Last week, I went thrifting with my best friend. Finding good deals on clothes we love may very well be the glue that has held our friendship together over the past six years. She and I split the racks, and if we found something the other might like, we’d yell across the store and hold it up for its judgment day. She usually trails closely behind me on my assigned racks because I always miss things. Without fail, she’s sure to find Free People on a rack that was mine. When she found some low-rise Levi’s, I was ecstatic. I’d been looking for a pair to try on for months.
I tried them on and I fell in love. They weren’t quite the baggy fit I was looking for, but they really fit the Rory Gilmore aesthetic I am going for this fall. I could see myself wearing them all the time. The Pinterest board in my head was exploding with ideas.
There was only one problem: Despite being chronically online, I hadn’t seen anyone my size wear them. The girls I had seen make them work were all two to three sizes smaller than me. They looked great when my best friend was in my ear telling me so, but when I got home and stared in the mirror for what felt like hours, they were emphasizing everything I hate about myself.
What I thought was a success turned into a failure. I decided I would donate them before I left home. $8 wasted. I should have known that they weren’t for my body type. It was my fault for thinking that could be changed anyway. It felt almost like one of my dreams was crushed. As an OOTD fiend, I had seen them look so amazing on other people, and it was crushing to find out that I could never be them.
I went to bed feeling defeated and disappointed. Luckily, my dreams brought a second life for my newest thrift shop gem. Not all hope was lost just yet.
I had this really awkward but so cute skirt that I couldn’t figure out how to wear for the longest time. No shoes looked right with it because it was slightly above tea length. I was on the verge of donating it even though I jumped for joy when I thrifted it in the fall. One morning in April, I woke up in my tiny dorm bed, late for class, but with a realization that made it all worth it: It’s a dress! That outfit, the skirt turned dress, is probably one of my favorite outfits I’ve ever worn. A few days ago, I had yet another epiphany.
I dreamed of a classic Saturday night on the second floor of Mary Markley Residence Hall. My best friend’s and my roommate’s, the Annas, room was the meeting place before we embarked on a chilly Saturday night in Ann Arbor. Drake blaring from the speaker, Anna Haf was putting on her lip gloss in front of the full-length mirror. Anna Sperry was doing last-minute economics work, classic. In my dream, I was hounding Anna Sperry about what she was doing for economics since we were in the same class. This is when it came to me. As I scanned the room, Anna Haf was wearing a fitted cotton T-shirt with low-rise jeans. When I woke up I put on the exact outfit she was wearing. I needed to see if this simple — or well-thought-out to an untrained eye — outfit could turn the tides for my coveted Levis.
It was exactly what I needed. These jeans were suddenly made for me.
Clothes have made me hate the way that I look for years. I wore large shirts when I should have worn a small for years in middle school. I have done the classic crying-in-the-dressing-room-because-why-do-these-jean-shorts-not-fit-me-anymore. Finding clothes was my least favorite thing to do. I always left crushed, feeling like I would never be pretty enough or small enough to wear the outfits I want.
I didn’t always feel this way. Whenever I was younger, before the all-consuming and unfortunate self-loathing of 13, clothes were my favorite way to express who I was. I will never forget when my grandmother bought me a pair of silver sparkle combat boots. These shoes gave me so much confidence and pure joy. I had never seen anything so perfect, so meant for me. I strutted down the halls of my elementary school with more confidence in a single day than I had all of my time in middle school combined. I wore those boots until all of the sparkles came off. What changed? What turned my devotion to expressing myself into disdain?
As with every other person who is my age, the introduction of unrestricted internet access may have played a huge role. I started seeing Instagram posts of girls who were half my size and I began to think that I was the problem. In my mind, in order to be confident and pretty — to myself — I needed to be them. I needed to dress like them and exude all that they were. At 13, this fake gospel that I fed myself made me think that fashion was not a way to express myself, but rather a way to make myself more likable and blendable. It was a fool-proof method to becoming this unattainable popular girl I was fiending to be.
From then on, the way that I dressed was always a copy of someone else. Whoever I thought was who I wanted to be at the time, I copied them. I bought Doc Martens because a girl from my high school, who I believed to be the coolest girl I knew, had them. I wore my hair in French braids because all of the popular girls wore them on Spring Fling. I changed the way I dressed entirely to reflect the way that I thought my ex-boyfriend wanted me to. The way that I dressed and acted was a mirror of what I thought everyone else wanted from me. The most heartbreaking thing for me to realize now is that these standards were completely manufactured in my head. No one else pushed these upon me. Although this criteria was informed by the tiny lifestyle YouTubers who dominated my middle school media intake, in the end, it was all completely self-inflicted as a result of my inescapable insecurity.
It was not until the summer before my freshman year of college that I moved toward fashion as a creative outlet rather than a way to shape the way the world perceived me. I bought Doc Martens Mary Janes as a reward for hiking 20 miles in the Upper Peninsula. So many people told me not to buy them. They were all wrong. I decided to take a fashion risk for the first time in so many years and it was the best decision I ever made. My Mary Janes forced me outside of my boundaries. For Mary Janes to reach their full potential, you have to style them. You can’t just throw them on with a random tank and shorts, or so I thought then.
Mary Janes paired with the inspiration I got from everyone I walked by on campus made me realize that fashion was a creative endeavor for me. I loved choosing my outfit each day, so much so that more often than not the area in front of my dresser was covered by the rejects of the day, much to my very organized roommate’s dismay.
My outfits are my own little art pieces that I can wear, which is the coolest thing ever. It has given me more confidence than any weight loss ever could. I wear outfits in my rural hometown that bring weird looks and questionable comments, but I pay them no mind anymore. The problem was never my physical being, but rather the mental turmoil that created a never-ending cycle of self-hatred. Finding clothes that I love rather than what I think will make me seem cool to others changed the way I see myself and clothes for the better.
Daily Arts Writer Sarah Patterson can be reached at sarahpat@umich.edu.
The post On personal style and self-inflicted standards appeared first on The Michigan Daily.
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