I Was Waiting For It To Hit Me

On life and clothes, real and imagined

At regular intervals I have to step away from online fashion content or I begin to feel anxious. It’s not your regular ‘just need to take a breather’ type of anxiety, but a more profound one, hinging on a nightmare-like state where my need to tap into something tangible gets completely lost and I am haunted by a never-ending stream of images that feeds a sense of inadequacy and exhaustion in me. As this feeling begins to unfold, I am unsure of my role in it all. The pace is too fast and too intense. What is it for anyway, trying to keep up? A familiar, existential question pops up again: if no one sees my outfit, am I even real? For the most part it’s just my perimenopausal brain that’s at fault, but like my therapist used to often remind me, our body can’t necessarily tell the difference between feeling and reality. The brain goes into red alert even when we know that the perceived threat might not be real at all.

I decided to take an extended break from Instagram a little over a week ago. The first week was full of FOMO, the second week has been much better. I’ve started to read books again and I can feel that I’m coming back to myself, slowly. My clothes have begun to feel more corporeal again. When I’m caught up in the whirlwind of style-related social media, I spend a lot of time and effort trying to figure out the superficial and the intellectual properties of clothing. I scan through images of myself and others, looking for both obvious and hidden messages that our clothes could reveal about us, on top of my usual ponderings that have to do with consumerism. Now I am reminded that my clothes are made of fibers that were made into fabric. The fabric was cut with a pattern and someone assembled the pieces with their hands. My clothes feel like artifacts that hang on my body rather than a dim reflection of an overwrought identity. I’m trying to make sense of the disconnect. How can something that has felt so muddled and impossible to pin down suddenly emerge with such profound clarity?

I was in the middle of one of my nostalgic bullshit rabbit hole adventures a week or so ago when I came across an extended version of ‘Beached’, the electronic music track from 2000 by Orbital and Angelo Badalamenti. Released for the soundtrack of Danny Boyle’s film ‘The Beach’, the exhilarating track features a voiceover from the young Leonardo DiCaprio who starred in the movie. He says:

You hope and you dream but you never believe that something is going to happen for you, not like it does in the movies. When it actually does, you expect it to feel different, more visceral, more real.

This got me thinking about how many imaginary qualities we pin on our clothing. Our longing for a reality that would somehow feel more real than reality itself keeps us in an endless, unsatisfying loop. We have a lot of expectations for our lives, and for the purpose of this newsletter, our clothes: the way they should make us look and feel, not to mention the life we could live in them, or the best version of ourselves we could become with their help. This is amplified by picture-perfect social media, skillful marketing, and the frantic pace of fashion. Style aficionados rarely dwell in the physical, tangible and durable reality of our clothing, but instead we focus on what our clothes might represent and what possible interpretations they could offer to the world about us. Every now and then we feel that we master the message we’re trying to convey, only to feel strangely empty afterwards. No matter how many clothing options we have in our closet, we’re still thinking that maybe there’s something else out there, something that would feel like it’s more real somehow, or at least enough. But nothing is.

As I’m getting dressed in the morning, I choose my clothes with more intention now that the social media-induced blur has somewhat subsided. Some of the clothes I pick out to wear I’ve owned for a long time, others are more recent. I see my clothes differently: not as an extension or an explanation of myself, but as objects that I like and live with. It’s a similar process to how I have breakfast: I pour the tea into my gilded vintage Soviet porcelain cup and my soy yogurt and muesli into an orange modernist bowl with pictures of hattifatteners. I do this every morning. There is no cohesive visual story. Nothing requires analysis or explanation. The cup and the bowl serve a purpose and I am attached to them as objects, and that’s enough. Breakfast is breakfast. Clothes are clothes. There’s freedom in moving away from the endless storytelling that social media encourages us to engage in.

Our consumerist society relies on our expectations to be unfulfillable and tied to products that can never live our life on our behalf. We might buy a new pair of trousers or a new dress, and for a moment we might feel more beautiful, edgy, cool, professional, more pulled together or like we fit in. The feelings are fleeting, and if they’re not witnessed and amplified by someone else, they don't come to fruition or they quickly wither away. The context of these feelings is social rather than personal. A deeper, personal context comes much later than the experience itself — hindsight is 20/20 — so it feels like we’re always chasing. Chasing, then, becomes a way of life, and often we’re too busy to notice when the context we had been waiting for becomes visible to us.

The other day, completely out of the blue, I thought of a Tasmanian guy called Dave whom I briefly met in 2003 while I was an exchange student in Budapest, Hungary. I had spent the first few months of my year in Budapest in a bit of a haze. I hated my first apartment, I felt lonely, my Hungarian was atrocious, and when I finally met some people I wanted to hang out with, with them came an underlying pressure to acquire experiences, to meet more people, to go to every event, to gather memories like trophies. None of it felt quite real and instead it was as if I was constantly hovering on the outskirts of life itself.

Dave was backpacking through Europe and we met in a bar one evening near Kálvin tér. He was funny, direct and charming, and what was striking about him was how in the moment he was, almost like a little kid. At an underground club later that night he danced like there was no tomorrow, just soaking up the moment like a sponge. He bounced almost uncontrollably under the strobe lights, taking up his own space within a sea of people who moved to the music with much more calculation and precision. I remember feeling envious of him. A lucky few people are like that, perfectly tuned into a time, a place and themselves when they are adults. Most people become too self-aware to allow reality to sweep them off their feet. We get caught up in the expectation of what life should feel like, so we don’t think much of the moment when we are actually in it. It’s only later when context emerges that we see that the moment, the feeling, might have been there all along.

Dave and I walked alongside the Pest side of the Danube at five in the morning after we had left the nightclub. I don’t remember what we talked about. I can’t remember what I wore, or what Dave wore. I can’t even picture his face. But now, more than twenty years later, I can go back to that moment in my mind and recognize that the precious feeling of being truly alive was just as real to me as it had seemed to be to him. I just didn’t know it at the time.

As I’m stepping away from social media once again, I’m reminded that it’s not what you buy or wear next. It's not who might see you, who you share your outfit pictures with, which influencers you follow, or where you find your inspiration. It’s always the life you live in your clothes, not the clothes themselves.

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