Remember when I said I was writing this blog for myself? This is like really, really for myself. It's kind of extremely self indulgent, but then again, so is this blog. Content interesting to someone
I have kind of two ways of handling things in my life. I either take them way, way, way too seriously, or I don't take them seriously enough. Incredible drive and passion or completely forgotten. Ask my old music teachers. It's true for clothing, especially. For the first 17 years of my life I didn't pay a ton of attention to anything without an Abercrombie slogan on it. And then suddenly, style was Very Serious Business. For a long time, my style and my identity were wound up so tightly, it was hard for it not to be. Clothing and social communication are forever inextricable, I think, but something's changed for me.
Yesterday my good friend Asa and I were talking about clothes, as we do frequently, and he mentioned how much my style had changed in the two years (!) we've known each other and asked me what happened. I've always dressed in a uniform - the same thing almost everyday until I'm sick of it, usually after about a month. Different uniforms for different identities, I guess.
When Asa and I met, my absolute favorite item in my closet was my J.Crew navy blazer, ideally paired with salmon pants and pearls. Then one day I stopped wearing it completely, save for work outfits. I swapped it with a vintage denim jacket for a while. Then it was a cropped (p)leather. And there I was that very night, wearing that same old navy blazer with an oversized men's tee and baggy boyfriend jeans. But something was different about it. I wasn't using it to say something anymore.
Here's what I told Asa: at 17 I was coming from a really non-traditional situation. My family is wonderfully unique, my high school didn't have a campus, and if you're looking for real religious tradition, the Unitarian church is not the place to find it. It was a time when I was craving some kind of formality in every aspect of my life, if at all evidenced by the fact that I almost went to SU and later, almost transferred to Rose Hill (no, I know. That girl is dead to me). I was really searching for structure, and more than that, some kind of identity. I grew up in a city where a lot of people are readily given really powerful identities by their heritage, their neighborhoods, their churches. I didn't have that, and I was determined to find one.
Two things happened around that time: I started browsing /r/malefashionadvice at the peak of its #menswear, GQ-esque moment and fell in love with the idea that fashion could have rules; and I somehow got it into my head that I wanted to be "preppy." I never really adopted the conservative social values preppiness so often extols, but at that point in my life, the idea of wearing the same clothes your grandmother wore and having the height of style be an L.L Bean tote was unbelievably appealing. I had never seen this side of style before. I was enamored with the idea that fashion could have rules and tradition. That was the name of the game for the next two years. You could sell me anything with the buzzwords "Classic," "tradition," and "Buy it For Life." I wanted to write "My identity is 'preppy'" across my forehead.
Growing up, fashion was always my sister's domain - she went to FIT and has always been impeccably on trend. My sister is cool as hell and like all little sisters, I always thought there was no way I could ever imitate her. And trust me, I tried. But find menswear and finding preppiness and approaching style in kind of a different direction than she did, that let me make it my own.
Right around January of 2013, two things happened that changed my life in a major way. One of those things was that I started spending a lot of time in Brooklyn. Brooklyn did influence my style - although it was Crown Heights, so I mean, not that much. But it was really more that I started to have this sense of freedom, of My Own Life. I stopped trying to rebel against my childhood and started trying to build up from the ground. I was finally free to embrace the weird little tomboy I'd been so desperate to leave behind. And I mean, for god's sake, my parents were hippies and I'm so far to the left I can't even read the map from here. I go to Lincoln Center. The preppy thing was never really authentic. I was still trying to find an Identity, but at least this one was more realistic.
This is a 100% true fact: Tom and Lorenzo's Mad Men blog changed my life. I'm actually really serious. They do a series during the Mad Men season called Mad Style in which they analyze the clothing of the characters - and the way they talked about Janie Bryant's costuming put into words something I'd known unconsciously for years but never really thought about - what clothing means contextually and socially. They'd say something like "See how Don is dressed in a staid, conservative outfit that calls back to his suits in the first season? Look at that juxtaposed with Megan's dress, which only a trendy, wealthy young creative would wear, and how it emphasizes the age aspect of their relationship. In this scene, she's insecure about being only the young hot wife, and their clothing emphasizes those roles."
I started thinking a lot about what I wore meant. If anything, thinking like that only emphasized my interest in identity, but it paved the way to thinking about clothing on a much broader social level and, look at that, that's the reason we're here today. But I think approaching clothing from that angle helped me climb out of putting myself into boxes. There was a long time, even after that, when I still tried to find "my style" and find a label and pick someone to be, but it got harder and harder as things changed way too rapidly. It became more and more okay to experiment, because it was less and less about fitting into a category and more about deciding who I wanted to be that day. And that brings us today.
One morning, I don't know. Some days you wake up and you look around and you realize you're on the other side of something. The farther and farther I fell down into the rabbit hole of the "anthropology" of clothing, the less and less I cared about saying anything myself. That, I can actually attribute to maturity. You never figure yourself out, but you stop being afraid to not know. I spent so much of my life trying to create, and to craft, and to become. And then one day I woke up and I already was.
I still wear a uniform, but suddenly they're just clothes. I still see clothes as tools, I don't think could ever not. I still take clothing really seriously, but it's mostly because I think it's more powerful than we give it credit for. I definitely still think like a costuming designer sometimes - like, who am I in this scenario, and who do I want to be, and how can I represent that? Mostly though, it's more of a fun exercise than anything else. I'm sure a lot of people go through really similar experiences. I'm also pretty sure that this one of those things I'm taking too seriously.
Here's what I know: One morning I woke up and a navy blazer wasn't a ticket into a magical world of WASPish tradition. It wasn't an overly-staid symbol of patriarchy and repression. It was a fucking navy blazer, and it adds much needed structure to those boyfriend jeans.
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