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

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.

I’m Just Going to Leave This Here…

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

History of Hair, Yours, Mine, Hers, His, Theirs

A Google search of “history of my hair” just now turned up 68,800,000 results. This does not surprise me. Just as our geopolitical history is filled with battles, innovations, opportunities, colonizations, festivals and cooptations, so is the history of our hair. Think about it. When you are a kid, your parents pretty much decide what your haircut will look like, and it often ends up being a smaller version of theirs. Maybe around the time you are approaching your teenage years, you start to get a say in the matter and for some of us who grew up with our mothers cutting our hair, this will be the first time your parents paid for someone else to do the job.

Puberty is also when the changes to the rest of your body start to affect your hair too, usually making things harder, because who ever heard of puberty making ANYTHING easier? The hormone shifts, the social shifts, all of that make it even harder to figure out the individual shifts that might be happening in your identity: what do I want more, to stand out or to belong?

Eventually, in the business world, you adapt to a balance between identity and belonging, to set yourself apart a little while also maintaining a professional stance. And always assuming that your physical hair itself isn’t causing problems (not always a fair assumption, as my African American women friends will be the first to point out), sticking to that balance can—slowly or quickly—lead to utter boredom.

These things are compounded when your identity undergoes more shifts. People get married and need to do something excessively fancy with their hair for the wedding. They get new jobs where the professional standard is different. They figure out they are queerer than they thought, and want to express that. They go through a midlife crisis. They have a baby—and we all know how babies grab at long hair. A lot of things can trigger a desire to change what we look like. The problem is, when the world is full of options, how do you choose the change you want?

Aesthetics, Culture, Choices

I understand that aesthetics are culturally embedded. In times of famine, fat is beautiful; in times of plenty, thin is beautiful. In an agricultural economy, dark skin means you are an outdoor worker, and thus lower class. In an office work economy, a tan means you have more leisure time outdoors, and thus are higher class.

I think of this now because suddenly I find myself knowing three different (dark-haired) women who don’t shave. Refusing to shave is a classic second-wave feminist act of defiance against our society’s straight male expectations for how women dress (and be) to attract the men’s attention, affection and presumably babies. By not shaving a women is declaring herself completely outside of and uninterested in that whole agenda.

Mentally, I can understand why some would want to make such a statement, but aesthetically I find it distasteful, especially as more fur is more visible. But here’s the thing. I think an awful lot of men should shave too. The problem isn’t that we have a standard of hairlessness so much as that it is a double standard. Frankly, I think that a far larger swath of our male population should not only shave far larger tracts of themselves than they currently do. They should buy mini- rider mowers and hire little gerbils wearing little Carhartt caps to do the landscaping for them.

Some jobs you can do yourself. But for big jobs, go with the professionals.

 

Lesbian Dodgeball #41

So a friend asked me to write about last night’s lesbian dodgeball game. There weren’t as many people there as usual, 12 rather than 18 or 24, so we were all playing all the time, up until close to the end when a regular showed up 1) late and 2) with a change of music to allow us to stop playing the game to the rather insipid and repetitive music the radio stations were playing that night. Real disco and old 70s ballads redone with a mean backbeat make for a Much Improved Dodgeball Score. Most Valuable Player of the Week: Sarah.

I have been trying to figure out a good metaphor for this strange game. It’s not like basketball or hockey or even soccer, especially the way we play it. So here is what I came up with.

 

Jaguars going for the kill.

Monkeys leaping out of three balls’ trajectories at once.

Sweaty women dancing to disco music.

 

The woman who gathers all of the six red balls and looks

Like a very aggressive tomato salad.

The women backing warily away, hoping not to get hit

When the tomato salad explodes in their direction.

The athlete. The wise-ass. The mom.

 

The crash as the ball hits the padded wall.

The louder crash as the ball hits the window.

The strength of the window, not breaking.

 

 

(Image from Google Images.)

An Offering

So I have spent much of this afternoon reading people’s blogs about gender fluidity and figuring out that mess, stupid bathroom laws, parents who say that they love their children but refuse to go to their gay wedding because Christ doesn’t like gays, blah blah blah. And another blogger talking about being a very feminine woman and how to be a woman of action and a formidable women, and it all just sounds to me like being a person, although possibly a person in high heels?

Why are we all struggling so much to simply be who we are? (Um, probably patriarchy?)

Why do other people seem to want to force the whole world into these terribly narrow boxes with prescribed ways of being in the world? (Well, patriarchy…)

And why can’t I just give everybody who is suffering on the interwebs today a really big HUG? (Oh, honey, I can’t help you with that one.)

Muscles & Mascara Monday: Truthful Statements

“Style is fundamentally a truthful statement… There are layers and layers of truth; and style, whether in dress or life, art or literature, is involved in their discovery.” –Freya Stark

I have been thinking about makeup lately. I used to think that makeup was something women put a huge amount of time and money into to get the attention of men, who often don’t even bother to shave. O, patriarchy, why you so mean?

I am lucky enough to have clear skin and dark blue eyes so I always figured that if a guy needs me to “put on my face” simply to notice me, then he’s not a person I really feel like being noticed by. I still feel that the Manhattan style of makeup is over the top, but New York has always struck me as being a hard-edged city and maybe it’s just a form of protective coloration, layers of powder rather than a sword and buckler.

Boston, as an academic city (we’ve got thirty colleges just within a few miles of the city center) tends toward the mildly androgynous. We probably have more comfortable women’s shoes in just a five-mile radius than they have in Manhattan and Los Angeles combined. And women who work/teach at these colleges are not an exception, whether they are full-time, part-time or graduate students (and the undergrads in baggy sweatpants). This always worked for me. As long as I looked “professional” and teacher-like, I figured that nobody would care if I didn’t take the time to put on makeup before running out the door guzzling my coffee and trying to remember my lesson plan. I get good student evaluations every semester. The rest is meaningless.

But in January, I started going to the monthly lesbian happy hour, which is a fascinating sociological activity. Where else are you going to find a sample of about eighty women with such a wide variety of clothing styles in the same bad bar lighting? More than half of our sample look like any other women you might see on the train every day. But there are a few types who stand out.

Fashionista/International Femme: Makeup, long hair, dress, heels. An air of being exactly where she needs to be. Even if I wore the exact same thing, if I was standing next to her, no one would notice my existence. I have had friends like this.

Grad Student Femme: Shortish wash-and-wear hair. Casual clothing, such as skinny leg jeans. Comfortable shoes, minimal makeup. The glow of youth.

College Dean-ish: An excellent haircut, whatever the length. Makeup, but never too much. Classic jewelry. Professional clothes, more femme than not. Classic but comfortable shoes, probably expensive. An air of quiet authority.

Grad Student Butch: Short hair with a little product for style. No makeup. Men’s style clothes but not necessarily menswear. Comfortable shoes, maybe spiffy. The glow of youth.

Flannel Butch: Plaid flannel shirt, dark wash jeans, expensive sneakers. Most of the jewelry is in one ear. One or more tattoos. A. The glow of youth AND/OR B. An air of quiet authority AND/OR C. Laidback attitude.

Bowtie Butch: Short hair. No makeup. Menswear, including either necktie or bowtie. Men’s style shoes. Laidback attitude.

Perhaps if I saw the same people in the bright light of day, the differences might not be apparent. But in the dim light of a bar, the women who don’t wear makeup, especially if they are over 40, look kind of grey and washed out.

So I’ve made a couple of visits to Sephora, one to get help in picking a shade of lipstick and one to get a 15-minute primer on how to apply eye shadow the right way and get help picking good colors. The young women (and one or two men) who work there are all made up to within an inch of their lives. But when they ask me what style I am going for, and I say, “Sorta like Ellen,” and they say, “Oh! You mean natural!” they are gung ho in helping me achieve a look that is as little like theirs as possible.

My shift in thinking about all this is primarily a shift in thinking from more outward–what do other people see when they look at me–to more inward–can I see my best self when I look in the mirror, blue eyes, Polish cheekbones and all.

It also helps that two of the faces of makeup companies in recent memory have been Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and Ellen Degeneres (Ellen the Homophobia Slayer), both of whom have fresh light looks that don’t scream, “Look at me! I’m wearing makeup! Ask me how!” Which is funny, actually, considering that is exactly what they’re getting paid to do… Ah, marketing, why you so sneaky?

Styling Saturday: The Geometric Sock of Improvement

At their best, men’s clothes have advantages over women’s—admittedly with grave exceptions. To my mind, good men’s clothes are structured rather than droopy. (The unfortunate trend among young men lately of wearing sweatpants with ankle cuffs is probably caused by a huge bribe to fashion designers from the Center for Population Control. Even my eighty-year-old father knows better than to wear pants like that.)

Another thing I like is that the colors are generally less saturated and more muted (think of a standard box of eight Crayola crayons. Add pale grey to each color). Such shades are kinder for my Celtic/Polish complexion and I find them much more restful most of the time.

The last advantage is the patterns, which are often calmer. If there are flowers, they are either on tropical shirts and the particular type of flower is recognizable, or the flowers are tiny, almost like irregular polka dots from a distance. None of this Women’s Section Let’s add flowers! And paisleys! To the same shirt! And matching skirt/jacket/pants! And you are much more likely to see geometric patterns as well.

But up until recently, it would never have occurred to me to attempt to shop in the men’s section (although in high school I bought my sneakers and Oxford bucks in the boy’s section; the sizes were better). But I recently bought some shirts in three different stores in the men’s section, to replace a bunch of shirts that I got rid of a while back because they either were too small or had been worn to rags.

And all these advantages in clothes even pertain to socks, which is good because the vast majority of my socks are fairly boring. And if I am going to be playing dodgeball once a month in my socks from now on, I am totally going to require New & Improved Sockage.