sneakers or flats and a nice shirt that still feel like me without alienating the people around me. I've gotten better at this, too, as my confidence in myself has improved: because, yes, one can dress outlandishly out of a sense of pride or insecurity, or to buffer interaction, and perhaps partly because one doesn't quite know how to make oneself comfortable to other people without losing that sense of unique self-ness, which does come with more confidence. (I still vacillate on this one a lot. "La la la, I shall wear these most outlandish things because they make me happy, and this situation is sure to be trying! ...Oh, wait, now I look as though I have wilfully separated myself from everyone else in the room, which is awkward.")
In conclusion, some odd things I have learnt about Dressing Eccentrically: fewer people will stare at you than you think, or maybe this has to do with how you wear your clothes; if you look comfortable and happy in them, nobody will make a big deal out of it. Except for old ladies. Somehow, my sense of fashion makes me an old lady magnet, and I have got so many gleeful compliments on things that I would not have suspected were especially septuagenarian friendly, such as green and black striped stockings and purple hair. I am... not exactly sure what to make of this.