Maybe it’s because I grew up in the ’50s and ’60s when girls were still required to wear skirts or dresses to school and you could be sent home if yours were too short. The end of the dress code when I was in 11th grade felt so seismic that even today, I chafe when I see kids going to public school in uniforms. How dare some institution tell them what to wear?
Of course, that kind of control didn’t end with permission to wear pants to high school. When I was about 21 I had a clerical job in an office that forbade “dungarees,” which I assumed meant blue jeans. So in between the mini skirts and dresses (it was the early ’70s), I wore corduroy Levi’s. One day my boss took me aside and told me that these also qualified as dungarees. He pointed out that “the other girls” managed to dress appropriately; I pointed out that they all had husbands or fathers to help them buy clothes. He won.
After that I followed the letter of the law but I just couldn’t get with the spirit. I’d wear exactly what I was supposed to but I’d also have on green nail polish or be carrying a purse I made from old jeans I’d embroidered in high school. I wasn’t deliberately thumbing my nose at the rules. I just couldn’t stand for them to dominate me completely.
As I got older, the dress codes were less openly articulated, which made them much harder to follow. In grad school there was an endless debate about whether we—especially we women—needed to wear professorial (i.e., dowdy and boring) clothes in order to be respected by students or taken seriously in job interviews. My wardrobe was full of black dresses and long skirts and I wore pants when I was apparently supposed to wear a skirt suit. I used dark red nail polish or maybe my eye makeup was too visible. My hair wouldn’t arrange itself properly—it was the wrong length or too many different colors. I had this notion that I should be able to dress as I liked, but while prominent feminist theorists wrote essays about why it was okay to love both ideas and fashion, people’s sense of how apprentice intellectuals should look didn’t really change.
In my early 30s I started to hate my entire appearance (I blame it on a series of bad haircuts) and on the worst days I’d just put on something black. When I realized that this always made me feel better, I decided to skip the self-loathing and for nearly 20 years I dressed almost entirely in black, from underwear to outwear. If I’d been in New York, I would have fit right in. In the Midwestern college towns where I lived, not so much.
In the years before online shopping, it took two or three years for, say, the style of heels you’d see in Paris to trickle down to Madison, Wisconsin and if I went to a bigger city for a vacation or a conference I’d inevitably come back with some item of clothing or a pair of shoes that couldn’t be found at home. Yet this never made me feel like a trendsetter. Instead, I always seemed to be over- or under- or just improperly dressed.
It’s not like people would see me and exclaim, “What the hell are you wearing?!” In fact, I always got compliments, although they sometimes came with reminders about the various dress codes I was violating: “You’re so brave to wear that [inappropriate item of clothing] to that [event with your future riding on it].” As I’ve gotten older, there’ve been fewer of those little jabs but I still sometimes think them to myself. Is that too much cleavage for work? Should I be wearing jeans instead of this elaborate skirt? I usually end up sticking with what I chose. After all, it’s too late to relive my entire adult life in the ideal costumes. But I’m always a little bit torn.
I can’t explain how clothes and style and self-presentation became so important to me, how I came to believe so deeply that what I wear expresses something profound and essential about me, but there it is. I understand that my choices are entangled in the global chains of manufacturing and consumption, even when I buy my jewelry directly from the makers (always), my clothes right from the local designer (often) or even make my own (sometimes). And I know that what I experience as a set of unique, personal decisions can’t be divorced from the fashion industry or mass media or what I notice when I’m walking down the street. My special snowflakiness probably isn’t nearly as special as it seems to me, but I can’t stop thinking that when I get dressed in the morning, what I decide to put on matters. At least it matters to me.