>In 1985 I insisted my mother buy me copious folds of mauve suede at $50 a yard. I had a vision. With no pattern, assistance or sewing skills whatsoever, I shoddily constructed a mauve fringe skirt to match a mauve suede vest that I already owned and adored. The fringe was long: 10-12 inches a strip, sewn over a white tube skirt of my own design. The ensemble was topped off with an unfortunate, uncooperative perm (showcasing hours of bathroom hairdryer Sun-In applications) and pale pink plastic round thick lens-ed glasses, similar to what all the Williamsburg gals are wearing these days. If I am approaching the peak of my levels of attractiveness as a grown woman, this get-up was the opposite end of the spectrum. I thought I looked spectacular. In reality I looked like Punky Brewster, regurgitated by her pink ‘my little pony’ and passed through a shredder.
Creativity was not prized either in my John Hughes suburb or my city of Chicago uniformed Catholic school. When you’re a kid it takes a while to learn to build those walls protecting yourself from the slings and arrows of popular and cruel pre-pubescent opinion. Needless to say, I have countless stories of tragic, unappreciated creative efforts. I will not bore you with more patheric reminiscing; I draw attention to this to point out—it was IN me. I didn’t choose it. I didn’t WANT to have quixotic images of outrageous styles unite with my lack of seamstress abilities and produce fashion debaucles throughout adolescence that would cement my social designation as an untouchable. That’s just the way I was made.
I bring this up to discuss because clearly I still so very much love fashion. And it’s not so much fashion as style. Fashion (particularly in New York) can be seen as elitist nonsense. Style can be born on a budget. I have both shoes that cost more than my monthly mortgage, and a Salvation Army leopard print coat that I hung on to for 15 years, THRILLED that I could pull it out again this winter because it was again (finally) a la mode. If I have a moment of hesitancy towards the long-awaited spring weather, it is due to the fact that I may need to retire said leopard coat for another decade and a half.
I used to feel guilty about this. As though I was spiritually subpar because I have an ardor for eyeliner and so love to express myself creatively through clothing. Monks wore ugly brown tunics. Nuns even uglier black ones. Being spiritual meant being bland, fitting in, melting in to the background.
When I went to India (and please forgive me bringing it up so often, because I see it does come up quite a bit here—that’s the apparent dividing line before old and new me, so to speak) my girlfriend and I were going to an ashram for two weeks where we had to wear their robes. I literally brought the clothes on my back and a yoga mat. I didn’t even bring my iPod. After she departed and I decided to ride out my 6-month visa and head South, I had iPod and laptop and a pair of Diesels Fed Exed and went about acquiring a wardrobe.
At every step, I tried to do as little as possible, blend in, let go, keep it simple. The more I let go, the more the most unique expression of myself came forth. I WANTED to be boring, and life wouldn’t let me. Toward the end of my trip someone called me the fashion queen of Mysore. This was not intentional (although I’m not going to lie I enjoyed the compliment, I mean please, I AM a woman after all.) In a community of quiet yogis, I was bright, loud and stylin’. And for perhaps the first time in my life I felt ABSOLUTELY at ease with that—with my Self. I was not making myself smaller to make other people more comfortable.
So here is what interests me. I totally get the value of asceticism and understand and welcome it as a practice. I don’t think I’d have been able to get comfortable with the extent of my fabulousness without stripping away all of the b.s. Paring everything down to the minimum, whether that’s a robe, a straw mat, a bowl of rice, a day of silence, cuts down the noise and shows one what’s real and what is extraneous nonsense. Sadhus who wander in India with barely a loincloth are in an exercise of a connection that is so beautifully internal or other-wordly, garments are not necessary for their path. (Loincloth is not my best look… Stuart Weitzman? : sacrosanct.)
I have found that many people take this asceticism to heart and body. At first in the yoga world I felt out of place if I wanted to wear make up, or God forbid, blow-dry my hair. (And I didn’t blow dry my hair for six months—you might not call that a holy practice but believe you me, it taught me a couple of things.) I really wanted to come out of India’s other end being a braless contemplative, in braids and Birkenstocks… that didn’t happen.
So, here’s the conundrum. Other than the whole Jesus born in a manger thing (and they still brought him gold, people, let’s not forget that) the humanized aspects of God are doused with bling in every major religion. The high priests, Gurus and popes are elaborately adorned. Or if the leaders don’t choose to subscribe to lavish fashion, fantastically designed temples of spectacular proportions are erected the world over in the name of devotion.
The Hindu religion is the most proficient in their zeal for all things vivid and holy. The cacophony of colors adorning any one of the Hindu Gods during worship contrast Crayola’s best efforts as unadventurous. Ornate pujas with their fire, incense, flowers and celebrations of creative progresses make Lady Gaga performances look banal.
The consensus is clear: Yay God—all things fabulous for you.
Yet are we not God? Are we not each aspects of the divine, swimming in a sea of oneness, enmeshed in the quantum fabric of the secret source of everything, whether we know it, whether we want to be or not?
And then is fashion, when chosen not for a label or to fit in, nothing but an expression of the highest essence of your self? A way to adorn this body that was leant to us and say, I appreciate you, you are beautiful, and what’s more, I am going to share your gorgeousness with the world, because you are FIERCE, Miss Thang. And you know why? Because you were put here TO be—you are an offspring of the Universe and you are supposed to shine in whatever bedazzled, fakakta way pleases you.
And if so… yay ME. Yay YOU. Yay to my purple toenails and the sideways bun I sport while writing this lounging on my chaise. Yay to your Brioni tie that stuns with its richly colored and luxuriously texturized weave. Yay to the woman for whom organic hemp allows a physical connection to the earth with its raw naturalness embracing her skin. Yay to the man who has four pairs of tapered JCrew chinos because he likes the way his ass looks in them.
So let’s go be comfy, be daring, be provocative and conservative, be naked. If we want, we can be all at once—just know that none of those things are you. We can play dress up as long as we like, with the knowing that there is something more beautiful than anything we could ever wear, and that divine sparkle is what makes the outfit.
