Sometimes I am left to wonder whether I might not secretly be a closet fashionista, based mostly on how long it takes me to pick outfits for important events and while packing. Well, I say outfits. Mostly I mean t-shirts, since that’s really the only part of my default outfit that changes.
I don’t think this is the case. I think if I secretly cared about fashion, I would be able to read a magazine about the subject without my eyes glazing over, and would put more stock into outfits and appearance instead of just one piece. I also reckon I would feel more compelled to care for my hair and skin beyond the bare minimum of hygiene.
More to the point, I think I would have more of a sense of style. To be fair, I have a decent enough idea of what clothes I personally think look good on others, and I have acquired, through years of art classes and amateur illustration, a sense of composition that can be pressed into service to call together an outfit which I enjoy, but I lack the sort of intuitive sense of capital-F Fashion that naturally occurs to me for things like physics, medicine, or language.
I can mimic and iterate on styles I have seen, and I can cobble together styles through experimentation, but I cannot come up with a design or outfit that is, or better yet will be, trendy any more than I can predict tomorrow’s weather in a random city without consulting meteorological data.
All of this puts me squarely in the middle of the pack, particularly among my male peers, and none of this is news to me. I continue not to care what is hip and happening any further than the broad trends of the decade, which I heed only insofar as they permit me to carry on without confusing passers by. But if I do not care about fashion or style, why do I care about which t-shirts I bring on vacation? Why does the debate between iron man and Loki t-shirts keep me awake while I am trying to sleep the night before my departure?
The reason, I think, is that while I really don’t care very much about fashion itself, I do care somewhat about impressions. I care a great deal about communication. I value my ability to communicate above most else, and I endeavor to make what I am able to communicate count.
Whether fashion is closer to a direct form of communication, like hand gestures or literature, or the kind of cyclical competitive art that is mostly contained to others who practice it, fashion choices can and do serve to communicate. I studied this while in art class. Clothing is one of the best and most enduring examples of color psychology at work. Despite varying by culture and region, everyone knows that a red cocktail dress communicates a very different message than a conservative black dress.
It seems only natural, then, that I incorporate this means into my message. There are just two problems. First, as previously mentioned, I lack the intuitive grasp of fashion that I would require to communicate with the same level of subtlety and finesse with which I endeavor to wield language. To me, perhaps the only fear greater than not being able to communicate is to have my message be misinterpreted against me; to come across as hostile when I mean to be peaceful, or helpless when I seek to project strength. So I keep my arsenal limited- I have fairly normal standards for trousers, footwear, jackets, and so forth, and concentrate on the one or two elements that I am well versed in- t-shirts with strong, simple color schemes and intuitable messages.
Second, and this is where my indecision starts to truly become self-defeating: frequently, I do not know what my message will be. For all my studying of colors and shades, for all my collections of t-shirts with subtle variations on common themes, for all of my trying, I remain unable to predict the future. I can’t predict how I will be feeling, and whether or not I will feel sociable (brighter colors with bold features) or more introverted (muted colors and simpler designs). I can’t know whom I might meet, and what impression I shall want to leave them with.
So this, like so many of my problems, comes back to trying to divine the future. If I meet person C, and become engrossed in subject Y, is it more likely that I shall take position Δ (delta) and need to persuade them by using shirt א (aleph), or the opposite?
The answer, of course, is that I don’t know. I can’t know. I am asked to choose a vocabulary without even knowing with whom I will be speaking, much less what I shall want to say. It’s no wonder this makes me anxious.
