An FB post from a couple of weeks back:

Pinkish brown linen Cynthia pants with black trim, brown silk shirt, brown socks, eggplant Trippen maryjanes, red/brown hand-dyed silk Cynthia scarf.

This year, people who read my Facebook posts see lists like this every day. I don’t usually include the links or mention the brand or designer of every item, but if you took notes you’d be able to figure out another part of the Match or Clash formula: that “high-low” thing style mavens, models and actresses in their 20s are always getting credit for inventing.

Of course, I invented the high-low mash-up long before those maven-model-actresses were born. Me and 1000s of other people who don’t dress in head-to-toe Single Designer but can sometimes afford to splurge. Like nearly everyone, I’ve always had to juggle style and money—or rather, overpriced “fashion” and my actual budget—and my favorite combination has always been expensive shoes with cheap tank tops. After all, a tank top’s basically a tank top but you can spot the difference between cheap shoes and expensive ones a mile away.

Right now my typical outfit is something by Chicago designer Cynthia Ashby or from the Swedish Gudrun Sjodren catalog, with a J Crew t-shirt or a cheap Uniqlo top as needed, plus these great gladiator sandals I ordered from Trippen as a birthday present for myself a couple of years ago. There are a million variations—a Uniqlo dress with an artist-made scarf, a pricey dress with an ancient cardigan—but the principle’s the same. It may look to some people like I don’t understand that those shoes are way too fancy for that t-shirt, but that’s kind of the point.

In the ’70s and ’80s, when I taught literature and women’s studies to undergraduates, I used to practice what I called “dressing to confuse.” Instead of the fairly consistent self-presentation the academic world generally expects, or the androgynous/hippie outfits lots of other feminist teachers favored, I’d wear a dress and girly shoes one day and jeans and a t-shirt the next.  If you’ve ever had students fill out evaluations, and especially if you’re a woman, you know that how you look is a point of fascination to them (“Why does she wear black all the time?”), so some of this was a deliberate attempt to undermine whatever conclusions they thought they could draw from my appearance.

But it also suits my temperament, which is why I still do it. Today, though, I’d probably call it something more like “dressing to show you I don’t care what you think.”