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Lately I've been feeling a little like it was time for another of the periodic stylistic shakeups that we go through in our lives, so I started outlining the kind of themes and roles that I aspire to in my dress, based on Russell T. Davies' essay about pretending.  Davies, you may recall, is the creator of the initially warmly welcome (but later deeply mortifying) David Tennant series of Dr. Who.  [EDIT: Actually the man from that link is a different Russell Davies. My apologies for accusing him of responsibility for Love & Monsters.]

I thought I'd say a bit about the things I pretend from day to day.  A couple of sartorial constraints inform my choice of fantasy roles: I like to keep a lot covered (if only technically); I tend to wear browns, greens, and golds; I like flat-soled, lace-up boots and long coats; and I'm quite messy and disorganized.  And I want to be desirable--not necessarily desired, but maybe like an acquired taste.

Hippie
In truth, I am a bit of a hippie--I'm pacifistic, left-leaning, and my standards of personal hygeine are relaxed.  Only the passage of years and the development of the internet prevent me from really joining any kind of social movement.  "Hippie" as a style, though, covers a lot of ground.  Let's say it's round wire-frame glasses, flowing cotton prints, Indian influences, hair, and sandals.

Witch
My first association with a witch these days is Anthy from Revolutionary Girl Utena.  Anthy is Ishtar, re-interpreted as a devil in a newer patriarchal myth structure, but to my mind a witch isn't so much a force of nature (a la S6 Willow) as a woman who leverages a bit more personal power and fearsomeness than would generally be considered acceptable to get what she wants (a la Granny Weatherwax).  I find this image of the unregenerate scary spinster to be somewhat romantic.  So: Fluevog witch boots, black dirndl skirts abbreviated to the low calf, that whole 19th-century librarian vibe.

Amy Pond
The newest Dr. Who makes the next-newest Dr. Who look shameful and silly.  One of many reasons for that is the character of Amy Pond, who is some kind of goddamn sexual tyrannosaur.  Did you see the Comic Relief special?  The contents of Amy's panties nearly caused her men to become permanently lost in time and space.  That's not even mentioning the power of Pond's crack or her Pandorica Box.  On account of being so fucking foxy, Pond basically clomps about in a man's shirt or sweater, a short skirt, colored nail polish, and Converse.  Like the 80s with flat hair. 

Flapper
The meaning of this iconography, like any of the sexualised roles I've listed, is fraught.  There's the romance of the sexual revolutionaries: Louise Brooks, Zora Neale Hurston, Josephine Baker, Tallulah Bankhead--but all these women were subjected to terrible abuse and exploitation because of their sex. The twenties was this period of incredible sexual objectification and subjectification of women, not unlike today.  Unlike today, the silhouette is boyish instead of hyperfeminine: dropped waist, longish skirts; tight hats with little to no hair visible; sculpted-heel mary-janes or t-straps.

Pre-Raphaelite
Another artistic/fashion movement which was about glorifying and exploiting sexy women in equal measure.  Long cotton-lawn gowns or tunics, tight sleeves.  Velvet if you absolutely must. 

Gunne Sax Girl
It's a sort of 1970s interpretation of the Laura Ingalls Wilder look, with lace and calico aplenty.  Prairie Underground (aside from having the perfect name) is currently producing some fine pieces in this idiom (albeit not in calico).  Occasionally Free People as well.  I can't quite afford either.

memento mori
A bunch of my fashion life has been spent orbiting goth--trying to dress as near as I can without falling in.  It's worth interrogating what it is about goth I find cool, and what it is I find embarrassing.  Goth is a look which is all about details, proportions, lines, with colour taken out of the equation entirely.  For that reason, it's a good place to start a journey into fashion.  And because of that, there's something adolescent and unsophisticated about it, as well as retro in the mortifying way that anything from your early high school years can be.  What I think of goth as being is all about D-rings, but what I want it to be is distressed Victoriana. 

Daria
Sometimes, you just need to look like you're Not Trying.  You can't do the big shop in all your finery.  That's when Daria is my fashion icon.  I hardly need to say, but the look is prescription glasses, longish skirts, sturdy low boots, and sensible outerwear. 

Kabuki
This would be David Mack's Kabuki, the complex pre-Alias tale of a cyberpunk agent's psychological journey.  I used to be a Japanophile, but now Japan and I are just good friends.  Similarly, I used to regard cyberpunk as a dystopian future, rather than the dystopian present and/or a dystopian retro 80s style.  Still, there's a goodly amount of this retro-future-present in my day-to-day style: think Black Milk. Shiny tights, sinuous cyber seams, Japanese influences.

Elf
My elf aesthetic is all about practical gear for the forest, made from the forest.  Legolas or Link.  Pixie hoodies, ragged-edge jersey skirts, pocket belts.

Snake

Snake?

SNAAAAAAKE!
Like Naked Snake and The Boss, I'm about having a camo index of 98% while still sporting military and Red Commie influences. 

Wonder Woman pin-up
This one has very little to do with the rest, but it's been relevant to my life since I moved to Scotland and am trying to live here as an American.  When I'm out and around, I want to be a cheerful, helpful, 1940s American in a smart uniform handing out Marshall Plan candy bars, not Ugly American Neoliberalist.  Coincidentally (perhaps) Wonder Woman is the MAC theme this spring.  There's an absolute wealth of 1940s retro style about, you're probably familiar enough with it.

I feel like I'm honing in on what I like and why, as a result of this exercise. There's a militaristic/anti-militaristic thread, a sort of natural or environmental theme, and the idea of death and decay.  Also anything with a nipped waist.

A RACE PUN

Is fashion the most racist industry operating today, you guys?  It's hard to think of another one where racism is so vertically-integrated, from globalist-racist textile manufacture to elitist-racist high fashion, to aesthetic-racist beauty standards in magazines. 

All these want talking about in a serious way, but high fashion is a particularly interesting case because it has a special quality, which I'll term "hipster racism".  Hipster racism is that style of racism which stems from the belief that through personal sophistication and irony you have transcended racism, and that henceforth no interpretation of your actions as racist can be valid.  This posture need not be informed by any kind of self-reflection or critical knowledge, just a belief that you can't do wrong if you mean well (or mean nothing).  The hipster racist knows that he is not a racist in his heart, because he is nothing in his heart, a valueless, empty point from which explorations can be launched.  Thus he frees himself to use racist language or imagery in the name of freaking out the squares. 

Avant-garde fashion is, by definition, obsessed with being shocking and unfamiliar, in exploring the heterotopia.  But in an information-dense environment, getting your shock from something that's new is very difficult, and so fashion often goes instead to the well of the socially-unacceptable.  So we get rotating collections of anthropological curiosities, sexual outrages, political bogeymen, obscene wealth inequity, the homeless, addict chic, grotesques. The atrocity is aestheticized and monetized.  And if you got upset, you had fallen for the hipster's trap: Gotcha!  You were holding something sacred, weren't you!  Thinking something was important, when in fact everything is arbitrary and nihilistic!  LAME.

All this is why I'm a just a little bit surprised that Dior shitcanned Galliano, rather than commissioning him to create a fall collection inspired by the legacy of Hugo Boss.

It is not necessary that everyone like everyone else

Occasionally I'm gripped with anxiety--would Nabokov have liked me?  Would he approve of how I spend my time? 

Then I think on the man a bit and relax.  No, he would not have liked me.  My thighs are huge. 

It's Just Noise

One thing that makes my eyes bulge in their sockets--though please bear in mind I did not go to school in the hippest part of the US, but rather the hippiest--is seeing college-age kids, who were at the time I attended college about four years younger than me, all wearing t-shirts proclaiming their love of musical artists of the 60s and 70s who are for the most part dead. 

I feel like I understand why a Boulder resident would choose strategically to wear a Bob Marley or Grateful Dead shirt.  I suppose Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin have their own rebellious, binge-drinky appeal, and professing reverence for Jimi Hendrix would certainly help justify one's decision to irritate other Native Americans with a hipster headdress.  It is a bit more opaque to me why someone would want to broadcast their love of the Beatles or the Rolling Stones (who no longer benefit from the cachet of not being the Beatles, as no one seems to remember that they once had a Blur/Oasis-style rivalry [though of course it is deeply insulting to the Rolling Stones to allow them to be compared even momentarily to Oasis]).  It strikes me as sort of like wearing a shirt announcing your enjoyment of inhaling air and exhaling somewhat more carbonated air; it's not like it's avoidable.  I'm sure even the Black Sabbath and Sex Pistols kids (who, again, may feel free to choose a band whose collective ages total under two centuries) love Helter Skelter or Happiness Is A Warm Gun or Savoy Truffle or something. 

Dead artists and the canonized living are safe to like because their meanings have become fixed; they'll never again produce anything which will be subject to critical scrutiny.  And god knows there's a broad enough range that could be expressed by a Beatles shirt to be the stiking-up point of a conversation with a stranger: so which is your favorite Beatle?  What was their best album?  What's your favorite of their songs featuring beating up women?  Would you like to experiment with some drugs with me, in case it makes us creative? 

But this is the music of our parents and grandparents.  They weren't burning up the dance floors with ragtime and the Charleston in the sixties, they were out seeing contemporary bands and screenprinting their names on really thin cotton t-shirts and wondering when the sexual revolution would reach them.  I wish keenly for a popular culture not controlled by Baby Boomers and their sensibilities, but more and more I think that we are not built for populism the way they were, and are doomed to narrowcast all the deeper parts of ourselves while our video of a cat falling off a chair gets seventy million views.