Getting Dressed (and What It Does)

AKA: Leslie Can Walk and Think at the Same Time!

I like to walk to the places near my house - to school, to the grocery store, to the nearby mall. It takes longer, but there's something relaxing in the slowness of it. The benefits are numerous, but now isn't the time or place to go into my exercise-and-general-wellness plan, so I won't. I will say instead that spending an hour or so walking every day gives me a lot of time to think.

As of late, I've been thinking about clothes. It's recently become cold, so I've retired my summer wardrobe and have been rearranging my closet to best fit my winter wear and trying to figure out what is missing before it gets much colder. In doing so, I realized just how much I've changed since I arrived here over a year ago.

Fashion was my enemy. Anyone who has seen "Mean Girls" may understand my dislike for fashionistas. (Imagine the Plastics being, not a group of 3 girls, but 90% of the school population.) I ran from the idea of being fashionable, which to me amounted to spending insane amounts of money on clothing only to find it out of style in a month. After going to a school for 6 years which required a uniform, I found myself at college with little more than t-shirts and jeans to wear. By the time I left WashU, I had shed my dislike for skirts and anything even slightly feminine, and even had a few cute outfits I wore entirely too often.

As soon as I arrived in Japan, however, I realized that I was playing a whole new game and on a completely different field. In the year I've been here, I've become immune to femininity, and my idea of what colors match has drastically changed. I've experimented with clothing in a way with which I never felt comfortable before, as I stand out no matter what I wear. It's been an interesting learning experience.

The result is that I no longer think of clothing like a checklist of things I need in which to be appropriately attired, as though there were a sign on my door similar to those at gas stations, saying, "No shirt, no shoes, no pants, no leaving!" Instead, clothing is like music, or a composition, or spices for cooking - getting dressed involves combining various parts into a cohesive, attractive whole. I no longer find myself thinking, "How long do I need to wait before I wear this outfit again?" ("How long until I have lemon-pepper chicken again?"*) I don't have set outfits anymore; I have, instead, the pieces to a self-expression puzzle.

My mom once told me the story of her meeting my godmother, Del Rae. A group of doctors and their significant others were on a skiing trip in Colorado, and my mom felt out of place among the women who had spent large sums of money on lavish, Southwestern wardrobes. Del Rae, a true Southwestern woman, offered to help my mom with her outfits. "All she did," my mom said, "was take what I had and rearrange it, adding a Southwestern embellishment here and there, but that in and of itself was enough. I was the best dressed there."

The moral of the story - "it's not what you have, but how you use it" - is something I've understood in many aspects of my life. It's just taken me this long to realize what it means for clothing, as well as what it doesn't mean. Being fashionable doesn't mean being rich and vapid; it means expressing oneself in a way everyone can see and comprehend. I must say that I rather like the change in connotation.



*I feel obligated to note that my roommate, hannah, would say that it is never too soon to have lemon-pepper chicken. (And, for anyone who wonders why I still refer to hannah as "my roommate" though we live in different countries, I offer you this bastardized Holmes quote: "To Leslie, she is always 'the roommate.' I have seldom heard her mention her under any other name.")