femme

The empress has new clothes

I showed my wedding photos to some new friends. I watched their jaws drop in tandem as I swiped through memories of me getting ready with my sister and mother, my smile as I walked barefoot down the aisle holding a bouquet and my father’s arm, the sunset as Husband and I ran across a quiet beach, freshly hitched.

I didn’t know what I expected them to say, but it was not this:

You look so… girly.

The word—spoken with slight derision from my gloriously metropolitan friends—I suppose was true. In my flowing white dress, shiny studs in my ears, pink flowers in my hair, I was feminine incarnate.

I barely recognize that girl now. And not just because I sit on the other side of that union, on the other side of the world, but because here, in LA, I couldn’t tell you the last time I wore a dress, or diamond earrings, or anything floral. My hair, which was carefully curled and pinned back that day, is almost always tangled now, too long and too blonde and left loose over my shoulders.

Very little, if anything, about me now could be called girly. My girlish clothes I abandoned across the Atlantic, gifted to friends or donated to local charity shops. It wasn’t a conscious choice; something in me just knew I wouldn’t need them where I was headed.

Today, I wear basketball shorts, cut-off tees, beat-up cowboy boots or Nikes most days. My jeans are ripped, my tank tops racer and boyish. I don’t wear (nor own) a bra. My lacy lingerie molts in my underwear drawer back in North Carolina—I have no use for it here. Wearing it does not make me feel sexy; it makes me feel false.

When I’m thrifting, I skip the women’s racks and head straight for the men’s shirts section. Anything oversized, tie-dyed, worn, that’s my MO. I’m reaching for items I would have never considered two years ago.

George, my man of the moment, used to work in fashion, a fact I find to be excruciatingly hot. Yesterday, he described clothes to me as “the most immediate and accessible form of expression of one’s self and one’s culture,” a phrase that would sound pretentious coming from any other mouth but his (that generous, capable mouth).

The further away I get from men—emotionally speaking; I was physically quite close to George just last night—the further I get from the definition of femininity I once prescribed to. I am expressing a new self: that of a woman expanding. I am expressing a new culture: single, childfree Eastsider, wearing whatever the fuck she wants.

We hear a lot these days about the male gaze. I hadn’t realized the extent to which I was catering to it until I began wringing it from my wardrobe, my body, my voice—both written and spoken. I’m still working on it, but it feels good. There’s nothing wrong with that more traditional version of feminine dressing, of clean edges and cinched waists and muted colors, but I realize now that it was never my version. Or at least not the version I feel called to express now.

Currently, I feel the most feminine when I’m dressed like a slutty Pete Davidson (this is redundant; Pete Davidson is slutty). I feel feminine in a big shirt and socks, dancing around my apartment. I feel feminine when I’m dressed messy, casual, comfortable.

This is only mostly true. When I’m ovulating, anything skintight will do. But in luteal, follicular, or those few days of menstruation when rage simmers close to the surface of my skin, the more “masculine” the better: cargo pants, graphic tee, hoodie, baseball hat.

Perhaps that is the most feminine thing a woman can do: to abide by her cycles. Not just the monthly ones but all the cycles of her life.

And this cycle of my life is calling for more risks.

A few weeks ago, I was dressed in what I thought to be a terribly stylish outfit, for a walk with a guy friend around the Silver Lake Reservoir. An excess of gold jewelry, baggy shorts, a cropped tee, high-top sneakers. He made some offhand comment about how weird I was dressed, though it was expressed more as a shared joke than as a chiding. My cheeks reddened on instinct, but after a brief pause I replied, I like it. And it was true.

That word’s been coming up a lot for me lately. My sister commented on a photo I posted recently: This is cool and weird. At first, I guffawed at the word. Why is it weird??? I texted her in a panic.

Later, though, I’d recognize it for the compliment it was.

Let me take a moment to provide to you Merriam Webster’s definition of the word weird:

Weird (noun)

1. of strange or extraordinary character: ODD, FANTASTIC

2. of, relating to, or caused by witchcraft or the supernatural: MAGICAL

3. FATE, DESTINY

Merriam, whom I choose to imagine as an exquisitely dressed grey-haired woman with a sharp quill and a sharper tongue (the reality is far more boring) tells us:

“Weird derives from the Old English noun wyrd, essentially meaning ‘fate.’ By the 8th century, the plural wyrde had begun to appear in texts as a gloss for Parcae, the Latin name for the Fates—three goddesses who spun, measured, and cut the thread of life. In the 15th and 16th centuries, Scots authors employed werd or weird in the phrase ‘weird sisters’ to refer to the Fates. William Shakespeare adopted this usage in Macbeth, in which the ‘weird sisters’ are depicted as three witches.”

Extraordinary. Fantastic. Witchy. Goddess with the power to architect fate, to dictate destiny…

Who would ever want to be that?

So, I choose to believe that it’s a good sign I’m dressing weirder every day. Maybe dressing weird is the first step in living authentically, of healing. Of stepping off-script. Of self-authorship. Of architecting one’s own fate.

Weird has begun to seep into every aspect of my being. I’ve got weird friends. I’ve got weird hobbies. I’ve got weird music taste. I’ve got weird art in my house. Vibrant, abstract, irreverent pieces—naked women riding horses, a cigarette in a shoe, a man’s head exploding into a bouquet of flowers. This week I bought a painting of a Yorkshire terrier for no good reason and hung it above the electric guitar I’m learning to play.

Being alone is a blessing because you get to talk to yourself—not just aloud (though I do this often) but in your style, your décor, your habits, your interests. I hear my own voice now. I didn’t before, in that girlish era. Correlation or causation matters not. I’m dressing different; I’m feeling better.

The same girlfriend to whom I showed my wedding photos told me of the three-word rule, a trick she learned online from some well-to-do celebrity stylist. To establish your personal style, she told me, pick three words, and then ensure that every outfit you curate (or every item you purchase) could be described with at least one of those words.

We workshopped it. Androgynous fit me, more than ever. Vintage, too—I rarely wear anything new anymore. I told her I’d like to think cool fits. She pled the fifth on that one.

I didn’t tell her this, but I thought it: only one word really matters, right?

Mine.