Clothes Make the Woman…Maybe
Style is a way to say who you are without having to speak. —Rachel Zoe Clothing has been one of the banes of my existence. As a teen and young adult, I had no sense of fashion and didn’t know how to acquire one. It doesn’t help that this was the ’90s, or that I didn’t have the money to do a lot of experimenting (or the inclination for thrifting). So I spent a lot of time feeling awkward and out of the loop. Not just because of my clothes, of course; I just had the general sense that I’d missed an instruction manual somewhere. Despite all that, I managed to start a professional career in a real office (after being chastised by my temp agency for taking a backpack to an interview…and here we pause to acknowledge that white-collar dress codes are deliberately classist, racist, and exclusionary). I realized I had to learn how to “look the part,” so I bought style magazines and signed up for an online style guide subscription, which helped a lot in demystifying the world of personal style and how to put an outfit together. I went through a phase of trying to wear blazers, dress pants, and pencil skirts, and trying to figure out how to find office-appropriate shoes that would stay on and also not kill my feet. (I finally settled on flat mary janes.) (Insert rant about women’s shoes, office-appropriate women’s bags, women’s fashion in general, pockets, and so on.) As…