Dressing after a fashion
The other night I helped S to celebrate his successful almost-completion of education by observing various graduation rituals along with a lot of newly trained doctors and their families.
For some reason I enjoy dressing up for such occasions enough to put effort into it, yet the rest of the time enjoy dressing up so little that this occasional effort ends up being spent on things like ‘find shoes that will go better with a twirly black chiffon dress than dirty white running shoes’ and ‘check on the internet whether permanent markers are an ok substitute for nail varnish’. (No—they ‘damage your nails’, and given the very low bar for successfully being nails, I suppose this means they make your nails dissolve or explode or something).
I think what is going on is that I just like dressing up and ‘21st century special occasion’ is not a lot more appealing than ‘pirate’.
Actually several things would make more sense if we were to separate ‘clothes’ from ‘fashion’ and say I care about clothes unusually much and like fashion unusually little. Both in the sense that I am not excited to wear clothes that are ‘in’, and in the sense that I am not enthusiastic about the whole setup where a narrow set of possible clothes are considered appropriate at any given moment, and which ones they are changes all the time.
Caring about clothes and caring about fashion sound kind of synonymous to me, so I suppose they usually go together, and my preferences are weird. I don’t know why though. Fashion seems to actively frustrate any efforts to have good clothes, whoever you consider to be the arbiter of ‘good’.
For instance, below is a sketch of an outfit I’d like.
Not shown: the waist, bottom and parts of the top are made of something very spandexy, the rest is made of something very rayony, except the see through bit, which is made of something very light that can be tucked away in a pocket if you just want to wear shorts, or let out as a skirtish thing. The shorts have lots of stretchy pockets. It would ideally be produced by a collaboration of Lululemon and Target.
I think:
This is not in fashion
This is not a thing you can buy even from arbitrarily unfashionable places
This is so far from in fashion that it would probably be interpreted as some sort of a political statement
If not, it would instead firmly place me in the ‘total weirdo’ bucket. Even if everyone agreed it was more aesthetic and comfortable than their clothes, and even if I also signaled my good grasp of normal behavior by adding a sign to the front that said ‘I know this is not how people usually dress, and I also know that it is normal to dress how other people dress, and I know that it is not normal to signal your understanding of normal behavior by just writing it down while you behave not normally, but this seemed better.’