# wool words ## fashion and art as speech #### 18 nov 2024 I've been thinking about fashion lately. This is extremely unusual for me; I have spent most of my life having little to no interest in clothing beyond what feels comfortable to wear. This is why, for example, I refused to wear jeans for many years; it was a huge texture problem. (You know, thinking about it, this should have been a hint for me regarding other things...) It's also very hard to navigate the world of clothing and fashion while being a fat person; things are just not *made* for you. The world would rather you hide away and perish than exist as a fat person. But since meeting my partner, I've thought more about fashion, about the fact that, well, I have a body that occasionally is perceived by others. (Horror! Tragedy!) Mostly I think about how well I think my partner dresses, how well it suits him, and then I think... "yeah, I want that too." I'm too old and too tired to be looking at myself with such negativity anymore. Still, it was mostly in the back of my mind until CJ the X dropped this video:  CJ covers a lot of ground in this video, but I keep coming back to a particular thing they say partway through the video: >[!quote] (emphasis mine) >Dress is not an art project. **It's language**, and you're babbling incoherently. ... I believe art is about so much more than just doing whatever you want, insulated inside of your impenetrable, intrinsically justified subjectivity. Art is also about learning a language and expressing yourself through that language. Or, said another way, art is *communication*, and so is fashion. What does a person communicate with their style of dress? This has really stuck with me as I try to think about what I, personally, want to communicate with my style of dress, because...in all honesty, sometimes I just think it communicates to others that I'm Some Centrist White Girl, and the thought of that makes me *sick.* So I've been trying to consider how I might meet myself partway. What kinds of fashion am I drawn to? What do I want to communicate? I'm [[20240603 in the queer dressing room|a queer without labels]], but how do I express that in a way with clothing that doesn't make me want to evaporate? (More literally than anything. Layers are *so hard* because I become a puddle even with light layers in the dead of winter.) This has led me to butch fashion. Now, I'm not a lesbian. In fact I almost worry it would be appropriative in some way for me to dress this way precisely *because* I'm not a lesbian. And yet I look through all these photos, all these clothing choices...and I see something that feels *right.* That feels a bit closer to *me.* Some of it I still shy away from, but the specific combinations of layers, fabrics, the fits and cuts...I can see myself in some of these outfits. I *want* to see myself, and *be seen*, in these outfits. There's a lot more I could say here—much of it to do with the video, some of it to do with my recent reading material—but I'll leave it all for now with this: I don't want to go back to a time when I could pretend I didn't exist in the material world. I like being here, despite the fears and flaws of this world. Finding a way that I like to dress will, I think, add to that feeling that I *belong* here, on this planet, with people.