Styling Saturday: Back to Basics with the Blazer

In the butch groups I am in, both online and off, one question comes up fairly frequently, either from young butches starting in the work world or older late-comers to butchness (and/or masculine-of-center (MOC) presentation and/or being nonbinary) in the work world. Now I am the last person to try to tell you how to dress if you are in the trades like construction, but as a long-time adjunct professor, I can advise on more white-collar style.

So the question folks ask is how do I start building a butch wardrobe for work. And the answer I often give is this: Start with that staple of the white-collar wardrobe, the blazer.

A blazer is a highly practical, highly adaptable piece of clothing. First of all, it covers you down to the wrist, so if you need to hide tattoos, you’re good. It gives you a uniform shape, so if you want to hide your Covid-15-pound extra belly (maybe I’m projecting here), it’s great at doing that too. People who experience gender dysmorphia will like the way it deprioritizes your bust. Also, it’s got POCKETS.

Let’s face it. Women mostly want three things—lifelong love, bodily autonomy, and pockets—not always in that order.

I’m not a fan of the shorter styles, which end at the hip rather than about three inches lower. A short blazer can be convenient on the train but I’d rather my blazer cover my wallet in one front pocket and my keys in the other. But this is the style of the moment, so oh well, I guess.

I put a black blazer with clean black jeans, or a navy blazer with navy pants and I’ve got an instant pseudo-suit. Or I can pair a black blazer with grey jeans or a navy blazer with khakis and I’ve got a slightly more informal outfit. Or camel or linen with brown or green pants… The possibilities are kind of endless, really.

It occurred to me to look up the history of this piece of clothing and I realized that men would probably call it a “sport coat,” at least in America. Apparently, the British used to and possibly still do call it an “odd coat.” The “odd” meant not part of a whole suit.

For the last few hundred years previous to the nineteenth/twentieth centuries, dress always revealed some very simple binaries: man vs. woman, high vs. low class, military vs. civilian, clerical vs. lay, etc. But outside of task-specific clothing like helmets, aprons, gloves and the like, and with the exception of horse-riding among the upper class, people didn’t wear different clothes for different tasks. Upper class people might have daywear and evening wear, but that had more to do with formality than with the task of sitting around eating. “In fact, it was not until 1923 that the style-conscious Ivy League undergraduate finally accepted the idea of a designated separate jacket for spectator sports” (Flusser 100).

I’m not sure when women started to add a blazer to skirts or dresses. Certainly, women’s riding habits (modeled after men’s) generally had two parts for practical reasons, but women’s clothes have rarely been particularly practical. Imagine a pioneer woman or any poor working woman doing any physical job in a dress. Based on my own memory, I would guess the woman’s blazer took off in the 1980s, and I suspect Ralph Lauren had a hand in that, as he did in popularizing Ivy League clothing styles to the Preppies of that decade.

In 1988-9, I went to every single college interview in the same outfit: a pale blue Oxford cloth button-down shirt, a khaki skirt (A-line, very plain), a navy blazer, and a cranberry necktie with white polka dots. (Don’t recall the shoes; something reddish with a low heel?) I think about this now and then when I wear neckties to work or church NOT along with a skirt but ABSOLUTELY along with a blazer.

JCrew Women’s Blazer

My favorite brand for blazers has for several years been JCrew, because they:

• always have good outer hip pockets

• almost always have working breast pockets for my ridiculous pocket square collection (although the size of the pocket can vary widely)

• frequently have an inside pocket and

• can be bought on sale several times a year; you get on the email list and they let you know when they are having a 30-40% off sale. They’re not cheap without a sale, but the quality is always worth it.

When I first started dressing a bit more MOC more consistently, I just added a blazer to whatever work trousers I had and complemented those colors and the button-front dress shirt or casual shirt and then a colorful pocket square in the blazer’s breast pocket. I’ve even gotten compliments from women in the restrooms at work and, as other MOC people will tell you, that’s surprisingly uncommon. (Usually they think you shouldn’t even be there.) But women seem to like that little pop of color.

That’s it for now. I’ll address pocket squares another time.

Flusser, Alan. Dressing the Man: Mastering the Art of Permanent Fashion. Dey St., 2002.

Styling Saturday: Closet vs. Wardrobe

The first time I ever came across the idea of a wardrobe being a place for your clothes as opposed to the name for all your clothes put together was probably when I read C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Appropriately, the story’s action starts when Lucy, the youngest of her siblings, runs into a wardrobe to hide from them in a game of Hide and Seek. Moving further into the wardrobe, she finds it leads out into a magical world of talking animals, deadly peril, and heroism.

Lucy Discovers the Wardrobe

She’s a lucky little protagonist, as we know that hiding is often not nearly so benign nor closets so wondrous.

Since I thought I was straight for more than four decades, I don’t consider myself to have been in a closet. It was more like a friend suggested when I came out, “Things that were in boxes are no longer in boxes.”

And, although I didn’t have access to the language in my youth or even in my early adulthood, I was always a bit butch. I loved playing cowboys with my older brother. He was Cowboy West and I was Cowboy East, and when he was off at school or playing with his friends, I would often be down in the basement riding my golden rocking horse on springs and pretending my metal rake with the glow-in-the-dark green tines was either a guitar or a rifle. I was probably between three and six at the time.

Rocking Horse with Springs

I hated dresses. I remember a particularly hideous (to me) navy and brown plaid dress with a white sailor’s collar that I had to wear with navy tights and black patten leather Mary Jane shoes for church. One time, I found out just before we got home that we were having our dad’s boss and his wife over for brunch and I raced upstairs to get changed so they didn’t see me dressed that way.

To be fair, I went to an all-girls Catholic high school and learned to appreciate the freedom our uniform skirts gave us when we were taking the stairs two at a time to get to class. Our uniform shoes were brown leather with rubber soles, practical and comfortable. For First Friday Mass or school assemblies, we threw on a cranberry blazer. The rest of the time we could wear a cranberry sweater with the red plaid skirt. Warm, practical, and a color I happened to look good in, unlike the green from my elementary school.

And then there was college in Vermont in the late 1980s. I can perhaps be forgiven if I took to wearing corduroys, boots, button-down Oxford shirts and wool sweaters, carrying one of the several Swiss Army knives my dad gave me on my belt. Practical, sensible, warm.

Swiss Army Knives

Apparently, people thought I was probably a lesbian back then, but of course no one told me. I had to find it out for myself years later.

My point, I guess, is that although we can intentionally or unintentionally hide in the closet, our wardrobe might actually reveal more of the truth of us than we ourselves know.

I am going to be shifting this blog to examine these questions. Who are we in the body and how do we come to terms with that? Who are we performing/being when we clothe that body in the ways that make us feel most authentic? I can’t answer those questions for anybody except myself, but there are other questions I have tried to help other butches and nonbinary people answer in some butch groups on Facebook and in the world, so I will offer some of those principles here.

Hannah Gadsby Rocks the Butch Look

So I just read a great short piece in Vanity Fair by the Australian butch lesbian comic on her clothes and why. Suffice it to say you should go read it.

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2021/04/hannah-gadsby-on-the-comfort-cocoon-she-calls-her-clothes?utm_campaign=likeshopme&client_service_id=31204&utm_social_type=owned&utm_brand=vf&service_user_id=1.78e+16&utm_content=instagram-bio-link&utm_source=instagram&utm_medium=social&client_service_name=vanity+fair&supported_service_name=instagram_publishing

Gentleman Jack is a Game Changer

So about five weeks ago, the British costume drama Gentleman Jack started showing on HBO in the United States. So far I have only watched the clips one YouTube user has posted that show snippets of the love story, ignoring Anne Lister’s entrepreneurial and political side, but holy mackerel, it’s good.

We know what we now know about Anne Lister because of her rather compulsive keeping of personal journals, the salacious bits in a code she constructed in her youth. Over the last century, different historians have decrypted and either shared or hidden those bits and their implications. I just read Angela Steidele’s Gentleman Jack: A Biography of Anne Lister, which draws heavily on the decrypted and transcribed bits of the diary. At over 4 million words, there’s a lot that still hasn’t been transcribed.

Sally Wainwright, the creator, writer and main director on the show spent twenty years working with the source material and finally found in 2019 the time was right for this story.

The show covers, in only eight episodes, roughly two years in the life of Anne Lister, and aristocrat who recognizes herself as what we would now consider a lesbian, even though the word had not appeared in the language yet. She considered herself clearly female (and lamented that fact when it stood in the way of her gaining an education or the vote), and said she loved “and only loved the fairer sex.” The show portrays her wooing a richer, younger, and less together, but equally gay aristocrat, with all the societal problems you might expect in the early 1830s of Halifax, England. (As opposed to when she was studying anatomy in Paris a few years earlier…)

 

 

We’re only five weeks in on an eight week “season” (or the British word, series), but already the show is kind of amazing.

High-Maintenance Butch?

I came out about three and a half years ago, and not much later realized that I was butch and probably always had been, even and possibly especially during the two years or so when I tried to grow my hair out and meet more guys and yeah, that. I’ve read about quite a few butches who went through that stage.

And then there was this Facebook quiz that showed up on my feed about two years ago and made me laugh, because, before I came out, I would have scored a perfect zero.

Nowadays, I am clearly much, much more high maintenance. Now, I score a grand total of four points. Yeah, not the hair extensions four points, or hair is dyed+nails are painted four points. Nope. Owns 20+ pairs of shoes.

Given that there was a time in the 1990s when I owned one pair of shoes for work, a pair of sneakers, a pair of snowboots and a pair of either flats or low heels for emergencies such as weddings, it still boggles my mind that I might own more than twenty pairs of shoes.

And I thought I owned only twenty pairs of shoes, including sneakers and boots. Nope. The other day I pulled all of my non-sneaker, non-boot shoes out into the living room to get a good look at what I had.

Pretty much, it came down to short boots,

Oxfords (bucks, brogues, wingtips and monkstraps), in black

Brown

And other exciting colors

And girly shoes.

The total came to thirty pairs. Who the hell owns thirty pairs of shoes? And when I think that most of them are made of leather, and I do know the problems with the leather industry, how did I manage to accumulate all of these? Or, to put it differently, how did I manage to eat this particular dinosaur? Sigh. One piece at a time. Okay, maybe a pair of pieces at a time. And that means, I suppose, that I can also reduce the excess one pair at a time, right?

To be fair, there is a real reason that I ended up with this many pairs of shoes, and if I look at the shoes I’ve got, the answer is pretty clear. Once I recognized and embraced myself as more of a masculine kinda girl, I wanted to express that through my clothes: blazers, cufflinks, vests, shoes.

Two years ago, I did a purge of all of my clothes. I got rid of 117 items of clothing, including shoes, socks, shirts, skirts, dresses. Things that were worn out but I was still wearing, I threw out. Things that no longer fit me physically, I donated. Things that no longer felt authentic, and probably hadn’t even when I thought I should be more feminine, I donated.

117 things. Gone. But we know that nature abhors a vacuum. (I know my cat does.) Apparently I filled it. With, among other things, shoes.

So this week, as part of a new purge, I tried on all thirty pairs of shoes and managed to winnow it down by one-sixth. One pair, the black oxfords, were simply too small. I was able to give them to a smaller friend who has been pulling together a working wardrobe for her post-graduate degree present. The others, all bought online even though I know that I have narrow heels and usually can’t wear shoes that don’t tie in some way but I was trying to have better girl shoes… Yeah, that didn’t work.

So now, I am 58 pieces of clothing down (including five pairs of shoes), in part because I just ordered two vests and yeah, another pair of shoes. I never meant to be a horrible consumeristic person, or as my sister called me a while back, God forbid, “a clothes horse.”

Life leads us in really strange directions.

Some of the Fabulous Socks

Can’t find the other pictures just yet.

That Damn Yang, Part 1

There is a logic to the men’s section of a department store that is largely missing from most women’s sections. Take shirts, for example. short sleeves are over here and long sleeves are over there. In the women’s section, this is not necessarily the case, except maybe during late spring/early summer when we are expected to shop for summer. The more formal “dress” shirts are often separated by color, or at least light from dark, and usually by material (smooth vs. rougher). You can easily find what you are looking for without having to look at all the shirts in your size on seven different racks.

And color! Men’s shirts have sensible colors: cranberry, navy, loden green, chambray blue. Black with pink flamingos. Purple with white bicycles. Stripes that usually don’t clash. plaids, the same (except for Madras plaids; there’s just no accounting for those). women’s shirts are a riot of colors: orange and pink paisleys, or jewel-tone flowers on a tomato soup background. Gaah. And turquoise, that irreparably iffy color that can make your skin tone look healthy in one light and fatally jaundiced in another. Sure, in the 1970s even men wore colors and patterns like that, but if the 1980s did nothing else good besides massive benefit concerts, it put to rest that particular sartorial nonsense.

And then there are the pockets. Men’s shirts (and pants and coats and vests) have pockets. And pockets are liberation. It is no mistake that the Nasty Woman Perfume mock ad video that came out back in November put clothes with pockets in the same category as reproductive healthcare and equal wages.

In comparison, the problem that men’s shirts always (if they are long-sleeved) have sleeves that are too long for the average women. But, you can always just roll them up; in fact the kind of women who are likely to shop in the men’s section are exactly the type to roll up their sleeves and get to work.

Year of the Fabulous Socks

Well, 2016 was a year of many things, most of them pretty bad. We lost Prince, and Princess Leia, Colonel John Glenn and Major Tom. Voldemort and his chess set of white supremacists gained entry into the White House when Russia took a page out of the US playbook to help make that happen, putting immigrants and queer folks and women and people of color at even greater risk of the kind of things that made Germany into an object lesson eighty years ago (one we have ignored, it seems).

In the midst of all this darkness, it is difficult, but not impossible, to light a few candles.

1. In February, my union got my colleagues and me a 26% increase in pay over the next three years, because, yes, that’s how little the school had been paying us.
2. In March, I started playing Lesbian Dodgeball on a monthly basis (see #5) with a bunch of overeducated goofballs. This started my collection of Fabulous Dodgeball (and other) Socks.
3. In May, I got a fabulous roommate and her Hello Kitty bestest buddy.
4. In August, I went alone to Boston ComicCon, wearing an Agents of SHIELD uniform and had a pretty good time. This is also where I got my Wonder Woman and Groot socks.
5. In November, I went to the Love Rally on the Boston Common with the abovementioned goofball friends, now in Deeply Serious mode. Then on Supergirl, the Girl of Steel’s sister DEO Agent Alex Danvers figured out that yes, she is into girls, as I had some months before.
6. In December, I went on my first date in eleven years.

Now, when I originally started writing this post, I had some vague idea about writing about the tradeoffs a gal makes shopping in the men’s section, but my pen had other ideas. Still, I stand by my title.

Because we could look back on 2016 as the year we lost so many of the best and brightest: Leonard Cohen, Muhammed Ali, Janet Reno, Richard Adams.

But I will look back on this past year as the year my sock drawer–that oft-ignored repository which, like a bookcase, tells the world through its changes how one’s life is changing–got a little fabulous.

So yes, 2016 will go down as the Year of the Fabulous Socks. And as God is my witness, 2017 will go down as the Fabulous Year.

And when that starts happening, I will get back to talking about traversing the men’s section.

The Safety Pin Controversy

 

So I have been thinking hard about the safety pin thing this week.After the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, where a majority of voters voted for the UK to leave the European Union, an uptick in race-based and other hate crimes was followed by people wearing a safety pin somewhere visible on their clothes to show that they were allies and willing to help people facing such crimes and other harassment. Similarly, after this recent election in the US, we are seeing an uptick in hate crimes and the stepping forward of people willing to stand in the way.

I have read pieces, both for wearing the pin and against it, and this is what I have come up with. I am not going to wear one on my coat. Thirty years of on and off again martial arts training is a fine thing but what I really need is some serious training in de-escalation tactics, and I do know there are some places in Boston where I can get some. This will happen soon, but not this week. I am still struggling several times a day not to vomit when I think about my fears for our fascist future. Presumably, this physical response will go away in a few days or weeks. I really hope so. Or at least that I could just literally vomit and get it over with.

But I have put a safety pin on the lapel of each of my blazers, because I want my students to know that I am a safe space and a resource. For now this seems like the best compromise I can come up with.

I’m Just Going to Leave This Here…

Gosh, postcard, you say that as if it’s a bad thing.