Fashion/Faux Pas

Raquel, by Alfredo Roldan, 2003.

Like I’m sure many others are guilty of, I own too many clothes for a lifestyle that I am not currently living and I pine after looks of people on the internet who seem like their literal job is Fashion, like Ken’s job is “Beach” in Barbie, and to be fair, I’m sure for most of these people I’m thinking about, that actually is the case. Either working as personal stylists, influencers, or just working within the fashion industry in general, it quite literally is their job to look fantastic and put together and maybe even try to sell you some of their fabulousness. However, there are obviously plenty of non-fashion industry people who just happen to also exude the kind of sartorial astuteness that I wish to exhibit in my daily life. Fashion not as a raison d'etre, but rather fashion that follows the contours of their quotidian life. I’m thinking of writers who look glamorous, like Marlowe Granados, or artists whose work is slightly mirrored in their choice of clothing, like Georgia O’Keefe. Fashion isn't their entire schtick, it’s just another branch of self-expression, with their pieces clearly thoughtfully selected and helping to extend the borders of their personality and work. 

When I look at my own life, I realize that I relish so heavily in my weekend outings and thus outfits because I spend the entire week living like a cartoon character, cycling through the same three outfits. Scrubs, workout clothes, and some form of pajamas, be it lounging around in a tank top and shorts or sleeping in an oversized college tee. There really isn’t much diversity within these three outfits either, often featuring black or blue, and unshapely though not drowning out my frame. In essence, I kind of feel like an unshapely blue blob, akin to a slightly deflated Teletubby. Which is fine! It really is fine if you’re okay with that or don’t mind or don’t care particularly about fashion and expressing yourself through it. But I’m beginning to understand what people mean when they say “dress for yourself”, it applies to not only what you wear but where you are wearing it! I hate being a blue Teletubby all week and then the weekend rolls around and I’m at home, sitting at my computer in another iteration of this image, staring longingly at my closet wishing I had “occasions” and “reasons” to wear my untouched articles. 

Maybe this is why women in the old days (and even now, though less apparent I think) had glamorous dressing gowns and silk robes, to insert a bit of personality and glamor back into their life, even if they are just lounging about within the walls of their homes. That is living for oneself, that is living with glamor in your bones and your essence. This may sound self-critical or like I’m trying to impose unnecessary ideas of appearance and presentability on myself in my own home, but that’s not how I mean it. This isn’t solely about how I look, it’s deeply about how I feel, and while these two ideas are deeply intertwined, I want to reiterate that this is for myself. 

The famous John Berger excerpt from Ways of Seeing is always rattling around in my brain as I wrestle with caring about my appearance as a woman in this world:

“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman. She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life. Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another....

One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”

― John Berger, Ways of Seeing

And of course, this then brings to mind the Agnes Varda quote that empowers one to fight back against that notion to reclaim the act of seeing:

“The first feminist gesture is to say: “OK, they're looking at me. But I'm looking at them.” The act of deciding to look, of deciding that the world is not defined by how people see me, but how I see them.”

― Agnès Varda

But where does that leave me?

After all, we don't get dressed in a vacuum. It seems near impossible to get dressed without wondering what other people would think of my outfit - does it fit the context of where I am going, the ambience of the restaurant, the theme of the party, the fashion of the times to show that I am knowledgeable of them and capable of acquiring them, therefore signaling my taste, class, and wealth? The sociologist Georg Simmel defined fashion as both satisfying an individual’s need to fit in with society through imitation and adaptation and satisfying the desire to distinguish oneself as unique and separate. So getting dressed is really about towing the line between these two desires, alchemically mixing and matching, changing and rearranging what you wear to get the perfect mix of both, lest you desire social ostracization or loss of identity. 

But if I were to dress up at home, where the occasion is, well, nothing exactly grand, just normal life things like reading, occasionally rotting in my bed, making a meal, etc, what would happen? My mind wastes no time imagining the outfits I would finally wear, things that the label-obsessed internet would probably assign “shipwrecked cottage maiden”, “70’s band groupie”, or “mediterranean disco mermaid”. Things that make me giddy at the possibility of actually wearing! And then also immediately sad because I still don’t know scenarios where I “can” wear these outfits, because let’s be honest, though I am constantly working on my confidence, I have not reached the level where I am comfortable being the most overdressed person at the local sports bar (Go Flanny’s!). I also don’t have a desire to. Which might make me sound like I’m speaking in paradoxes and being a hypocrite, but I truly don’t want to look like I’m dressing up for halloween or a theater production while everyone else is in Tshirts and jeans. A perfect example of Georg Simmel’s philosophy and the delicate dance that is dressing up, for others and yourself. 

So now what?

I think what this means is that I’m going to make an honest attempt at not wearing baggy, shapeless, deflated Teletubby akin clothing as much as I can manage while at home. It means putting on a cute little dress after my post-work workout instead of immediately changing into my pajamas. It means getting dressed on the weekend after waking up instead of wearing my pajamas until some plan pops up later that day. Not everyday, not all the time, but just more than nothing. I assume I’ll feel less likely to “veg out” and more likely to jump into other hobbies if I’m not dressed like I’m ready for bed all the time. I think looking nice for myself, a nice dress here and a swipe of red lipstick there, will, I begrudgingly admit, probably make me feel better about myself. And actually wearing my clothing will hopefully make me feel less guilty about owning things that I don’t get a chance to reach for as often as I’d like.

But just between me and you, I’m currently writing this in tie-string shorts and a workout tank top from a college bar crawl…with pink lip balm though! Baby steps… 

Having fun playing with the collage feature on Pinterest with things I have saved!