#165: Coming back around on getting dressed
#165: Coming back around on getting dressed
(After avoiding the topic for years)
There was once a time—it’s hard to remember—when being the #1 show on HBO signaled a certain prestige. Today, that honor goes to Naked Attraction, a low-budget British reality show wherein random civilians are paid $0 dollars to get naked on TV. I’d like to call its rise inexplicable, because it’s genuinely dumb and bad, but it’s actually fairly easy to explain: There is one successful dating reality show formula, and Naked Attraction cracked it in 2016. That formula, of course, is to cajole singles into unconventional dating “experiments” under the guise of helping them find love. What’s interesting about this particular show though, has nothing to do with any of that.
For the uninitiated, here’s how it works: A random British single is tasked with choosing someone to date from six potential suitors based solely on their naked bodies. Presented like scientific specimens in neon-lit, human-sized test tubes—with all the grotesque detail that implies—the suitors are revealed, body part by body part, to the single in question, who picks apart their appearances in the name of love. The incredible premise of the show is that this is somehow a more sincere way to find a partner—contestants are presented plainly, without cover or disguise, their truest selves! It’s one of the more amazing subversions of common sense I’ve witnessed in the reality TV realm, which is saying a lot.
Anyway, the important part is that in each episode there is a moment when the contestants are eliminated and, by way of a sped-up twirl, finally displayed in full dress. This, in my view, is the moment most worth reckoning with philosophically. Counter to the entire conceit of the show, it’s when we actually learn something about anyone on there. It's at this moment that a woman, previously presented only as a pair of pale thick thighs, pierced nipples, and a long neck, is revealed to be a rockabilly. Or a guy with chiseled calves, zero pubic hair, and a suggestive grin appears to be a computer programmer. The show foolishly breezes past this part, but the significance is undeniable. When you start out naked, the mask becomes the revelation.
It seemed almost fated that this show would make waves last week, because it happened to be the same week I was planning to write about clothes and their power, or lack thereof. It’s been a while since I’ve written about fashion, but I’ve recently felt called back to it as a topic. The obvious reason is that I’m eight months pregnant and, for the first time in my life, feel an impenetrable distance between myself and my “personal style.” (My maternity outfit reveal on Naked Attraction would suggest I’m a shut-in.) But in truth I’ve been grappling with my relationship with clothes for years now. Pregnancy is only my most recently acquired lens, and it’s proved to be a revealing one. Whereas I used to find the topic too morally messy—the joy, the possibility, and the beauty co-mingling impossibly with the sweatshops, the wastefulness, and the exclusion—the additional distance has actually afforded me a cleaner perspective. The show, then, solidified that.
The messiness
My inner conflict about fashion peaked when I worked for a fashion website in my twenties. I wasn’t expressly a fashion writer there, but when I did cover the subject, I understood I should transmit a full-throated confidence in its importance. At first I felt no doubts about this—it was my first professional writing job, and I spent hours leading up to my first day researching fashion houses, organizing them in a spreadsheet, memorizing their reputations, so as to not be exposed as a fraud. It took a couple years for me to feel sure-footed enough to express a wavering faith. When I did—like in this essay or this essay in which I wondered whether my devotion to clothes made me superficial—my boss gently suggested I was misaligned with the ethos of the company. To be fair, I was. But I didn’t want to be. Or at least, I hoped all my hand-wringing might bring me to a place of moral clarity, whether in favor of fashion or against it. Instead, I left the job after four years and chose to avoid the topic completely.
Outside of that environment, I wondered if I might become the sort of person who cared less about what I wore. Certainly the conditions of my life would have supported that. I was in lockdown for a while, my outfits rendered irrelevant; I’d stopped working with brands, writing about style, or posting outfits on Instagram; I no longer had coworkers to impress, or coworkers at all. I stopped attending industry events. I stopped being photographed. Functionally and theoretically, I was free to detach. Become the sort of person who didn’t bother with that “superficial” stuff. I never did though. My relationship with clothing has changed a little—a waning interest in chasing trends most obviously—but it wasn’t until I got pregnant and could no longer fit into any of my clothes that I was forced to reckon with how much my style still mattered to me. Without it, I felt, still feel, a pointed sense of loss.
There’s this idea that removing a toxic attachment from our lives, however difficult, will be necessarily transformative. This is of course what leads people to delete social media apps or throw out their scales. In recent years, I became convinced the same could be done with my closet. I became ruthless in my wardrobe cleanouts, eventually getting rid of half my clothes this past April. Admittedly, it felt good. But when pregnancy pushed this strategy to its logical extreme, whittling my options to only my most basic and lifeless items, rather than feeling liberated, I felt trapped. The transformation never materialized. There are two possible explanations for this: either my interest in personal style is so toxic as to be imbedded beyond circumstance, which feels too dramatic to be likely, or, more simply, it wasn’t completely toxic in the first place. This left me wondering what, exactly, it was instead.
The mental scrub
Part of the problem, I’m realizing, isn’t that I lack a defense of style as a valid interest. It’s that I’m bombarded with defenses. There’s a cultural dialectic taking place between those who want to freely revere fashion and those who want to impeach it. The result of this tension is an industry that, through various marketing efforts, pretends to care about its moral failings—the unsustainability, the appalling working conditions, the oppressive premise of trends and who they aim to exclude—and otherwise doubles down on justifying its existence. There is of course only one way to do this, which is to frame fashion as necessarily profound. Clothing as the social fabric, the bedrock of identity, the key to expression itself. I don’t trust it on instinct.
What I’m coming around to is a less self-serious gambit. Sure, clothes undeniably leave an impression, as the revelatory spins on Naked Attraction confirm. But overstating that power reeks of PR. I may delight in learning that one woman was a rockabilly, and I may, through her choice of clothes, understand her far better than by simply appraising her objective naked form, presented like a cut of meat at the deli counter. But my understanding of her remains limited, and I respect her humanity by remembering that. This view of getting dressed feels less tortured to me, less burdened by delusion, and delightfully lower stakes.
You can’t overwrite the fashion industry’s problems with exhortations of its profundity. This is where I’ve historically tripped up, because the proclamations of its significance, while morally appealing, don’t stand up to much scrutiny. Without access to my clothes in pregnancy, I haven’t failed to connect, or lost track of who I am. I’ve just been bored. Getting dressed, for me, is an acute creative challenge, a tactile experience, a chance to answer questions about what I find aesthetically appealing and why. I’m excited to get it back. But I no longer believe it’s a genuinely profound form of self-expression, or a true solution to social alienation.
Fashion can tell a compelling story about a person, or an era, but I think it’s best understood as supplemental to the essence of either. By framing personal style as an expression of our truest selves, we overestimate clothes, and underestimate people. As Esther Leslie put it in her reflection on fashion under the purview of Marxism, “Fashion is concealment, a masquerade that changes the surface, but not the core situation.” Masks still hold potential. They can be grotesque or beautiful, intriguing in their ability to obscure, reveal, or complicate. But masks—clothes—are ultimately bound to their ancillary role; objects that orbit substance rather than truly inhabiting it. Suggesting otherwise, I think, is to worship a false god.
The most absurd thing I read last week was “The Man Who Thinks He Can Live Forever,” by Charlotte Alter for Time. Last week’s 15 things also included two books I recently enjoyed, my new favorite ice cream, the phrase that’s been in my head for 25 years (lol), and more. The rec of the week was the best music for fall, and I’m working on the playlist as we speak!
Hope you have a nice Sunday,
Haley