“Don’t: An Evolution of Personal Style”
It’s 1994 and I’m doodling in my notebook during Mr. Harkins’s Biblical Theology class. I feel a tap on my shoulder and turn around to see a red-faced Brian Huppe handing me a folded piece of paper, his grin bearing shiny silver braces. I take the paper and unfold it to find the note he wrote me. It reads “we know what you are (a lesbo). Go back to where you came from.” Ingesting the words feels like swallowing glass. I don’t care that he thinks I might fancy girls, but I know that’s beside the point when he chooses to call me a “lesbo.” I ask Mr. Harkins for the hall pass and dart into the bathroom to recover. I look in the mirror, seeking answers as to why I’m a target for schoolboy cruelty. I’m a punk rock alterna-girl in a Midwestern parochial school so there’s very little self-expression possible without violating the dress code. My hair is cropped in a short bob. Instead of a tartan skirt, I’m wearing navy blue polyester grandpa golf pants I bought at the Goodwill. Around my neck is a rhinestone encrusted cat collar. I’m 15, chubby, and freckle-faced with chipmunk teeth and all I want is the freedom to express myself without persecution from basic boys like Brian. A few years later, in the spring of my senior year, my favorite teacher Mr. Steinberg shares with me an essay written by a female student whose name I don’t remember. The essay is about style. The student chose me as her subject, writing that my style is “unique” and “fearless.” I’m incredibly flattered to know that my sartorial choices inspired a girl I didn’t even know.
After high school, my budding sexuality influences my personal style. I call my look “Latent Lolita,” inspired partly by Betsey Johnson, riotgrrls, and Courtney Love’s “kinderwhore” phase. I kick around in oxblood Doc Martens with lacy knee high stockings. I wear delicate vintage crinoline skirts as outerwear paired with too small baby tees that have cartoon characters like the Powerpuff Girls on them. You can see my black underwear through my slip because I want you to see it. My style is a carefully mediated provocation, an opportunity to point the middle finger at conventional modesty. I am met with disapproving eyes by women and leering eyes by creepy older men. My co-workers at the pizza place where I wait tables during undergrad shake their heads. One of them tells me my style is “wrong.” Keeping true to my punk rock roots, I don’t give a fuck about what any of them think about what I wear.
After college I am languishing in Kansas City, wasting my brain cells on rock shows at local bars every night of the week. My father worries that I am partying too much and not living up to my potential. His work transfers him to Boston and even though I’ve been out of the house for six years at this point, he strongly suggests I join the family in the move to the East Coast. Despite the fact that I am an adult who can make her own decisions, I feel the need to obey my father. I leave behind my wild nights for a sleepy harbor town where my only friends are my much younger siblings. My father pulls some strings to get me a job working as a customer service representative at a mutual fund company.
To get to Pioneer Investments in Boston’s financial district, I have to take a ferry. Every time I board the ferry I am reminded of the opening scene from the 1988 Melanie Griffith movie Working Girl about a secretary from Staten Island who works her way to the top. The Carly Simon song “Let the River Run” that underscores the film’s opening plays in my head. I love this movie. Because it’s the 1980s, Melanie Griffith and her friend, played by Joan Cusack, have hair as high as a skyscraper. Their makeup and clothes borrow from a noisy color palette. Their sartorial choices demarcate themselves from the upper echelon of Wall Street. In this film, style is a mark of social class where the lower classed characters are more sartorially expressive than their elegantly muted upper class counterparts. Despite my earnest attempts to fit in and wear my version of “biz caj” in my financial industry job, I stick out like a sore thumb. I have no business being there. I don’t care about money and I don’t care about pleasing the type of people who work in middle management. One day my manager, Komal, takes me aside for a little chat about my work performance. She suggests I tone down my wardrobe. “Wouldn’t you rather be known as Megan the hard worker instead of Megan who wears bright colors?” I look down at my yellow cowl-necked sweater and my turquoise corduroy Marc Jacobs skirt. Aside from my morning coffee, my brightly colored clothes are the only source of joy at this job. And besides, I’m a telephone representative. I could show up to work wearing pasties, a jockstrap and some wellies and the customers would be none the wiser. I resign myself to a wardrobe of beige and tweeds because at this point in my life I don’t feel like fighting to be myself anymore.
Thankfully my time at Pioneer Investments is cut short by my decision to move back to Kansas City after the loneliest nine months of my life. I return to a buzzing social life and a slightly matured version of my Latent Lolita look. I pick back up with the burlesque troupe I performed with before Boston, the Burly Q Girly Crew, who are chosen to accompany the electroclash pop star Peaches during her performances in Austin, Texas during the South By Southwest music festival. That week in March of 2006 was a whirlwind of outrageous excess. Our terrorist drag-style burlesque is a perfect complement to Peaches’s make ’em gag aesthetic. A few months later while drinking porch beers with my roommates, I get a phone call from my fellow Burly Q’er, Taylor. She asks me if I’m anywhere near a Glamour magazine. I tell her there’s a Walgreen’s down the street so yeah. “Why, Taylor? Are you in it?” “No, girl. You are. You’re a Glamour Don’t!” I remember loving the Dos and Don’ts feature when I thumbed through my mother’s copies of Glamour. I always wondered who these women were with the bars over their eyes, if they knew they’d end up as a fashion casualty splashed on the glossy pages of Glamour. Well, I can tell you I had no clue that I was being photographed when I was standing on a street corner in Austin. My friends and I drove to the Walgreen’s, grabbed the Glamour, and there I was. My crime? Dressing like a little girl. It was my last day in Austin, and the hot, rainy weather resulted in a confusing outfit that paired a light purple windbreaker with a flouncy green skirt, pink leggings made by my fashion designer pal Peggy Noland, and flip flops. It wasn’t my greatest fashion moment but it wasn’t my worst either. While I can imagine that most women would be mortified if they ended up a Glamour Don’t, I am not most women. As a lover of irreverence, I thrive on mortification. Being called a “Don’t” by a so-called fashion authority was the pinnacle of my personal style. My mere presence was constantly being met with “nopes” by peers and higher ups, and instead of bowing to their complaints, I prided myself for daring to go against standard conventions of style in a world beholden to the normal.
I left Kansas City for New York City in the fall of 2007. You think you know what weird is until you spend an evening in the East Village. The streets are filled with punk rock bohemians who express themselves through their dress no matter their age. Living in New York, I thrived on the anonymity and the freedom to dress however I pleased without comment. Like many women, as I approached my thirties, I started to tone down my fashion daringness. Not because I was concerned about “dressing my age,” I just no longer welcomed attention from anyone, negative or otherwise. Today, clothes are a necessity to get from point A to point B. If I could wear a cloak of invisibility, I would. I do not know if this is a response to caring less about wanting to provoke people, or the sad effect of societal apathy towards women over a certain age. At this particular point in my life, after years of being a clothing iconoclast, my current style is in a fit of flux. I waver between phoning it in in the name of comfort, or dressing to impress when I’m out at drag shows in Chicago’s Boystown. While I tend to dress with uncertainty today, I do know that when I reach my 70s, I have every intention of returning to my roots, adopting the style of the punk rock grannies I saw strutting the streets of New York City with Manic Panic dyed hair, miniskirts, fishnets and combat boots who refuse to go quietly into that good night.