By guest writer Ari Silvan
Throughout my childhood, I took sewing classes taught in the basement of a classmate’s mother. I would make headbands to wear to basketball practice and stuffed animals for my friends’ birthdays. I recall making a shirt I wore to my first (and only) school dance in the fourth grade. Listen, I won’t deny the truth. This item of clothing was indubitably conventionally “ugly” and poorly made. Nevertheless, it is an archetypal example of my sense of style growing up: sentimental, idiosyncratic, and loathed by my family.
As a girl, my parents and older sister would relentlessly make fun of me for how I dressed. I would hold on to clothes until they became raggedy and buy clothes with stains on them from the thrift store. My sister, on the other hand, was the antithesis of this. She plastered Vogue covers on her side of our shared bedroom and stood in front of the mirror perfecting her high ponytails. To my family, and especially to my sister, I never had apt clothing to wear to nice dinners out or -- to my wardrobe's biggest nightmare -- the dreaded bar and bat mitzvah. It was not necessarily a tomboy-ish flare that made my family wince. To them, it was that I dressed like I had parents who “neglected me” and in clothes that were held together haphazardly. No matter how hard my sister pushed me to borrow her dresses or cardigans, I refused. I know that girl still lives inside me to this day because I refuse to wear any shoe with a heel.
Clearly, my commitment to a self-embraced “frumpy” lifestyle did not come out of nowhere. From childhood to young adulthood, hundreds of small purchases brought me to this place, where my closet is overflowing with fabrics and half-thought-through sewing aspirations. I still find refuge in frocks my grandmother would call “ill-fitting” and worn-out sneakers that let the water seep in when it rains.
Regardless of my haters, so much of my wardrobe made me, and still makes me feel good. It reminds me of the versions of myself who loved each item and the memories associated with them. Nevertheless, the tale of my girlhood and its connection to clothes would be incomplete without thinking about how often clothes made me feel bad about myself. Frankly, it wasn’t from the teasing I received from my family. Their comments about my clothing taste were always sandwiched between loving words and support for my “creative” choices. My mother never forced me into hair bows or dissuaded me from wearing what I wanted (even if we were going out to Mr. Chows).
Writing this has reminded me that, even in my early twenties, I am still haunted by the media I consumed in my girlhood. Perhaps, I relish the feeling of being draped (or swallowed) by dilapidated clothes as a rebellion against fashion advice that puts clothes into boxes, limiting the patterns and styles we should wear by our bodies. Seared in my brain is the fact that I saw myself as having a “pear body shape” for years after taking an online quiz. Or that when I look at horizontal stripes, I am still haunted by the advice I found in a teenybopper magazine that said to avoid wearing them because it would make you look fat.
We are served popular fashion on a platter but, in my opinion, this is not “serving” anyone. I try to think about the way I dress in limited doses, divorcing decades of body dissatisfaction and indistinctive style rules. Women's bodies, all bodies, and the clothes we choose to decorate in, are puzzles the fashion industry tells us we need to decrypt. Solve by taking online quizzes, hours scrolling on social media, and spending our piggy banks on clothes that “hug us in the right places” (ew). I hope the next phase of my fashion adventure can let go of the difficult memories attached to clothing. More importantly, I hope I will always hold on to my love of all things funky and stay true to the fact that my "puzzle", engineered by consumer culture, is unwilling to be solved.
I think I finally have found a sweet spot though. Despite the fact that I still do not dress for the correct season or always have matching socks, my fashion-forward sister and I have met an equilibrium. We never could have imagined it as girls, but now my sister and I share a wardrobe. She borrows my outdated tops and I, her $80 white tee shirts. Both are important because they make us each feel like our best selves – and we can even learn a few lessons from each other.
@ariellesilvan
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