bITS 'N CHUNKS
There are a lot of factors that go into deciding on a fashion style that goes against the mainstream. The ones I'm most familiar with are gender presentation, race, and my weight.
Let's start with weight because that's the easiest. What is the face of any movement except Afropunk and Lolita? Skinny white girl. There is nothing inherently wrong with skinny white women, okay? There is nothing inherent wrong with being skinny. Body shaming can go both ways. But at this juncture, we're going to have to agree that fat people (in this case, women/femmes) get the brunt of it. Being skinny will get you tsk-tsk'd but people are legit terrified of being "fat", whatever your spectrum of fat is. Slim bodies are inherently "owed" certain fashions and fat people have a hard time penetrating that prejudice unless our bodies are essentially oversized versions of whatever mainstream society considers acceptable. Fat but curvy? You're in. No cellulite? Lie about your size? Able-bodied? Whatever it takes. What that means is, if you're fat and you decide you want to dress alt, people are going to throw a lot of DIY tips at you. I've been told to figure out how to sew and it's a great idea, but I wonder about the people who are unable to do so. It's already frustrating enough to find regular degular clothes and now you wanna be kawaii?! Let's bring race into it, too. If you're anything at all besides white in this world you've probably gotten the impression that white folks own everything. Talking good English, certain clothes, even shit from other non-white cultures. POC are present in just about every subculture but we're often told we shouldn't be simply for being POC. Even if we started the damn things. When I was young, goth and emo were just a space for the affluent white kids of my area to escape from "urban culture" (dog whistle), so to see me, a black, in their scene and actually enjoying myself must have been the biggest of nopes. Gender presentation is interesting because in theory how you want to feel will be expressed through your clothes. When I want to present femme which is most the time, I will wear a skirt. When I want to go a little masculine, I'll wear a damn skirt anyway or even pants. But wait a second, pants have been more or less unisex for a long time. The gag is, clothes have assigned gender but if you ask that t-shirt how it feels today, it's not going to say anything back because it's a shirt. So, you want to dress "provocatively" and you're struggling. First you gotta ask yourself, is this provocative or are people just shocked to see someone X race, X weight, X appearance, X financial level wearing this? Is this really who I am as a person? Has all the truly provocative clothing been swept up by edgy teenagers and fetish lingerie enthusiasts? And most importantly, do I look good in this?
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Ia! If you've come this far, you're either looking for weird or you know you've found it... TRESPASSING
September 2018
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