Un-dressing in the City

Style is more than fashion. Fashion is an element of what style uses to achieve its ends, but by itself, fashion is unreliable, like the friend who is always terrific fun to be around, but who often doesn’t show, leaving you waiting at the appointed rendezvous, feeling awkward and self-conscious.

Style is code. It’s a metaphor for the public self. It’s the way we move in space: our persona. We use it to adapt to our environment, to belong, to stand apart. Clothing can enhance or conceal a person. It’s an invitation, or it’s a warning. I look at the pictures in The Sartorialist and imagine those people in my kitchen. Could I talk to them? Could we find our way past the clothes to meet over coffee?

Vancouver is all about the easy, and these days the yoga cult has overcome all other fashion trends. Mats and other yoga gear can be purchased almost anywhere—in houseware boutiques, in bookstores and in grocery stores—but lululemon is the retail shrine where devotees go to worship with their Visa cards. I bought a tank top there last week. It’s brilliantly designed—a perfect intersection of form and function, but the woman who sold it to me wore the beatific expression of an acolyte. In fact, every clerk in the store seemed to have on that same expression: wide eyes and faces soft and slightly upturned, as if to meet the light.

People in this city give each other a lot of personal space. We almost never acknowledge others without some express reason for doing so. This can be excruciatingly lonely for the newly arrived, but for those of us acclimated to this benign indifference, it’s comforting. We pretend not to look at each other, and so we’re free to reveal more that we conceal. We can go about un-dressed without fear of the penetrating gaze of strangers. Vancouver is a liberated city. The public self is insubstantial, because without witnesses, there is nothing to hold it in place. We grow transparent; weightless. Sometimes out of the corner of your eye you’ll see a man or a woman lift right up off the sidewalk and disappear into the clouds.

Sartorialism

I hate to get angry because I feel vulnerable, exposed, as if my anger had pulled out my old poems or scattered my e-mails across the server. The horror of anger is the possibility that I will say exactly what I think. My words will be forever attached to me (not to "august" but to the person behind august); all will regard that moment as the true me, and will be right. Anger will reveal my deceit, and so I hate it.

Is that the reason why, in the moments following anger, the pause after storming out of the room, I always wish I were better dressed? I wish that my true self were more sartorial? I wish that my boreal anger arose from somebody well kempt, tucked in, put together.

I used to think fashion was fake, that clothes masked insecurities and promoted eating disorders, that vanity was a gateway to avarice (and perhaps to a gambling addiction). Certainly, a good suit can act as a shield, and I sometimes like it when a coat gives me a place to hide.

More and more, though, I find that I dress well when I am happy, not because I am unhappy. Putting on new shoes is like buying a book: it's an aspiration to improve myself, to show myself to be a person capable of improving. I remember an episode of My So-Called Life in which Claire Danes refuses to take part in a mother-daughter fashion show because she feels too ugly to be seen. I aspire to be less scared. I aspire to walk through the world feeling I deserve to be here, to inhabit many worlds, to exude dignity, to maneuver like an assassin.

When I am angry, you will want to see me. You will not want to see me angry.

What Do We Think About When We Think About Fashion?

Is black the new black? Will I ever be a photo in the The Sartorialist? Do I even like the Sartorialist? What makes me want to dress better? How can I move through space with minimum waste, maximum joy?* Is fashion even worth it? Does it improve my self-esteem, and if so, is there something wrong with me?

We could call it a Wikifray Symposium. Sound in with your thoughts.


*It's a Sade tune that sounds the way I'd like to look.