Dressing for the Part
“The first purpose of clothes…was not warmth, but ornament. Among wild people, we find tattooing and painting even prior to clothes.”
Thomas Carlyle
I woke from a dream this morning—a dream about a dress I had designed being fitted on a woman. The dress was a melon-colored shift with four ornamental buttons on the front, zipper in the back and no belt. I really liked its color and its simple elegance. Clothes have been called, “the furniture of the mind,” and, it’s true, you can tell a lot about a person by how they dress. I rarely shop, and when I do, it’s usually at a thrift store; but I like to take something ordinary and dress it up a little with a scarf or a simple piece of jewelry.
Ornamentation is as old as the human race. Modern tattooing is still about spirituality and belonging, as it has always been. Gang tats say, ‘I belong to this group,’ and butterflies, roses, hearts and lotus blossoms are spiritual symbols, as are snakes and eagles. Just having a tattoo of any kind, in fact, says ‘I belong’. We humans want to declare that we’re part of something bigger, something identifying and powerful, and belonging is harder than it used to be because of our mobility. Just a couple of generations ago, western people stayed where they were born, and family name was how they identified themselves. Now, we are all over the map, literally.
Dress is sometimes highly individual, and sometimes conforms to expected norms. What has made Lady Gaga such a sensation is that you never know what she’s going to wear, but you know it will be outrageous. The clothing ‘the beautiful people’ wear on the red carpet is supposed show just how glamorous they are. You will never see a dowdy get-up at the Oscars. Professional men still wear suits and ties to identify their relative importance compared to their staff.
Nuns wear habits, Muslim women wear head coverings, monks wear robes, Arabs wear the turbans of their tribe, Scots wear the plaid of their clan, and so on. Our clothing is an external manifestation of an internal reality. It represents a dimension of our psyche laid bare. Pay attention to your dress today. What does it say about you?
In the spirit,
Jane
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