Once again, I am waiting at Sheffield train station. It is 15:57 on Friday 24th March, 2023. A beautiful woman is journaling in the waiting room. She’s wearing a moss-green headscarf secured by three dangly hair clips, black jeans and Dr Martens.
I’m sitting with my boyfriend. He’s just bought a dark green hoodie. It suits him. It matches his shoes, which also match his trousers.
I’m wearing a black skirt, Dr Martens, a David Bowie t-shirt and a leopard-print fur coat. I feel happy and I like my outfit. It has just inspired an article.
I get on the train – I begin to write. The words fall from my thumbs while I muse about my outfit. I am asking myself: ‘why did you spend so much time debating whether to buy this t-shirt? You love it now.’
So why?
Because you have a budget?
Because it might not have fitted?
Because you might be too loud?
Hang on. Too loud? Too obvious? Let’s pause here and think.
It appears I was scared of being ‘too much’. I’m happy wearing my heart on my sleeve but I was frightened to wear some of my personality on my t-shirt.
With the joy of expression comes great vulnerability and the risk of feeling silly.
SILLY? Silly, I ask you?! When life is finite and summer comes but once a year! And yet the fear of feeling silly (not even being silly) remains. It is definitely the feeling and not a concrete standard of silliness, because who is setting that standard? The issue is that I feel too loud, not that I am, objectively, too loud. An official threshold where being ‘too loud’ begins is an illusion, but it’s an illusion I’ve retained. I must dispel it.
In my mind, I am haunted by the memory of the ‘cool’ people at school, who always wore expensive brands on non-uniform days. I was acutely aware of not being one of these people. But I didn’t really want to be cool – I was always jealous of the people who appeared to wear what they wanted – but I didn’t particularly want to be one of them either. What I wanted, really, was to look COOL, but to not be too OBVIOUS. Ideally, I would be ATTRACTIVE and INVISIBLE. I was already self-conscious enough as a teenager – why would I make others more conscious of me?
Even now, if I wore this magnificent Bowie-leopard-print-outfit in my hometown, I would feel very self-conscious. There would be much too much of me on show. In a small village I am more obviously anomalous, leopard-clad. But is being anomalous really that scary?
Shortly before I came to Oxford, I was sitting at a school prize-giving event when I suddenly thought:
- Cool is what other people are when you don’t know them very well
- And if you know them and they’re still cool, they have reimagined ‘cool’.
As this thought arrived, I realised that I was on my way to leaving my school mindset. The status quo, which everyone had been trying to stick to, was, in fact, powerless. I was not ruled by their opinion, or what I perceived was their opinion. In fact I had never been ‘ruled’ at all: I only wanted to blend in.
Now, as I shed the remnants of my high-school skin, I am petitioning you, reader, to help me alter the collective meaning of ‘cool’.
I now conceptualise ‘cool’ as: wearing what you feel like; trying something different that you’ve wanted to try; not doing what you don’t want to do; extending experimental freedom to yourself and others.
In my world, cool people will understand that I’m not fixed in their image of me from last Tuesday. Clothes will be a place to curl up in and to grow through. What I liked most about the clothes of the people I shared the waiting room with that day was that they seemed to feel at home wearing them. I didn’t know the lady with the headscarf but I felt she’d had those clips forever, it was a small ritual to put them on and that they were objects she treasured. She seemed at peace with her clothes, like she’d chosen her outfit carefully a long time ago and, to use a telling metaphor, getting dressed was now like slipping on an old pair of shoes (albeit with new laces). What was important, both with her hair clips and my boyfriend’s hoodie, was that they belonged to their wearers. The original price was irrelevant. I would like cool clothes to have these values – not monetary ones.
Sometimes, when I see the third years walking round Oxford in their incredibly cool outfits, appearing so self-assured, I think: ‘GORGEOUS! OUTRAGEOUS!’ I love it. But it’s not outrageous, it’s simply an expression of yourself at that moment. I want to be like them. No, I don’t mean that either. I like them because, like Brooke in Mistress America, they have the kind of beauty that makes you want to be more like yourself.
But right now, (Friday 24th March, 2023) I am wearing my coat on the train, and I look absolutely fabulous. If I don’t like it, I can change. I can change in two years, I can change tomorrow. I can be loud now, because the voice of my clothes is a sight worth hearing.