I Dress Terribly on Purpose
The miniature rebellion of aggressively unflattering shapes
I never made a conscious decision to begin wearing ugly clothes.
I can remember no watershed moment where I thought to myself, “Today, I will don a shapeless gray sack and scowl at those who thwart me.”
Like so many of life’s great revolutions, my transmutation from American Eagle-wearing preteen to overall-encased adult happened terribly slowly. Hundreds of small decisions brought me to this place, where my closet is filled with dresses my mother would call “ill-fitting” and my shoe rack is stacked with clunky, orthopedic-looking sandals and wooden-soled boots. This collection of items, some of them embarrassingly expensive and others sourced from castoffs at Goodwill, accumulated over the past decade. At first, I didn’t know quite why I was drawn to clothes that my siblings mocked and my boyfriends disliked. But my husband recently made a plea for me to “wear a nice dress, an actually nice one,” to dinner, and it began to dawn on me that I’ve been costuming myself out of spite, dressing out of anger.
When it comes to my wardrobe, there are two versions of the truth, and both have their merits. In one version, I bought these things because I saw other women wearing them. These women were all of a specific type. They made…
