Thinking About Clothes

I’ve been thinking a lot about clothes recently. Not just because my financial position leaves me simply online-window shopping instead of doing actual retail therapy, but mostly because my work into cosplay has made me really stop and think about clothes in a way I hadn’t really done much of before. So today, I’m going to talk a bit about clothes, and the thoughts playing around in my head on the subject matter.

One of the most obvious sentences I’ve read in quite some time was one that went essentially like this: you can tell a lot about a person by their clothes. On first account, it seemed remarkably obvious. I spent most of my life worrying and stressing about this exact consideration. Teenage me agonized over clothes because of how much they were supposed to embody what made me me, and no teenager really knows who they are because at that point in life we’re changing so much. Our brains are suddenly beginning to find ways to think for themselves, and so we’re constantly considering what it is that makes us unique and special and not just echoing things we’re told to be thinking about from parents, family or even friends. And yet, we also want to fit in. We want to wear the clothes that others will recognise, and never want anyone to look at us and ask that dreaded question: “what on earth are you wearing?”

I went through a do-rag phase at one point. There are still lingering photos of me with a bandana wrapped around my head. This was around the point I blue-tinted glasses and dyed one small stripe of blue in my hair. I constantly vacillated between some jazzy perspective, with my blue hair and blue glasses – my hair straightened flat– to some over-the-top tom-boy who thought that a bandana round the head communicated my inability to be like “other girls”.

In these two perspectives of myself, you can see the influences which fought to be shown on every aspect of my body. I was embarking on a discovery of jazz music, a genre of music which spoke to my inner turmoil, especially as I was in an abusive relationship at the time. I loved this new thing of mine so much I wanted to embody it – wanted to wear leather jackets and blue glasses and talk about nothing but Billie Holiday. But I was also intensely aware of my inability to fit in. Other girls were talking about makeup, which I wouldn’t start wearing for another two or three years (the first day of which I still distinctly remember a friend making fun of my poorly applied eyeliner), or about their new-found crushes. Not that all girls were like that – it wasn’t until I was much older that I realised we were all perhaps pretending to be interested in things we weren’t simply for the art of “fitting in”. But these social perspectives of people-watching, and realising the complicated nature of what fitting in really means, didn’t come until after my first few anthropology classes in university.

Young Vivian rocking some blue-tinted glasses.

I have since learned every interest of mine doesn’t have to be represented in my fashion choices. I don’t have to wear every genre of music I enjoy, or have my glasses reflect my hobbies. But, in a way, they still do. I still enjoy wearing flares or boot-cut jeans for more reasons than I think they are most flattering; they also remind me subtly of the fashion choices of the flower-child scene I saw reflected in old pictures of my mother, a style I once tried to reflect when I first picked up Buddhism in high-school. I still sport a large collection of shoes and purses, only less than half of which I actually use on a regular occasion. This collection, like the makeup bag full of lipsticks and eyeshadow colours I seldom use, is important to me. It gives me the choice to be the person I feel on any particular day.

Just a few years ago, I got my first tattoo – the words from the One Ring wrapped around my upper left arm. This is perhaps the biggest display of my personal interests being inscribed on my body. But it goes to show just how intensely my own interests can be reflected in what I choose to wear.

Ernest Goffman wrote about what he described as “identity kits” – items or aspects of your identity you always keep on you. This can be the fact you always carry a book on you, or the necklace you never leave the house without, or your choice of jeans or shoes. They’re the aspects that make someone think of you, and that if someone else was to ever cosplay as you, what they’d inevitably put on. Reflecting back, I can remember my past identity kits, like my bandana or my blue glasses. But it made me reflect on what my identity kit is now, and what that says about me.

Shifting to cosplay (as that’s where my brain was at in this research), I considered how interesting it is that these characters do not have a say in what their identity kit is. This is decided by us – the audience – who has considered what makes a character quintessentially them. But, on second thought, that’s always how it works. I’m sure back when I was teaching, my students would have certain considerations of what was quintessentially me. Maybe they would recognize my backpack, or the colourful pens I used for notetaking. But maybe they would pick up on something I don’t think as much about – not because its not important to me, but because it is so much me that I don’t have to dwell on the thought of its existence. I think of how my husband always considers Zelda earrings and my hair braided to one side as a quintessential Vivian-look, but for me it was simply what was easiest for my hair that was too thick and long to wear in a bun without hurting my head.

From a mythic perspective, clothes tell stories. I’ve mentioned before about the role of implicit mythology (in a few different forms, actually). Clothes are a form of implicit mythology. Clothing is a tool we use to communicate ourselves to others without ever having to open our mouths. My hair, my makeup, my jewellery, my clothes, are all part of the communication of self to others, and each aspect communicates aspects of myself and my story. Dressing as someone else is an important signature of the art of dress-play (cosplay, drag, etc.) because the clothing signals who we are.

Definitions and word choices associated with clothing can be complicated and can shift depending on what we’re talking about. What’s the difference between clothing and costume, for example? There’s two aspects or definitions of costume, but one always stands out: a costume hides aspects of your identity. If a costume hides your identity, at what point are our clothing choices simply a costume? The way I dress when simply at home with my husband is different than when I leave the house, and both of these are different than if I were to, say, go to a job interview. If I wear certain clothes to hide my tattoo when I go to a job interview – with the explicit purpose of hiding it – is my outfit a costume? The art of dressing, in any circumstance, is the art of emphasizing or de-emphasizing aspects of your own identity through your clothing. Its an act of play – we are all just cosplaying the character we want to portray ourselves as in that moment.

So the singular phrase that you can tell a lot about someone from their clothes is both more direct, as well as far more complicated, than it initially seems. Clothes are complicated, and the humans wearing them are more so. Where I am at the moment is considering clothes as an intricate form of mythology and storytelling which individuals play with every time they change outfits.