On function, fashion, and the femininity
A love letter to women and to blazers // A draping of the corporal vessel
My mother is a deeply functional woman, and in my family, women were appraised for their intellectual merits and accomplishments before their appearance. Which, in many ways, is a blessing, because it narrows all possible sources of developing body insecurity to the broader social media and peer group. I wasn’t “allowed” to be on a social media platform until I was 18, except for Blogger, which also forced me to find a way to creatively define myself through writing and storytelling rather than fashion, outfit or aesthetic.
I attended a convent girls’ school in India, which had not only a uniform, but a very rigorous set of rules applied over the uniform as well. All socks had to come up to your ankles. The skirt could not be more than two inches above the knee. No hair accessories besides those in your natural hair color. No dangling earrings, no nail color and no makeup. No lingerie that showed through the white shirt of the uniform. No bangs or fringes, and if you had any, you were required to clip them out of your face. These were enforced via a points system by the teachers/student “governance” (in my school, this usually consisted of promising students who were nominated by the teachers). If you had enough points against your name, you would be reported to the principal for disciplinary action. If you were reported twice, your parents would be summoned to school.
You’ll note that the intersection of these rules and puberty creates a difficult environment for self-expression and self-development. I remember falling to a de-facto tomboy-esque arrangement (short hair, sneakers, etc.) because it saved me time from having to consider which arbitrary rule I would be in violation of. Was it really me? Was it something that helped me define or find myself? These were not questions that I was allowed to consider in my school environment at that time.
My school’s authoritarian views on dressing were justified in that they kept growing girls modest and safe. Unpacking the societal, situational and toxic reasoning behind this is beyond the scope of this post. For a woman to be known for her body? For showing her body in a certain way? For marketing herself via her body? These were ideas that were strongly frowned upon, especially if you were young. It’s kind of laughable now because nobody asks to have hips or nipples, we just have them, and we were being shamed for having them. We were conditioned to conform to a mode of dressing that allowed us to appear as invisible as possible under the blanket of “dressing modestly will not invite sexual attention from strangers and therefore keep you safe”.
Fast forward to undergrad in New York City, home to many large fashion houses. You’re supposed to be experimenting with style, with textures, color and presentation, and I was perhaps given a larger margin for idiocy than I had considered at the time. For the first time, I saw the considerable power that occupying a feminine body and presenting in certain conventional forms granted, and I learned of this privilege more explicitly through the journeys of my transwomen friends. There are spaces and modalities that are easier to access if you are more conventionally pretty (any activity that requires interacting with a large volume of the daily public) and there are different ones you can access by following specific in-group markers. I’m speaking to the niche of anime fans who create dubstep remixes to opening soundtracks.
The Lunar Gala Fashion Event (Chinese New Year, 2015) at Columbia University
I started a Pinterest board and followed thousands of fashion bloggers and only started saving images of what I liked. Then I would do the equivalent of clustering what the broader groups and preferences were in the chosen set. This is how I achieved my first sense of style. The cluster nodes are mainly: something bright, something that I could run to a train or a late class in, and possibly something embroidered. The functionality of what something could achieve was still a higher priority than what it “looked like”, even if looking is the main reason for presenting. This is one of the prime reasons why I can never abide Y2K fashion: two strings barely covering the nipples is not, in my constitution, a top. Clothing is meant to protect your skin from the elements, and if it fails in this primary function, then it is not good clothing.
(Maybe I am your local problematic Indian Aunty in the making, who knows.)
Since I had been around women for so long and since women could wear, quite literally, anything, it did not strike me until years later that a sense of style had to convey femininity. A person can be feminine, but a dress is simply some fabric cut in some style. The discussion and disambiguation of gender and clothing is also too complex for this singular post to tackle alone (hi, Judith Butler). But it never really struck me that my style was “androgynous” until I had an ex tell me that I would “look prettier” if I wore more crop tops and booty shorts instead of long pants.
How women present in the workplace affects their opportunities, no matter what the established dress code might be. Yes, this is a form of discrimination, and we have not progressed enough as a society to “not have to worry about it.” But it is something that I kept very strongly in mind, as I had grown up watching my mother dress in suits for work even when everyone around her was more casual. Work inspires a uniform too, just like school, and if I had already played the game of winning over the authorities once, I could play the game again. In fact, I had to. If someone has to discriminate against me, if someone has to find a way to cut me down, they will pick the smallest available fault, and I was not going to let my efforts be undermined just because I just “didn’t look right”. And I know how to play an exclusionary game. Short of a biopharma manufacturing lab, there will never be any other workplace with as restrictive a dress code as my school.
Business casual is, and remains, my home. I became a glutton for blazers because you can slap on a blazer on top of anything, literally anything, and people would consider that you are intentionally dressed and you’re someone to be taken “seriously”. At my first job, I was the youngest and one of two women in a large tech company. It was crucial for me to start dressing like I knew what I was talking about, because my imposter syndrome demanded that I be taken seriously. I moved out of cutesy embroidery and styling hackathon t-shirts over skirts, but I did lean into printed blazers. The blazers reigned supreme also when I was on-stage during my comedy hours. So from 9AM to 5PM, I was in business casual (tech-friendly) and from 6PM to 10PM, I was still in business casual (circus-ringmaster-friendly). To date, I have 16 blazers.
But the question of femininity remained. There were a few men who did not think I was “being feminine enough” when I was clothed. To hear criticism leveled against you for an inherent attribute is to create inadequacy where none exists. Since I was still presenting myself as a worker, as an actor, as a unit of an institution or a subculture, I had no idea what purpose or function femininity serves. Business casual means you are presentable to clients. Winter layers means you are warm.There’s also a disambiguation between slutty and feminine. The slutty dress code is devastatingly simple: show more and show off. But there’s also specific intentions of slutty. It serves a distinct purpose and therefore still has function, and you could also be slutty and not feminine. What does feminine clothing mean? It wasn’t simply dresses and skirts, it was supposed to be (as per every women’s magazine) an incalculable vibe of allure, capriciousness and suggestiveness: “Playful”, “spontaneity”, “flowy”, “sexy”.
I don’t know which of these adjectives would capture the grace of my mother’s sari, or my friend’s elaborate punk tattoos. In all of my experience, knowing many women, living with generations of others, and being one myself, there are so many ways to occupy the space in the world: through conformity, through safety, through safety, through protest, through motherhood, through age. You could just be feminine by existing and believing that you are.
It took me the Inside Years (2020-2022) to sit with this notion. I could revert back to the intellectual freedom of my childhood of not caring what I wore as long as I was protected from the elements, and I could hide a significant part of my face. At this time, I also read Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ book Women who Run with the Wolves, which explores the historical and mythological concept of femininity and how we, as a society, have carried forward those messages in our stories. She argues that the main conceptualization of something feminine, in the cultural history and in myth, stems from the ability to create (not just life, but any generative endeavor). To fashion something out of nothing was a skill I had already learned through creating these identities and uniforms for myself, and they reinforced that I wasn’t, in fact, “bad at being a woman.”
Now that we’re meeting each other in public again, we’re opening ourselves to censure, appraisal, attraction and distaste. I’m trying to think of clothing less as uniform, and less as an identity costume, but more as a (financially-responsible) whimsy. The assignment is outside my comfort zone but that’s where I’ve been told growth happens, and I have other women to learn from in those realms. In 2018, my goal was to not buy anything that didn’t have pockets. In 2019, it was thrift-shopping. In 2020, I debuted athleisure. In 2023, I’m returning to more thrift and wearing less black (48% of my closet is black).
In 2023, I’ll be a new woman again.
+1 to less black. Black conveys lack of imagination or confidence in personal style to me (irrespective of what people consider 'feminine' or not). White and grey tones say that to me also. I like style that is gregarious and loud and bold and non conforming.