tied up

as a child, as i would think is the case for most children, my mother would choose what i wore. in the process of growing up, one has to start learning to do that for oneself, as is the case with so many other things one has to figure out when disentangling one's life from their parents'. the beginning of that process is what we call puberty, which is commonly understood to be a conflictual time. unsurprisingly, the topic of clothing is a common flashpoint for these conflicts. the world is confusing when you have to navigate it by yourself and you start understanding that your almighty guardian is not as powerful as you had thought them to be and it is difficult for them to accept that you are starting to gain your independence.

i think i was somewhat of a late-bloomer, so i only really started caring about my style at 15 years old. and, obviously, i got into this because i had a crush and i wanted them to think i'm cool. maybe i was looking for someone else to fill the hole i started to notice, some other life to entangle mine with now that my parents had so obviously become the wrong people for that. nowadays, i don't think that the outfits i was wearing back then were particularly cool (i would also presume this is a common experience), but when i think about it, i'm realising that the seeds of some of the ways in which i dress today could already be seen back then.

i wouldn't have understood it as such at the time, but then as now i liked mixing different levels of formality in my clothing. i made it somewhat of my thing to be wearing button-up shirts almost every day in high school, which was not a common thing for kids my age to be doing. but i would like them best if they were weird or quirky in some way. one of my favorite shirts had lots of small colorful airplanes on it and another one was covered in a selection of animals i would associate with safaris. i think what drew me to this style was that i was dealing with an inner conflict around trying to fit in and being legible to others, while still being visibly different in a way.

after i graduated high school and went to university, i spent a few years trying much harder to dress like i was belonging to a certain subculture. i was listening to a lot of rap, so i was trying to wear the streetwear that was common in the late 2010s. obviously, i didn't want to be wearing the brands that everyone else was wearing, but i still kind of wanted to look like them in some ways. i had a lot of friends that were skating, which i also tried and dressed accordingly, but i think at some point i started to feel like i was just badly imitating something that everyone could see wasn't really me. i realised i was never actually a part of these subcultures (and i'm not sure if it was even possible to be part of them in any real sense at the time), so i kept the bits of it that i liked, but distanced myself from the things that didn't fit me anymore. i had understood that i liked wider cuts, but i didn't like wearing branded things anymore just to signal my in-group knowledge of what is cool. i think that is why i've struggled buying shoes since then, because the brand had been my only heuristic.

and that's when i think i found back to these earlier roots. i got back into wearing more dressy things. for years now, basically the only pants i've been wearing are dress pants. i bought an ill-fitting sports coat and a about a year ago i started wearing neckties. by now, i've acquired a small collection of them that i rotate through. i think i wear a tie at least three or four days a week. i remember, that a few weeks ago i told someone that i've kind of made it my thing to be wearing ties, something that is still uncommon in my circles. i'm now seeing the similarity to what the button-up shirts meant to me in my teenage years.

i have some ideas what might be drawing me to this. one of the obvious ones is that i saw my dad going to work in a suit every day. when i was eight years old, i wished for my own suit as a birthday present so i could be like him. as i was saying in the introduction, i think a lot about developing your personal style is about differentiating from your parents, but to me part of that has always been subverting the expectations that they would put on me and that society is putting on them. wearing an ill-fitting sports coat is conforming to those expectations in some way while still "rebelling", malicious compliance if you will. i also think that there is something that draws me to the contrasts that are contained in these outfits. there are other contrasts that i've discovered i like in my outfits. i like wearing a skirt with a dress-shirt and a tie embodying the different gendered expectations on style. sometimes it can be as simple as a contrast in the color of the clothes.

i know none of these things are unique to me. i see these ideas in what other people around me wear all the time. i've been directly inspired to start wearing ties by my transmasc queer friends who have been doing really cool shit with them in their outfits way before i started to wear them around my neck. a lot of the origins of the streetwear that i was trying to imitate have similar ideas of subversion contained within them. i just realised i wanted to explicate these ideas to myself, because i'm starting to get to a point where i feel like i need some change in my wardrobe. i feel that the outfits i'm wearing are starting to get quite repetitive and i want to have some new inspiration to move to different places and i want to make that move intentionally. since coming back to my home country last year, i've lost access to the vast amount of cheap thrift stores in my neighborhood that were maintaining my wardrobe through the previous years and something about shopping clothes online annoys me these days.

i like where i'm at, but i see there's more places to go. i don't have any concrete ideas on what that's going to look like, but i belive it makes sense to take stock of the current state of things to see which directions might be open to me. maybe i should get back into wilder colours or i would like to try and find some more asymmetrical pieces. another idea that i have is to become more familiar with different types of fabric and how their structure influences my look. i want to start wearing more handbags and different types of hats. there's so much to try i'm realising as i type this and it makes me excited. let's see where it takes me.