Dress to impress

I’ve always known I was something of a head-turner. No false modesty. If you know the effect you have on people, own it.

The fact is, I can walk into a room and immediately heads turn to look just about anywhere but at me: at a bird, a wall, straight into a solar eclipse if need be.

You didn’t ask in what direction the heads were turning, did you? (Ba dum tss.)

Far too often, tickets or invites for parties and fetes come with a scribble at the end: Dress to impress. Who should I set my sights on impressing? The fete organisers already have my money; surely they require naught else of me. Or is it that I must not ruin the general milieu of glamour by my reliable dowdiness?

I think about dressing now, about clothes, about how I look, far more than I ever thought possible. I feel like this is the first true exposé I’ve written.

I imagine everyone I’ve ever met from secondary school to about last Tuesday flailing about in various degrees of shock and something akin to betrayal. Everyone says I have a uniform. They’re not wrong. My closet is 60 per cent jeans, white T-shirts, white shirts. The rest is mostly underwear.

But what do we think about when we think about dressing to do this impressing? First bit is to acknowledge that we do. But not like the invitations suggest. I think we dress to make an impression. We present to represent.

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: culture, personal curated looks, power, see-meh-here. Now we are left with the rest of us. This may overlap or not.

Of the less recognised categories, armour is my favourite. Possibly – likely – because it is so unremarked-upon. Women in particular do it all the time. I know a psychiatrist who once asked a patient why she was wearing so much makeup. “Armour,” she answered. She was shielding her true-true self from the world under layers of masking and colour. She was distracting her judges. Anyone who would dare to comment on her real emotional or mental state. Brava. Also sad. Sad that she and so many of us do that. I’ve become a lot like her.

I’ve become interested in how dress changes as we do. This may or may not be much ado about appearance, but over time I’ve watched it morph. When we are young we dress in what we are put into, for good or ill. Later, we may dress to rebel. At some point we consider wearing what we think is attractive to them as we wish to take home with us. We will meet the grave or pyre in what others choose to say goodbye to us in. When is it really about us?

Case studies on dressing. I offer the following: I remember a sister in her 20s in a khaki aviator jumpsuit. In it, she went from being shy and self-effacing to an absolute supermodel from the golden era. And one who wore full-skirted dresses and heels when she was at UWI because that was who she was. And she cared nothing about what others thought. And then there’s the sister who was miserable on her wedding day because of a hairdressing nightmare. Those were not tears of joy that day. Oh, but for her son’s wedding, in a white-and-gold sari, in a sea of fashionable gowns, she was magnificent. It swirled around her in her grace and joy.

One day, after a fortifying lunch with a nephew, we went out in search of a tuxedo. So triumphant was he in the swiftness of the process, I later found he’d also got himself a pink sports jacket. Because why not? This dressing business is a dangerous thing.

Remember to talk to your doctor or therapist if you want to know more about what you read here. In many cases, there’s no single solution or diagnosis to a mental health concern. Many people suffer from more than one condition.