Dressing

I am exactly the kind of person my 11 year old self would have found terrifyingly sexy.

That aside, 

I want to write about costume. Halfway through last year I wanted to live more in alignment with my attitude that possessions perpetuate pollution and slavery, so I bought some fabric, went to a dressmaker and had three identical unbleached fair-trade cotton kurtas made. I threw out nearly all of my clothes and wore nothing but cotton kurtas for about 6 months thereafter.

At first I felt very self conscious, I looked a little bit like a Buddhist nun and it felt like everyone was looking at me.

After about a month I stopped caring. I became very comfortable. I didn't have to make any decisions about what to wear, I just threw on a kurta and walked out the door. I also stopped wearing makeup, and began to enjoy the comparative androgyny that my face has without cosmetics.

Six months in, I began to feel like I was missing out. Everyone else got to choose what they wanted to look like everyday - but I was living inside a weird self imposed spacious beige gaol. 

So I dyed one blue and one red, and am juuuust settling into the concept of a yellow kurta, because I might miss the unassuming appeal of unbleached cotton.

The loose kurtas were also a gender-neutral option which I found appealing. I was sick of wearing skirts and dresses because I felt unseen in them. 

Recently I've tentatively explored drag as an empowering method for exploring and expressing gender nonconformity. Now that I write about it, you couldn't really get any further from plain cotton than drag, with is notoriously outrageous and sparkly.

Perhaps this appreciation for drag queens is the accumulative effect of six months in beige. 

I enjoy that I set myself these little personal social experiments.