Dressed, Mostly

Sometime in the summer of 2011, I answered a fashion questionnaire from a moving train because that was apparently what I was doing with my Thursday afternoon. The blog was running a recurring style feature and I’d ended up as one of three participants. The other two had more interesting things to say about clothes.

Jana had just come back from the woods outside Osnabrück on what had started as a blueberry expedition and ended in mild medical anxiety. The blueberries were gone—eaten, apparently, by everyone and everything that had gotten there first—so she pivoted to blackberries, ate one directly off the bush, and was immediately informed by her companion in a tone of maximum alarm that she’d just swallowed a tapeworm. She was now Googling symptoms while being photographed in a Minkpink blouse and a pair of Ash shoes she’d found reduced from €190 to €50 at Urban Outfitters. She said she normally never wears trousers—except in the woods, because her mother had warned her about ticks.

Van Anh was nineteen, still in Berlin, about to move to London to study economics and politics. She was also running a fashion blog called Chopstick Panorama somewhere in the hidden depths of the internet—her phrase. Her style moved between all-black and chaotic color with no fixed address. Sometimes sweet, sometimes edgy, she said. My style is as changeable as the current weather. She’d already bought most of the outfit at Topshop and H&M in anticipation of London, which was either homesickness in advance or just smart shopping.

I wore a sports-department beanie, a jacket from a Swedish label called Björkvin, and black socks. Always black socks—I acknowledged this when asked what I hated about my look, and I still hadn’t solved the problem. When asked why I wore that outfit instead of something else, I responded by asking why the blog had so many naked women on it, which was a reasonable counter-question and also not entirely off-topic. When asked whether I looked better naked or dressed, I said clearly dressed, then immediately walked it back with an "although, hmm," which tells you exactly where my head was at twenty-seven.

Clothes as self-expression is both completely true and very easy to overthink into paralysis. Jana had accidentally eaten a forest berry and was consulting WebMD in a good outfit. Van Anh had a coherent aesthetic philosophy at an age when most people are still figuring out which cut of jeans to buy. I had a beanie, a deflected question, and a sock problem. Fashion is a language, and some of us are more fluent than others.