Describe Your Fashion Sense?

What a prompt, this week, from LongAndShortReviews: "Describe your fashion sense."

I'm sure some people, if asked to describe my fashion sense, would say "She hasn't got any," or maybe "Lost in the nineties." I definitely don't like to spend a lot of time dressing before I go out. I like to be able to reach into the closet and pull out something serviceable.

I observe that this irritates people who are trying to market "fashion," but as a matter of fact I am a trendsetter. I look, once or twice a year, at the Mad Ave Misogyny Parade that calls itself "fashion." I have a good laugh. If I do see anything worth buying, or more likely worth digging out of a storage bin, that is an idea whose time has come. 

It's likely to be a color. I have some rigid rules about styles:

1. Shoes: Should be shaped like human feet, not hogs' trotters. Human feet are wider at the toes than at the heels, not vice versa. Boot heels can be one inch high. which helps some people maintain a heels-down grip on the stirrups when riding a horse. Shoe heels should be flat. Shoe soles should be flexible and should not clatter on tile floors. Shoes that fit properly do not need lacing, which looks mannish to me. No part of a shoe should be stiff unless it's a special protective steel-reinforced work boot, which does not pretend to be comfortable and should be left in a locker at the job site. Shoes are the one thing in the closet for which artificial, even petrochemical, materials are acceptable.

2. Hosiery: Should be 100% cotton. Because doctors have advised hosiery addicts to change socks or stockings often, some people imagine that keeping their legs encased in fabric all day actually helps with the fungus infections those people always seem to have., Wrong. Southern Preppies, who wear either shoes or socks but not both, and by "shoes" usually mean sandals, don't get those fungus infections. Hosiery addicts get them. Fungus does not grow on surfaces that are air-dried most of the time. Fungus grows on surfaces that are kept warm, damp, and dark all the time. I think tights can look cute, and I still have a few pairs I wore in the 1980s, but nowadays I wear them only in subzero weather, not all day long.

3. Trousers: Our culture requires men to wear trousers on all occasion as a punishment for Adam's sin being worse than Eve's. As a woman I do prefer trousers to skirts for activities like gardening and home improvement. For jobs where I sit still, skirts rule. Hip pockets are a traditional decoration we can do without. Pockets should be roomy (as should trousers), enough to hold a water bottle or a spread-out hand or a paperback book. Patch pockets down below hand level are a casual style inspired by work gear, not for everyone or for every occasion, but they're too useful to be allowed to go completely out of fashion. 

4. Skirts: Must cover the knees at all times. Should keep mosquitoes off the ankles, preferably. Skirts don't need to conceal the fact that women have legs--a silly Victorian idea--but if they don't cover, fan, and decorate a lot more than shorts do, what's the point? Skirts should swish gracefully when the wearer walks, and should comfortably accommodate a long step. 

5. Pieces and Layers: The fewer the better. For one thing, visually cutting the figure in half with one color above the waist and one below is the easiest way to make the figure look shorter. For people who are over six feet tall that's a good idea. For people who are under five feet eight it makes no sense. More important than that, the fewer seconds I need to spend adding pieces in order to get dressed, the better I'm pleased. Dresses are always more fun to wear than suits. 

6. T-shirts: I don't share the perception that plain white ones look like underwear. I merely think plain white ones show dirt too easily. T-shirts are unisex, except that those of us who prefer to lead other people's eyes away from the C-cups prefer to put the big picture on the back. As a bonus, a plain-fronted, solid-colored T-shirt works just fine as the blouse in a suit.

7. Shirts generally: Button-down woven shirts look great on the trim flat figures of men. They look tacky on women. Fully fashioned plackets that cover the buttons and the little gaps that inevitably form in between them are a fiddly, time-consuming, dressy style that seems like the female version of "Black Tie." Things tailored to fit a specific woman on a specific evening, and buttoned at the side or back, are the female version of "White Tie." In situations where men wear blue or gray suits with colored ties or none, women's shirts should be loosely draped pieces of knitted fabric, dressier looking than T-shirts but no less easy to move in.

8. Hats: Are used to shade the eyes and/or turn snow, so they don't really need to match anything, but they are more decorative when they do. (Obviously useless hats are hookerwear.) Hand-knitted sweaters often come with matching hats. Summer dresses could come with matching straw hat bands and ties.

9. Underwear: Is not a good source of inspiration for what clothes should look like.

10. Outerwear: It's not really the fashion industry's fault that so many people so grossly overestimate the amount of protection from the weather they need. Still, it would be nice if outerwear were marketed as it is worn by active healthy people, rather than by people who seem to be running high fevers. If the water on the ground is not frozen, a cardigan (with a matching hat) or a trench coat is ample insulation; heavier, bulkier overcoats are for colder weather--or for sick people.

11. Colors, generally: Right after wearing things that are roomy enough to allow us to move naturally, the next most important rule of style is to wear colors that suit our complexions. About 70% of humankind are "Winters," 20% are "Summers," 7% are "Autumns," and 3% are "Springs." Anything in your own colors will look good enough on you to distract attention from its other shortcomings, so if you're limited to handed-down clothes, sort them by color. New, stylish, even well made, clothes will be a waste of money if they're not in your colors. 

12. Styles, generally: As Susan Jane Gilman learned, no matter how much a woman may like the idea of unisex clothing, most of us don't have unisex body shapes and will look a lot better in styles designed to celebrate female curves. Not that men don't think we look cute in clothes borrowed from them. They do. So, partly that's a territory-marking instinct, and partly it's true. Couples at the wearing-each-other's-clothes stage of romance are cute. The silly grins, mostly. When we buy our own clothes for ourselves, though, most of us look and feel better in the styles women have traditionally liked for ourselves. The "menswear look" of "boyfriend jeans" loses its magic when the misproportioned clothes have not been permeated with our own men's pheromones. Fitted waists, full skirts, and even the occasional ruffle or lace trimming, do more for us than unisex clothes ever will.

With those rules established...I followed the First Ladies on Twitter when Twitter was functional. Their accounts weren't very functional--all real celebrity accounts were routinely hacked into, deleted, and reopened, so people following celebrities didn't get many of their tweets--but all good Washingtonians study the First Lady's outfits for any tips or touches that may be applicable to us. That the First Lady may belong to a different generation, color "season," etc., so most of her clothes wouldn't suit us, is the point. We can't copy her whole outfits and don't try. People who are in the loop notice a color, a collar, etc., inspired by hers. (This is also why news watchers get so vicious about the First Lady's fashion blunders. There ought to be a little sympathy for the first time a woman's bra gives out and she realizes the body in it is starting to give, too, but for White House watchers that sympathy seems to be overshadowed by a felt need to assure everybody that that's not a look anybody wants to copy.) I'm totally out of the loop by now, of course, so it was fun to be able to dress as if I weren't.

New York? Hollywood? Anywhere in Europe? Pooh. Nearly all Americans live in nicer places than those and should be proud to dress accordingly. 

I feel about New York fashions almost the way I feel about traditional "ethnic costumes." There is no old rigid rule that says you have to have been born in India to wear a sari or in Japan to wear a kimono or in the Netherlands to wear wooden shoes. Actually a lot of people who have lived in those places, or whose friends came from those places, have been given very nice traditional ethnic outfits as a souvenir of those friendships. Non-Indian women even report that while working or travelling in India they were pressured to wear a sari, given "clueless foreigner" or even "hated foreigner" treatment without one. Once they come back from India, though, continuing to wear the sari seems like advertising that they're trying to change their citizenship. There can be good reasons for such a statement to be true; it should not be made if it's not true. Well, I've not taken any vows of service in New York, or married anyone from there, either.