All Dressed Up

Ubiquitous Starbucks coffee cup in hand, I stood staring at row after row, aisle after aisle of shoes, wondering which ones defined me. Which one would I buy so that another facet of my personality would be revealed to the world? Which shoe would tell everyone I met that I am elegant, but fun, sophisticated but still young? Something classic, but unique. I was looking for black heels for work and a slip on shoe for everyday wear. Who knew there were so many choices when it came to black heels, but so many of them inappropriate for work? All I wanted was a black heel with a certain amount of height, but not too much. I do need to be able to walk, and I don't need to pole dance. One shoe was patent leather, yuck. One had too pointy a toe, making my feet look like long, black weapons. Another was too rounded. Finally I found the perfect pair-- Micheal Michael Kors, the Charlize pump. Elegant and simple. But they didn't have my size. And it was $89.95, more than I had decided I wanted to pay. (It would have used up all my babysitting money!) So I didn't get it.

Then it was on to finding everyday shoes, this task proved to be harder than the black heels. Even more than what heels defined me for work was the conundrum of what casual shoes defined me the best. And whether they would stand up to repeated use. I really wanted a pair of white loafers. Not off white but white. My mom has a pair that are surprisingly cool. I feel like a hip mod when I wear them, or a preppy yachter. But there were no women's loafers to be found, much less white ones. There were some great men's loafers, but again none in my size. So I ended up without shoes.

For years I have been using clothing, music, books and my other tastes to define me. Ever since I began school at Lake Anne in the middle of the sixth grade and insisted on a perm, (looking back, a very bad idea, I'm not cut out for curls) and wore a sweater over my very cool-at-the-time black stirrups. I began a life long quest to define who I was, and how people thought of me based on my clothing. For a long time I didn't want to be defined exclusively through my clothing, and so wore men's trousers and a variety of shirts and sweaters, all trying to achieve a certain rebellion against fashion by devising my own version of the beat look. Obviously what was more important than my clothes was what I read and thought and did. This in itself was a form of dictating how people thought of me in terms of what I wore, as in "Don't relegate me to that group of girls--I'm independent of that, can't you tell by my thrift shop digs?' And of course I still believe that, but I also recognize that the way we look is important to how people percieve us, as unfair as it might seem, it's true. And we can use that to define ourselves, and better understand who we are. So even though I still dress to stand out from the normal suburban crowd at the mall I try to do it in a way that expresses who I am, and what I like.

But as we grow older who we are and what we like, and who we have to become, in the workplace, with friends, everywhere else we might go in life, grows more complicated. For instance, right now I am an employee in a corporation. I have spent years rebelling against the idea of 'business clothes' and 'business casual' because even though the models look so pretty in their Banana Republic clothes it didn't feel comfortable to me. I didn't want to be beholden to a code that dictated what I could and couldn't wear. As long as I thought it was appropriate and clean and neat then who else cared? It felt like a violation of my First Ammendment. Now that I do have a 'real job' I try to balance my love for costume jewlry and unusual clothes with a sense of business casual that my boss can understand. I can't dress in what I feel to be the typical boring work clothes, I wouldn't feel right. But neither would I wear torn jeans, so what is so wrong with wearing what I want?

Women are so often told what we can and can't wear in this world, and we soak it up, we're always so certain that we must be doing something wrong, our hair out of style, the wrong dress, why else wouldn't we have the life we're shown in the advertisments? We let these depictions of life define our roles for us, telling us we should be sexy and also virginal, and smart and also a great mother and stylish and put together, but also free to be ourselves that it's no wonder some people drop out of the race altogether, or some like Britney Spears, go insane.

I can only foresee this continuing, my struggle to define myself as I change throughout life. Who will I become when I get married? How will I dress when I have kids, to show I am cool but still a good mom, but also independent of the stereotypical soccer mom? And where are my role models for aging elegantly? We seem to only have a few versions of old women that we allow slip through the mainstream. Right now it's great to be young and feel free enough to chop my hair into bangs and a short bob like I did on Friday, or wear ridiculously high wedges with my silk trousers. I don't want that to change, but things inevitably do. Growing up allows us to dress in a way we couldn't when we were younger, either because of our parents' censure, our lack of money to afford the clothes we wanted, or our own inhibitions about our bodies. But just when we can wear whatever we want we also start to censure ourselves, either because of work, or the roles we play that seem to dictate a dress code. I don't want to ever forget, as I define who I am as a woman today, and navigate this world as an adult, the sense of freedom and self that my clothes allow me.