Aspirational Dressing

Published in Scriptus May 2015 issue

Why do we choose to wear clothes that don’t flatter us? This is a question that has been on my mind quite a bit recently.
Last week, I went shopping and found a dress that looked great: simple, sophisticated, sexy. I loved it. I tried it on and, looking at myself in the mirror, I imagined being that girl. You know the one: that girl you see in your favourite streetstyle blog, walking about looking cooler than the Antarctic –like she didn’t even try. It’s hard to admit, but I think a lot of us can relate. I was so focused on how effortlessly cool the dress would make me that I didn’t even notice how it really looked on me and I bought it on a whim. Back home in my real life –where I wake up late for class and definitely don’t have sexy bed hair-, I tried it on again. It looked like a sack and did nothing for me. Yes, I might be able to ‘pull it off’ if I wore heels and makeup, but aren’t the clothes supposed to show the best of you, instead of you having to try to not to look like a potato? I started noticing how often we knowingly sacrifice beauty for fashion. Just like apes, we’re social animals, and we mimic our peers to gain acceptance into the pack. We use our clothes to signify our belonging, or claim our place, in certain groups and social categories. Part of us still believes that clothes have magical powers capable of turning us into whatever we want to be (the expression ‘the habit makes the priest’ comes to mind here)… and we’re not entirely wrong: after all, people make quick judgements based on what we wear all the time, so our clothes do act as our proverbial book cover. That said, however, a dress is not very likely to turn me into Cara Delevigne, so I’m glad I kept my receipt: it’s going right back to the store. A