(re) discovery
After years of fearing perception, my fashion taste admits a guilty comfort in athletic leisure ware. This hasn’t always been the case. Courtney Love has influenced my fashion choices most of my life. As a teenager, and even briefly as an adult, I easily paired all vintage clothing with a pair of ripped tights, combat boots, and large hoop earrings. I am and will always be a sucker for animal print, having fully embraced my premature auntie persona my whole life. Once upon a time, I subscribed to the Nylon fashion magazine and committed to a DIY type of style, drooling over ripped drapey fashion pieces they showcased (yes, I was an indie sleaze tumblr girlie). As a woman who has just breached her third decade, there has been an unprecedented amount of adversity I was forced to experience, and comfort has taken over. The desire to feel safe has dominated my lifestyle and therefore, the way I look. I learned that I have embodied this trauma and no longer present myself as someone I am familiar with.
As a student of gender studies, I have learned of the true meaning of camp and other pop culture fashion phenomena that has influenced many of my feminist predecessors. The iconic Gloria Steinem, who famously wore her perfectly tinted glasses overtop her hair or my riot girl idol, Kathleen Hanna, who has proudly sported her short babydoll dresses and little kicky heels for decades. Or what about Lady Gaga that continuously makes bold fashion choices without a second thought? I admittedly cower in their shadow and admire (with big glitter rainbow heart eyes) their ability to lean into their feminine softness while still presenting a desirable “please don’t fuck with me” attitude. This is something I feel like I used to exude, but this was, of course, before I was disabled and in recovery.
Well, as hard as it is to admit to you right now, while I am sitting at my computer in my top floor condo, fully thinking I am living my Carrie Bradshaw era, and I am looking down to see what? Something Carrie wouldn’t be caught dead in. I am sporting who-knows-how-how old black bootcut leggings, faded at the knee paired with an over-sized airbrushed white tee. My white socks should be hidden, as they are also stained with dirt and covered in lint. I am a sustainable fashion blog intern whose walk-in closet is dominated by hoodies. I am revealing this to you as a form of accountability. I formally choose to revisit the fashionista path I once strolled upon as a bit of a trendsetter in my small town (that has been stuck in a social and technological time warp). You’d be proud because I have already begun to fill my closet with secondhand and vintage statement pieces. More notably, my handbag and belt recently grown the most it has in probably over five years… where is all this fashion sense coming from?
There are two local consignment shops I found in my new neighborhood that I have returned to (shout out to The Mannequin on Main Street & to Olivia’s in Northern Bel Air). I even made more than one Pinterest board to help stimulate the stylish part of my brain. It’s no longer enough to window shop on online re-selling platforms, even though that’s type of doom-scrolling I am into lately, I have to touch the dusty racks and smell the mothballs. I am deeply committed to forming a relationship with the cashier, discovering the best days to shop and learning the sale cycles. This is nuanced type of consumer culture that surprisingly enough, not too long ago, was the norm. As much as millennials want to revisit their childhoods, this is how I do mine.
I make sure to follow ever pillar of the slow fashion movement and continue to pay into the small businesses of my community. Of course, I made my journey to discover my personal fashion taste as an adult into a form of activism, how else would I approach anything else?
Right now, I am on the hunt for: all types of funky pants, leather jackets, and silver bracelets.