So, piggybacking off various recent posts about my spring wardrobe and dressing myself after weight loss, let me tell you something about me and clothes.
I'm not naturally very good at dressing myself.
(Fun fact: I even have trouble operating a buttonhole, because of an old injury to my wrist. But that's not really what I'm talking about. I am talking about my fashion sense.)
I watch my four-year-old daughter happily change her outfit six times a day, and I sort of marvel at it. She loves clothes and dressing up or down (up mostly) to suit the occasion. When I was a child and young teen, though, I was pretty clueless about clothes. It wasn't that I only wanted to wear comfortable things, or even that I didn't care how I looked — in fact I could get very anxious about what people would think if I wore something unusual-for-me to school, or even out to dinner with my family. And I was, of course, very self-conscious of being heavy, and wouldn't wear anything that I thought exacerbated that problem.
I can remember having some fights with my dad and stepmom because I had arrived at their house without having packed any clothes that were "nice enough" to go to dinner, in their view, and refusing to do things like tuck in my blouse and wear a belt because I thought I looked less fat with my blouse untucked. I have always been pretty hopelessly unstylish by nature.
A few years ago, however, I figured something out: It is not necessary to be naturally stylish to avoid looking decidedly unstylish. It is only necessary to avoid certain pitfalls. It is, of course, possible to get very creative and interesting with color if you are gifted at putting them together, but if like me you are not so gifted, well, I avoid clashes by setting rules for myself like "one colored thing, everything else neutral" and "throw it away when it gets holes in it."
Anyway, it's really only recently (you can guess since when) that I've tried to expand my horizons just a little bit slightly. For example, I have been tentatively doing things like buying pairs of what I hear are called "cute shoes." Not, you know, "black shoes that will last forever and go with everything so you won't have to worry about whether they look dumb with your outfit," but "cute shoes." I even (whisper) found a shoe designer label that I reliably like and have now gotten a couple of different pairs from. And I have on occasion bought, say, a dress that looked not merely inoffensive, but, you know, kind of pretty, or at least interesting. Don't worry, I'm not taking my black tee shirts, Dr. Martens, and olive cargo pants to the thrift store just yet. I'm just saying: I've been branching out a little.
This has caused something to happen for which I was unprepared.
Sometimes — I know, it's weird — I will greet a neighbor or a friend from church, and she will say: "Wow, those are cute shoes! Where'd you get them?"
And get this: I do not know how to answer this question. Readers. Help me out here.
First of all, what does "where did you get these shoes" mean? Duh, I bought them from the internet. Does it really matter whether I got them from Amazon or Overstock.com or Zappos or eBay? I googled them, and there they were. It is this question that makes me suspicious of the entire encounter — I don't ask my friend where she got her sturdy yet practical new coffee grinder, nor my husband where he got his ice axe. Obviously these things were bought from an establishment which sells coffee grinders, ice axes, or ballet flats (as the case may be). Does it matter where? It can't matter where. This question must mean more than it appears to mean on the surface.
Second of all: what is the proper response to this question? Is this just a polite bit of small talk to which I am supposed to make up an inoffensive answer? Does the woman who is asking me about my shoes want to know, for example, the information I would want to know if I was going to buy the shoes for myself, namely, the label? Should I say, for instance, "Oh, they're from Clarks" (assuming that was what they were) because, well, then you could go to Google and search for "clarks flats mary jane pewter" and find my shoe? Do I say, "Thank you, I really like them too?" Is this some kind of a test?
And what if they happened to be an actual designer label? What if by some thrift-store/eBay/outlet sale miracle I was wearing a pair of Manolos or Kate Spades? Do you say so? Is that pretentious or is that something that a cute-shoe-admirer wants to know? Am I supposed to use this question as a means of indicating the kind of shoe-shopper I am, whether I am a thrift-store-hound or a Craigslist maven or Imelda Marcos?
Same thing with dresses — if someone says about my one — one — designer dress*, "Cute dress, where'd you get it?" which of these true answers is the one that the woman is looking for? (A) "At the Mall of America," (B) "Nordstroms," (C) "It's BCBG Max Azria," (D) "Thanks, I picked this up on sale a couple of years ago?"
I have enough trouble dealing with small talk, which famously is not intended to transmit meaning at the level of the actual words spoken, but instead is a social ritual through which people defuse potential hostilities before entering into more personal communications. I have this vague feeling that women talking to other women about their clothing is partly small talk and partly shot through with hidden implications and messages that I am hopelessly unable to decode, let alone respond with the correct countersign.
Please help me navigate this unknown territory.
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*the one I'm wearing in two photos in this post
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