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And I think, as I get older, things like Mame and the lesson of self-invention becomes more and more important; to say to other people, “You don’t have to do anything you’re told. You just have to be kind. And you just have to never stop looking. That’s it.”
Justin Sayre (Auntie Mame — Justin Sayre This Movie Changed Me)
(https://onbeing.org/programs/auntie-mame-justin-sayre/#reflections)
“All of us invent ourselves. Some of us just have more imagination than others.” -Cher
Discovering Self Through Fashion
Periodically, I take a step back and ask myself: why does fashion really matter to me? Usually this questioning coincides with instances where I feel less connected to my clothes, and perhaps less sure of the role fashion ultimately plays in my development as a human being. When I was still struggling to come to my relationship with fashion on my own terms, these kinds of ebbs and flows used to feel so much more consequential than they do now. Because I know I'll continue to love fashion despite questioning it, I'm now able to approach these moments with a kind of warm curiosity. What am I meant to learn about myself from questioning fashion in this way?
I emerged from this latest period of inquiry with an insight: I use fashion to help me discover who I am. It's one of the many ways–in addition to serving as a vehicle for creativity, and for celebrating beauty, and for infusing joy– that fashion deeply enriches my life. Fashion is a gateway to self. At the moment we try on a piece of clothing, we're reckoning with who we are, who we've been, who we want to be. We're becoming.
Wrapped up in the allure of consumerism, in the draw of a trend, in the cache of a brand name, I think, is the fundamental truth that we're all coming to fashion to find ourselves. The forces that draw us to fashion often seem external in nature, like consumerism, the desire to fit in, or to stand out, but really, those external forces are only relevant to the degree that they resonate with an internal need. Self-exploration, personal development, transformation, metamorphosis– these are our human needs. These are the things we turn to fashion to help us do.
I've been guilty before of letting my struggles with fashion eclipse the things about it that make it so great. With time, I do that less and less. I'm here to become the person I'm meant to be. If my clothes can help me along in that the process, isn't that a testament to the integral role fashion plays in the human experience?
Feature image: A woman in Oman captured by Frederick Simpich Sr. circa 1919 for National Georgraphic. Image © National Geographic Stock: Vintage Collection/GRANGER.
Sincerely Me
I made a free post on my Patreon https://www.patreon.com/posts/excerpt-01-8663386 but maybe I can talk about it here too. Maybe it’s relevant.
A trans character hears that her boss has died. They weren’t close, but they were friendly, but they weren’t friends, but they thought well of each other.
I’ve never been sure how to react to death, whether it be a pet or a relative that I didn’t know well. It hasn’t happened to me personally yet, and I’m still unsure what feelings I will or won’t express.
I’m not sure where this uncertainty comes from, but we must write what we know - that’s a phrase I think about a lot.
Another one is Just Be Yourself.
I understand what Just Be Yourself is trying to say, but it makes the process sound so automatic. If we take a moment, just a moment, to breathe in and think internally about nothing we can, what? Just be ourselves? Just be?
I wonder how many years, what percentage of my life, as been myself. I wonder how long I’ve just been acceptable, and not unthinkingly, but consciously changed for reasons I’m not quite able to word properly.
And that’s not living sincerely, is it? Moderating how my feelings are expressed so that I might not get noticed - because I wasn’t ready to be noticed then. And over time that moderation whittles down any instinctual feelings to the point where each feeling reaction must be measured and thought about. Considered.
If I choose to be happy am I happy? If I choose to be excited about the latest Spider-Man trailer am I excited for it, can I choose those feelings? Or maybe I’ve just spent a very long time reiterating my love for Spider-Man that now it must be something I do. Are we allowed or able to choose feelings?
We’re told we must choose to ignore the negative, is it sincere to invent something positive for ourselves? Is it sincere to invent anything? At what point is an identity built or discovered?
I think self-discovery works best when your Self isn’t at odds with the world’s perception of you or what you should be.
I like pink and maybe it doesn’t matter if that liking was discovered or invented, because now it just is.
On Inventing Ourselves
In theory, I'm a huge believer in the process of inventing ourselves and doing so over and over, as many times as we need, for as long as there's a divide between who we are and who we want to be. Or is it the divide between who we are at the moment and who we Are? In practice, inventing ourselves is a challenging task. It requires honesty with ourselves (the hardest kind), and quite a lot of courage. Sometimes I think the ultimate appeal of fashion, it's true power, is in giving us a quick and easy gateway to self-invention. Change clothes, change self. We don't have to quit the job, or leave our comfort zone. We don't have to move somewhere new, or ask the big questions. We can put on a piece of clothing and try out a new identity.
Lately, I've had this recurring impulse to take all of my clothes to a consignment shop, sell everything, and start from scratch. It's made me think: is this the first step of a re-invention? Change clothes, change self? I'm not sure. I do know that from my experiences with self-invention and re-invention, while it's not easy, it's some of the most important internal work I've done. To liberate yourself from whatever holds you back in order to to become whomever and whatever you know you are capable of becoming seems to me just about the biggest gift we can give ourselves. In that spirit, here are a few notable people sharing their thoughts on self-invention.
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MAYA ANGELOU
Each of us has that right, that possibility, to invent ourselves daily. If a person does not invent herself, she will be invented. So, to be bodacious enough to invent ourselves is wise.
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CHER
All of us invent ourselves. Some of us just have more imagination than others.
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CHARLES DICKENS
The important thing is this: to be ready at any moment to sacrifice what you are for what you could become.
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MADONNA
No matter who you are, no matter what you did, no matter where you've come from, you can always change, become a better version of yourself.
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CHARLES BUKOWSKI
invent yourself and then reinvent yourself, don't swim in the same slough. invent yourself and then reinvent yourself and stay out of the clutches of mediocrity. invent yourself and then reinvent yourself, change your tone and shape so often that they can never categorize you. reinvigorate yourself and accept what is but only on the terms that you have invented and reinvented. be self-taught. and reinvent your life because you must; it is your life and its history and the present belong only to you.
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Feature image by Tim Walker for Vogue Italia, October 2014
... I’ve always worked with the idea of the lost child. ... It’s like starting a book with some of the pages missing. You know you missed something, but that sense of exile can also become a place of creativity, because you have to be self-invented.
Jeanette Winterson, from an interview with The New York Times
The Art of Self Invention
Author: Joanne Finkelstein
https://www.dawsonera.com/abstract/9786000009786
Both an exploration of the ways in which we fashion our public identity and a manual of modern sociability, this lively and readable book explores the techniques we use to present ourselves to the world: body language, tone of voice, manners, demeanour, 'personality' and personal style. Drawing on historical commentators from Castiglione to Machiavelli, and from Marcel Mauss to Roland Barthes, Joanne Finkelstein looks to popular visual culture, including Hollywood film and makeover TV, to show how it provides blueprints for the successful construction of 'persona'. She also discusses the role of fashion and of status symbols and how advertising sells these to us in our never ending quest for social mobility. Finkelstein's interest here is not in the veracity of the self - recently dissected by critical theory - but rather in the ways in which we style this 'self', in the enduring appeal of the 'new you' and in our fascination with deception, fraudulent personalities
“If space is the field for memory, and if memory is the basis of our narrative self-invention, then we must live in some seam between inside and outside, some corridor between the place we make and the place that makes us.”
—Richard Powers, interview with The Believer magazine, February 2007
