It’s no secret that I love clothes. Like, love love. Ask my girlfriend, who’s currently trying to convince me to find a way to not take up all three of our closets with my beloved garments. But more than clothes, I love fashion, style, and the statements it can make, or not make. I get it when someone says, “Clothes don’t really matter. They’re superficial.” But even in that, you are making a style statement. There’s no way around it. You could go out fully naked, and that’s still a style statement. It doesn’t just exist in dresses, pants, ties and boots. It just exists.
I was born and bred to love fashion and style by my mom, who is 10 parts a style dynamo to zero parts a “let’s make cookies and cross-stitch a wall hanging” kind of mom.
One of my favorite mother-daughter bonding rituals was getting up on a Saturday morning, making tea and climbing into her bed (with one of my sisters sometimes) to watch Style With Elsa Klensch on CNN. The runway was one of the few places my mom and I overlapped in my formative years. I learned so much about fashion that I didn’t know that I had learned anything, assuming it was all common knowledge.
I remember my mom making statements along the lines of, “I shouldn’t have had children; I should have been working in Paris for Dior.” And she really could have. Maybe she should have. She’s got the gift. These comments weren’t exactly heartwarming at the time, but now, I totally get it. And as an adult, I’ve made up for a lot of that disconnection with her in those earlier years.
She also always pushed me to explore my fashion boundaries, which rocked. When I got suspended for my shorts and then for my pants, she picked me up and took me out to lunch. And this was not a person who took missing school lightly – at all, ever. She just thought their reasoning was out of line, or at least, not in line with her.
So over the years, I’ve never shied away from trying a look: adventurous in life, adventurous in style. And over the years, my choices have on some level reflected my age, my body shape at the time, or my place in life. Mostly, though, they reflect my mood. Sure, when I was modeling runway in my 20s, my body shape permitted different style spaces than my more feminine shape does now, but I still swing from hyper-femme in a hot pink Lycra mini-dress to more tom-boi in skinny jeans, sweater vests and blazers.
I wasn’t really aware of my style choices and my lesbianism converging in other people’s eyes until my straightforward sister made a straightforward comment. I was wearing gray tuxedo pants (that she bought me before my coming out), a floaty blouse and a gray blazer, and she said, “Well, you’re just a big ol’ lesbian now, aren’t you?” And I responded, “Yup. It’s awesome.” She said it kindly and in a playful way, but it got me thinking. Was my family worried that I was going to go butch? Were they just trying to get me to open up? I still have no idea; I just know that for the first time, I was acutely aware of how my family saw my style.
They’ve always known me and encouraged me to dress ambitiously, but was it now somehow linked to my being gay? I actually thought, “Should I now dress only femme around them now that they know?” The answer lies in the one thing I’ve learned most in adulthood about my supremely opinionated family. They will respect me the most if I just do my thing with confidence. Style is a lot like any other conviction – have confidence in it, stand up for it, be comfortable in it, and others will be more likely to commend you, at the very least.
