The You Suit
5:36 PM, Monday evening. Ever hear the expression, "the clothes make the man"? I’ve been thinking about the You Suit...
It’s a gloomy, gun-metal gray day where 10 AM is indistinguishable from 5 PM. Joan Osborne is singing "Crazy Baby" on my CD player. Bluesy. Real -- like the soft rasp that whiskey gives your voice in a smoky club. It’s a slow low burn day.
I got a new computer at the end of February. Over the intervening time, I have been moving into the new machine and exploring many of it’s neat toys. I’m more in the mood to talk about fashion today, though.
Sometimes I wonder just how much of your personality is generated by how you dress or present yourself. I wonder how much changing your appearance changes who you are. I suppose that it is true of most people (but I expect it is especially so with artists and such): there is a need to periodically re-invent yourself.
And, personally, I have been looking to re-charge my creative batteries for some time now.
It seems to me that physically changing little things about yourself can make you think about life a bit differently. For instance, I’ve had very short hair and very long hair -- and in each case my relationship with the world at large has been just a wee bit different. It’s sort of amazing that such a simple thing as the length of your hair can tint your day-to-day experiences. But it does.
It’s true with clothes, too.
What you wear affects how others react to you. Believe me, there is a difference in how folks treat me when I’m wearing my leather motorcycle jacket as opposed to how they treat me when I wear my nice new single-breasted suit (deep navy blue, of course).
None of that is any big surprise, I suppose. The interesting thing (to me at least) is not really how others react to my various fashion choices -- but how I think of myself depending on how I look. Differences there are there too, young Skywalker. At the moment, I’d very much like to get out of my own status quo.
I’m in the mood for new clothes, baby.
I want to play this game a bit differently; so I think I need a slightly different costume for the event. How silly and superficial is that?
What I’d love to do is to find the perfect look for me. The fashion and manner that opens the "real" me to the world and to myself. I’d like to find the You Suit.
"Man, that look is so you, baby!"
Hah. Stylin’ and profiling.
--- JWR, 3/4/98