Clothes for My Imaginary Lives

Tyanne's comment yesterday about my wearing what I embellish made me think about this. I mean, I've already been thinking about it a lot, but it made me think about writing about it.  I'm still going through the clothes I own, trying to weed out the stuff I have but don't wear, even the stuff on which I spent many, many, way-way-way-too-many hours stitching and/or beading. This is, as you might imagine, really tough. It's hard to get rid of things I thought I liked well enough to embellish. And it's not that they didn't turn out the way I wanted them to (although I never really have a concrete plan; I can't "see" the finished project ahead of time, so it's really like an adventure through unknown territory, and I'm always surprised to some degree or another) or that they were a disappointment. Oh, sure--sometimes that happens. But not very often. What happens way too often is that I finish the garment, like it, try it on, put it in the closet, and then never wear it. It's because I made it for one of My Imaginary Lives.

We've talked about this before, haven't we? About how we have these lives that exist somewhere in the backs of our brains, lives in which we're required to wear clothes we don't normally wear and have matching sets of dishes and rooms set aside for entertaining, never mind that none of those situations ever really come to pass. I've overcome most of that over the years, but I'm still, in that back corner of my head, holding on to some ideas about places or events that are going to require special clothes.

I can hear Thoreau's admonition here, can't you? Substitute "special" for "new," and he's got it exactly right.

So I've been gradually, gradually weeding out. It's taking a long time. For one thing, I've discovered Trish at BJ's Consignment, so I've been bringing *in* more than I've been taking *out,* but that's getting better. A lot of the shopping I did there was, I think, therapy for The Long, Hot Summer of Dis-Ease. Proof? I've begun re-consigning some of the stuff I brought home. And, oh, this is a marvelous thing, indeed. I can get rid of stuff AND get paid for it. Not as much as I spent for it in the first place, of course. But still. I still donate other stuff to Goodwill--Trish doesn't take just anything, and there are some things that are just not going on the racks in her shop. To wit: I was there Monday when a woman brought her a blue fox coat, worn once. She's got quite a selection of fur coats brought in by Midland women, discouraged, I suppose, by the heat. The truth? I imagine the economy here has enabled them to go to Dallas and buy brand-new furs.

But then there are still other garments, things I've never worn but love. Or things that I've worn once and realized, while it was on my body, that it was for one of those other lives. I think I've almost conquered the belief that someday I'm going to be out of work and have to go to the bank and get a job there. I've never had a job at a bank, and I have no financial skills to speak of, other than not being in debt, which doesn't count for much since I'm also not rich, which is the case for a large percentage of my fellow Midlanders. I do have a few things in the storage building, though, that I hang onto just in case I have to get a job somewhere where I'll be forced to look normal. And a few things I could wear if I wanted to accept an invitation to an evening wedding or some sort of With-a-Dress-Code Concert or something.

But I'm working on that. As we all saw from The EGE's 40th reunion this summer, when I assumed there was Something I Was Supposed to Wear, I discovered that non, there is no dress code any more. Not for normal people. For the Super Rich, oh, sure. For, you know, like meeting The Queen and dancing at The White House and stuff like that, I'm sure there are rules regarding hem length and gloves and jewels and whether or not you can wear your tiara if it has more bling on it than does that of The Queen Mother. I don't expect to go to any of those places or events, and my knees are only one part of me that's opposed to the concept of The Curtsy.

Still, though, I find myself putting on clothes and wondering what's wrong with them and what, exactly, I was thinking when I bought/altered/embellished them. Take this, for instance.

Wait, wait, wait. First let's look at Alex and how she's dressed now:

This is a child's t-shirt from the thrift

 over one of my own bras, with a pair of my old tights.

This is a really useful foundation, and although it bugs me that she's wearing brown shoes with black, I deal with it because I love those shoes--they're almost exactly like some I had in high school--but never wear them. I was going to make something out of them to put on my desk--you know, for holding pencils or something--but then thought better of it. And then discovered that they fit her perfectly.

OK--so Alex, I discover last night, it exactly the same size as my mother was at some point in her life, when she had an 18" waist. I tried her dressing gown on Alex, and it fit perfectly--no one I've ever known could get it around their waist. Alex is about 4 inches smaller than I am everywhere, so the things I'm going to show on her are going to be baggy. Keep that in mind, please.

And a word about that--I don't wear baggy clothes all the time, and I don't wear baggy on purpose. I just can't stand confining clothes. I've always had broad shoulders and a wide-and-very-short waist, and many clothes that fit everywhere else will bind my shoulders or pinch my waist, and I can't STAND that. Hence, the largeness. I try to balance it out--larger on top with fitted on the bottom and vice versa. Still--they're going to look much bigger on her. Plus she has hardly any shoulders, not, you know, having arms and stuff.

So check out this:

It was a long LL Bean pin-wale corduroy dress, so soft and silky that I couldn't resist. I used some corduroy from a shirt to cover buttons to match a pair of Hue corduroy leggings.

 Then, when I started doing the yoolies, I got the idea to cut it like this on the sides.

 I wore it with a chartreuse long-sleeved t underneath, the leggings, flat brown boots, and this belt, which I adore. (Can you tell what it's made of?)

I wore this one day at the quilt show in Houston. It was colorful, with the leggings, and nothing about it was wrong. (Except that the belt obscured my pockets, which was a pain.) But nothing about it was right, either. At the end of the day, I knew I'd probably never wear it again.

And here's another thing I wore over the weekend:

 I finished it last year but had never worn it. Or maybe I wore it once. I can't even remember. It was a beige-ish thrift find. I dyed it, changed out the buttons, and then stitched it.

Again, there's nothing wrong with it. I like the way the pattern shows through really subtly. I love the colors.

But it's not me. Those of y'll who like clothes: do you know what I mean? When I say something is "me" or "not me"? Do you know that? It's so hard to explain. It's not what other people say about it or whether it's in My Color Palette (or, god forbid, the Spring/Summer/Winter/Autumn Palette or whatever they tell you when you Have Your Colors Done). It's all about how I feel when I wear it, whether or not I feel like me or not.

For years, when I worked at Animal Control, I wore men's clothes. In fact, for much of my life in my 20s, I think, I had a lot of men's clothes. Part was function--I never knew what I'd be doing at work. We won't go into details. Part was camoflage: I had hip-length hair and one of those naive/innocent faces, but I always hated it when men treated me all southern, like, Little Lady, as in, "Here, Little Lady, let me hep you with that." And that patronizing smirk.

That's obviously another conversation, and it's neither here nor there because it hasn't happened in years, what with the hair and the tattoos. Plus the post-menopausal gestalt thang I've got going on.

Anyway. I didn't necessarily feel like me in those clothes, that corduroy jacket (I always thought I'd grow up to be a college professor in a corduroy jacket with leather patches on the elbows. Either that, or--as I've said before--the guy who used to ride on the running board of the presidential limosine. Yeah, I apparently thought I was going to grow up to be a man. Not that I had any desire to change genders, but I sure didn't want to grow up and keep house and have raise kids), those boots, those shirts. But I felt camoflaged, and it helped when I was talking to a room full of men wearing sidearms.

Some clothes make you feel like you're in drag. Really girly-girl clothes, really butch clothes: really gender specific clothes. I remember buying a bustier many, many years ago and feeling like a cross-dresser every time I put it on.

Other clothes make me feel like I'm trying to pass as something I'm not. Like when I wore Teacher Clothes, all those years I was teaching and subbing. Or Dress-Up Clothes, the kind that call for odd shoes and stuff on your legs, like--omigod--pantihose. Those kinds of clothes.

But then there are the clothes that are Just Right. The ones you put on and go, "Ahhhhh." I don't know what it is, but when you find them, you just know. I wish I had photos of me in all the favorite outfits I've had in my life. (Levi's 501s and t-shirts don't count; that's been my default outfit almost my entire adult life (my parents wouldn't let me have Levis and were generally opposed to jeans).)

That's what I'm doing now: going through everything I own and figuring out what's Not Me and what's Just Right. And realizing that a lot of the things that I once would have thought were the latter are, sadly, the former. The difference seems to be that I no longer have any desire to blend in and don't believe I'm ever going to work in a bank and so want to wear only the things that sing to me. Comfort is first, then color, then that indefinable something that makes them sing. One-of-a-kind is good. Altered out the wazoo is good. But there are some things I haven't touched that sing anyway. These jeans, which I adore. My boots. Some of my jackets and coats and sweaters. That jacket up there, though, what it feels like is wrong with it is that it's Too Normal. When I wear stuff like that, it's like I'm imitating another life, a life where I'd have grandkids and watch tv and talk on the phone and make meatloaf/beef stroganoff/chili for dinner and would knit and go on Girls' Nights Out with my girlfriends I've known since college and have all my rooms painted Eggshell or Taupe. Nothing wrong with any of that, but most definitely Not Me.

Or something. I can't really put my finger on it, exactly, and that's the problem. That's why I think something's going to work for me and then find out it just doesn't. I put it on and wear it and feel that little sense of trying to fit into some other life, some alternate idea of myself. Not a big deal--this is not some huge traumatic thing, some thing that's keeping me awake at night. I'm just trying to weed out my closets and the storage building and have only stuff that I really love. Because I love some of my clothes a lot. I put them on and get instantly happy. All my life, I've saved those clothes and spent most of my time in stuff I didn't like so my favorite stuff wouldn't get torn up or worn out. We've talked about that before: use the good china! (Not that I own china, but you know what I mean.) I don't ever want to do that again. I want to wear only The Good Stuff, only the stuff that makes me grin when I put it on. My flannel jackets I made. The skirt I over-dyed. The yoolies.

So that's where I am over here, going through clothes again, picking out one thing at a time and wearing it out of the house, seeing how it feels on me and how I feel in it. Some things have really surprised me in a good way--I've got to get photos of this brown linen jacket I'd stitched but never worn. Yes, I said *brown*! I wore it last weekend, too, and it was lovely. It felt great--heavy enough to be drapey but light enough to wear over something else. Roomy pockets, a good length (I really like tunics, about mid-thigh), soft fabric. The color isn't me, but that doesn't seem to matter with this, which is also surprising. And, by the way, it isn't about Getting Compliments. I don't know about y'all, but this was something my mother always had in mind: the things she wore that Got a Lot of Compliments. Those are really nice, and of course I like having people say nice stuff about things I've altered. But that doesn't make it Me or Not Me. Other people may like it, but if it isn't right for me, it just isn't right. The brown jacket? Nobody noticed it, not that I know of, but I loved it. A puzzlement.

Now that I've got Alex, I hope to show more photos of this whole process. Thanks for coming by and checking it out and reading all this musing about something that, in the larger scheme of things, isn't of any earthly importance at all. I'm glad you're here~~it's way more fun than doing this all by myself! XO