I was 17 years old. My friends and I were going out to a party, and we had spent a lot of time crafting the perfect outfits for our adventure. It was the 90s, and we’d visited Hot Topic earlier that day. Someone (not me) may have been wearing a pair of vinyl pants.
Finally ready, we came down the stairs to show my mom, with pride, what we had done. I realized even before she spoke that, somewhere, somehow, I’d made a grievous error. Her eyebrows nearly left her face.
“Why are you wearing that?”
Please now picture that scene in Clueless, where Cher’s father complains about her tiny white date dress. I gave my mother a puzzled pout. It was cute… wasn’t it? Unlike Cher, I didn’t have Calvin Klein’s good name, or Cher’s sense of style, to defend me. I changed into something else.
It’s possible my mother’s question was tattooed on my brain that night because now every time I look at people’s clothes I wonder: why are you wearing that?
Turns out there are many reasons why. Many good reasons, and bad reasons, and odd reasons, and delightful reasons. These reasons range from ridiculously shallow to depths that border on mythological. We dress because of pop culture, sentiment, ceremony, nostalgia. We dress to honor a person or a history that is dear to us. We dress for convenience, practicality. We dress so that we will be noticed. We dress so that we will not be noticed.
This is happening all over the world. Literally everywhere. And I find that fascinating. Every nation, every religion, every family or social group, and ultimately every individual human, has its own spoken or unspoken dress code. In this column, I hope to uncover the stories we are telling through what we wear.
In a recent interview on The Who What Wear Podcast, fashion designer Rachel Scott connected how we dress with how we speak. “I’ve always been obsessed with language, and I think that’s really how I even view fashion, really,” she said. “The clothes that we wear are like our vocabulary.”
When you choose to put on a vintage t-shirt or a suit or a pair of Crocs, what are you saying? Are you intentionally saying something? Unintentionally? What is it? Most of us overthink, worrying about how others will perceive us, and our sense of style dissolves into blandness. It’s like agreeing with everyone you meet just to get along with them. Like word choices, fashion choices are active, passive, shy, bold, rebellious, or codependent.
Maybe my mom’s question will haunt you now, like it does me (sorry). But really… Why are you wearing that?
The Fashion Plate
For me, the point is that I don’t have to think much. I just kinda have a uniform that just works for me. It consists of this hat, which was a graduation present from an aunt. When my father passed away she took on a mentoring role, and when I graduated with my PhD in Math she gave me this hat. Before that I was never a hat person and now I wear it almost every day. This dress shirt. And I also have a coat which was also a gift from an aunt, on a different side. And these dress pants that I can also climb in or dance in. And that’s about it. That’s my daily thing. I’ve been told that I have “the Oppenheimer look” and I don’t know how I feel about that.
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