Thinking through Dressing

The echo of desire in consideration of assemblage

“Erotic desire for another person is a desire literally to have that person, to incorporate that person into one’s own being.”
—Brian Ponger, The Arena of Masculinity

I have been thinking a lot of clothes lately (not suprisingly) but in a way relegated more to just putting shit on rather than thinking too hard about the idea of putting shit on. I am engaging in new communities where the aesthetic prevelance is mostly not aligned with my own because I think it’s interesting to step outside of the echo chamber and experience what other people are doing rather than what they are saying. I am also currently re-reading some Bataille and finally making progress on Blanchot’s “intellectual biography” while also reading an amazing collection of leathersex fiction that has one of the most Bataillean narratives I’ve ever encountered in the realm of explicit gay SM pornography. All of this is circulating, it’s what I’m thinking about, but none of it is coalescing in a thesis, as I just typed to a friend.

I have been wanting to write, feeling absent from this practice, but realizing I have had nothing to say (and having also not had the time to articulate what I want to say) that adds up to anything has kept me from actually making the attempt. But, of course, half the work is moving from the space of the blank page to the space of the text; if there’s anything I can say with authority it is that. In connection with styling, one does not seem to confront an existential panic when naked because the mandates of the world at large require we are covered with something. The blank page, however, can sit untarnished.

I have also participated both casually and with my usual aggressive force in some conversations surrounding the idea of “authenticity” and personality in the clothing one wears. While I’m not sure if I’ve written much about it here, I reject the term “authenticity” as a construct that often has very little to do with anything other than a lack of imagination; what I have written about is that the self is an ever evolving and circulating force that never truly settles into complacency, which often seems to be what people mean when they point to the idea of “authenticity” of dressing to express oneself. I think, for the way the term is normally used, a better term might be “personality,” but again this is just one part of the larger equation.

The thought has come up recently in two major ways. The first when encountering celebrities styles in head-to-toe runway looks without any sort of change: Alexander Skaarsgard has been wearing quirked up High Fashion sexcore looks to the media events for Pillion (a movie that, for the record, I ended up liking much more than I expected to), and there’s always been something that is a bit off about them to me (he is much, much sexier in the presumably custom leathers he wears in the film). I didn’t realize at first that he was just wearing runway looks, but once I connected the dots it made sense. Similarly, when I see people in the MFAD discord server post the “inspiration” that they’re often (somewhat poorly) trying to imitate for a fit they’re presenting, I never feel anything but underwhelmed by the imitation in the face of the original. I think what’s interesting about both of these case-studies is that there’s clearly an aesthetic interest that the wearer of the “copy” is expressing, and I suspect that aesthetic interest is “authentic,” there is definintely semantic meaning in terms of how the runway/editorial looks are constructed and styled, but there is a disconnect between the individual wearing the “construction” and the “construction” itself. I have chalked this up to an absence of “personality,” — and to me, personality is not just “this is my wardrobe so if I recreate a look with my own wardrobe it is in my personality” but rather something that seperates the sort of formal considerations of the way the outfit is put together and personalizes it, refuting a sort of objective aesthetic insistence and remembering that every individual body is different in a mulitude of ways.

A similar absent disconnect can also be found when you see most people wearing full-CCP outfits. There is often a sort of construction based on media representation that certain folks try to imitate that doesn’t actually allow the space of the self to interact with this pre-conceived fit. I often will think of a fit in my head, and then when I go to put it on realize that it doesn’t work as imagined: for me the work of putting the fit together, being willing to try and abandon different things, being willing to try and to fail, is what leads to a good fit. A good idea is just that, an idea—to move from idea to fit requires the presence of the body itself (and this is one of the things I like so much about clothing as an expressive or artistic or whatever medium). Almost always, a “complete outfit” purchased at once without any sort of actual engagement with one’s actual body tends to fail.

But beyond the actual activity of getting dressed (which some days is the peak of my creative engagement with the world, and I say that without any frustration), beyond the sort of “I like this and that’s why I wear it” (which is fine but it’s fucking boring), I like considering the question of why do you dress the way you dress?

I engage with the world at a level of collage, taking various elements and smashing them together, in the space of my head, in the space of my written creative work, in the space of how I make internet content, in the space of how I think through things, so it should, of course, come as no surprise that this is always a guiding methodology in terms of how I put outfits together as well.

OK as a slight aside — I tend to use “collage” as a lens in which to talk about this, but it’s really just my entire aesthetic outlook: I spend a lot of time looking at shit and when I find stuff I like I try to start thinking about how I can throw these things I like together into something new. A friend asked me for some basic reading suggestions surrounding aesthetics, and after thinking about it for a few days I instead just wrote this back:

This is sort of a smarter way of saying what I said above, in the sense that the point I’m trying to make here is that “just accepting or inheriting aesthetic considerations from others doesn’t ncessarily strengthen [one’s own] capacities.” This is why I always find it hard to accept that when I make a negative or positive statement about something people try to insist I’m stating a quantifiable fact rather than just stating my own subjective engagement with it.

OK OK but before I entirely lose the thread i was pushing towards, what exactly am I collaging when I think about how I want to dress? Ultimately, very similar things to what I write about when I write fiction, or what I write about endless on here. If I were to write a statement of intent that I would, undoubtedly, always fail to perfectly cohere to, it would be something like the following:

1. I want to dress in a way that looks slightly psychotic: simultaneously austere but also “fucked,” in the sense of either patina or some sort of formal element that rejects formal menswear harmonies (example from the real world: i never hem my pants and like to tuck them into my boots, which always looks a bit off but carries a sort of expressive capacity that I am quite aesthetically fond of).

2. Within wanting to dress mildly like a psychopath, I want to be a sexy psychopath. For me this is borrowing garments from gay/leathersex semiotics, whether it be sheer tanks/longsleeves, leather wear, inappropriate gloves, or form-fitting/shaping garments in tangent with the elements of my wardrobe that insistently reject formal harmony.

Largely, this is the rubric I operate under. Beyond this I have to get more specifically into narrative, or into some other concern depending on what it is that I am dressing to on the day of. These two elements generally stay in place regardless of the circumstance, and I feel relatively comfortable with them. They’re open enough that they’re no directive in any fixed way, but they also point to a vocabulary that I have practiced enough that I feel confident with its use.