![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Come all without, come all within
Aug. 10th, 2007 10:20 pmI'm moving from Norah's summer-abandoned room over to Dominique's, across town. This means that I've been packing (again), and trying to get rid of some of my clothes, which also means I've been thinking a lot about them.
I used to not really care about the image I projected to the world. It wasn't that I didn't care about my clothes; it was just that I judged the clothes on a completely different level. It was about how cool I thought they looked, not how they looked on me. I didn't care what I looked like, really. There was a time, not so very long ago, when, apart from one or two dress shirts, every top I owned was tie-dyed. They looked bloody awful on, for the most part, but I wore them with confidence because they were so cool (to my 14-year-old self), and besides I had dyed nearly half of them myself.
Just before I came to uni, my mother decided that, while it was fine for me to go away to rural Iowa dressed like some strange cross between a hippie and a hobo, it wouldn't do to go abroad like that. Besides, I had lost a lot of weight, and most of my clothes didn't really fit anymore. Soshe dragged me to the mall we went shopping, and I was outfitted with a basic wardrobe of relatively plain tops and a few pairs of discount jeans. Also some sweet cords from L.L. Bean, but somehow just after buying them, I started to care about the fact that waist-fitting trousers, like them, are highly unfashionable, so now I hardly wear them.
It bothers me that I should care about what is or is not fashionable. Because not only did I used to not care much about clothes, I was proud of that fact, like I was 'above' all that or something. (Who needs vanity when you can have full-blown egoism?) I wanted to express myself with my words, I said, not my appearance. So in high school, while my friends got their cool clothes, and their piercings and their new hairdos, I kept to my t-shirts (and my swell fedora).
Of course, what my high school friends were trying to do was express their identity through their clothes. And they did it pretty well. If one dresses outside the norm, it's a pretty good guess that that person is outside the norm in general. I know when I see someone on the street dressed up all hippie, punk, or (sometimes) goth, my brain says "One of us! One of us!"--but how are such people to recognise me? (Also: what does it say about my social groups that I find mohawks a bit passé?)
I used to have a whole slew of (obnoxiously self-righteous) reasons to excuse my plain style of dress. One of them, that I mostly didn't care, was true. But there was a certain shyness about it, too. People treat you differently if you're dressed strangely, and most of them have about the opposite reaction to mine. I didn't want to draw attention to myself.I like to do just like the rest, I like my sugar sweet But the other thing is, I kind of like shocking people, when we get to talking about certain things. I've had people surprised to hear me swear, for fuck's sake!
Which is why I'm quite pleased with the style I'm finally beginning to cultivate for myself. Not really hippie, nor 'retro', or antique, or lesbian, but combining elements of all of these, and probably some more that I couldn't really name, not having been in the habit of assigning genres to clothing. I'm gradually supplementing and replacing my clothes with ones I actually like. The image I'm attempting to project will, I hope, be far enough from the norm to mark me out, but 'innocent' enough to still shock people at parties.
P.S. Harry, just for you:
I used to not really care about the image I projected to the world. It wasn't that I didn't care about my clothes; it was just that I judged the clothes on a completely different level. It was about how cool I thought they looked, not how they looked on me. I didn't care what I looked like, really. There was a time, not so very long ago, when, apart from one or two dress shirts, every top I owned was tie-dyed. They looked bloody awful on, for the most part, but I wore them with confidence because they were so cool (to my 14-year-old self), and besides I had dyed nearly half of them myself.
Just before I came to uni, my mother decided that, while it was fine for me to go away to rural Iowa dressed like some strange cross between a hippie and a hobo, it wouldn't do to go abroad like that. Besides, I had lost a lot of weight, and most of my clothes didn't really fit anymore. So
It bothers me that I should care about what is or is not fashionable. Because not only did I used to not care much about clothes, I was proud of that fact, like I was 'above' all that or something. (Who needs vanity when you can have full-blown egoism?) I wanted to express myself with my words, I said, not my appearance. So in high school, while my friends got their cool clothes, and their piercings and their new hairdos, I kept to my t-shirts (and my swell fedora).
Of course, what my high school friends were trying to do was express their identity through their clothes. And they did it pretty well. If one dresses outside the norm, it's a pretty good guess that that person is outside the norm in general. I know when I see someone on the street dressed up all hippie, punk, or (sometimes) goth, my brain says "One of us! One of us!"--but how are such people to recognise me? (Also: what does it say about my social groups that I find mohawks a bit passé?)
I used to have a whole slew of (obnoxiously self-righteous) reasons to excuse my plain style of dress. One of them, that I mostly didn't care, was true. But there was a certain shyness about it, too. People treat you differently if you're dressed strangely, and most of them have about the opposite reaction to mine. I didn't want to draw attention to myself.
Which is why I'm quite pleased with the style I'm finally beginning to cultivate for myself. Not really hippie, nor 'retro', or antique, or lesbian, but combining elements of all of these, and probably some more that I couldn't really name, not having been in the habit of assigning genres to clothing. I'm gradually supplementing and replacing my clothes with ones I actually like. The image I'm attempting to project will, I hope, be far enough from the norm to mark me out, but 'innocent' enough to still shock people at parties.
P.S. Harry, just for you:
