What are your favorite emojis?

🙃🙈🫣 Are some of my most frequently used emojis. I don’t text or use social media like Instagram and I try to convey emotion through words, so I’m not on that alternate keyboard often. All three of these emojis represent a kind of silly embarrassment: “Whoops!” “I made a confession!” & “Is what I said okay?”

They can all be used to acknowledge something I said I was going to do one way, but it ended up going differently. Like when I had a weekly themed post and it fizzled out.

Last year, inspired by Fran Drescher’s character from The Nanny, I declared that I would have more fun getting dressed. And I did! I shared how consistent I was in 2023 with going outside of the dress-to-depress athlesiure mom aesthetic that’s a residual effect of the pandemic. I started ‘fit pic Friday to showcase some of my dopamine dressing. A couple of months in, I was feeling like weekly outfit pics had lost their appeal but held steady and reminded myself why I was sharing my outfits online. I changed the weekly update to creative roundups that included the outfits…then it all fizzled out.

Why?

I’m still dressing for fun, but it’s gotten to be so integrated in my day that it doesn’t feel worth sharing. There are some days I’d forget to take a picture of my outfit at all, even though I had a fun outfit. Whoops!

It’s not that I’m not basking in the fun. I only have so much media space before I have to pay to upgrade my website, and paying to share pictures of what I look like everyday seems…silly.

Fashion has a bad rap

For me, at least. I don’t want to feel like fashion is important to me because I relate the idea of “fashion” to trends and consumerism, both of which don’t appeal to my values. It’s also intimidating: to say I like fashion would be insinuating that I think I’m good at dressing—whatever that means.

I’m not good at wearing what’s “cool” now, but I am having fun. I think some things I wear make people other than me smile. Most of my items are thrifted so it’s about repurposing & recycling more than consumption. Fashion seems to be the remaining art form where “cool” is an assumed requisite. But in fact, it is simply self-expression through ornamentation. Fashion doesn’t have to be suitable for the magazines of yore or look expensive. It doesn’t need to be anything at all.

And honestly, the baseline has gotten so low. People dress with such little consideration. Who cares if you wore an outfit you hate? You don’t have to post it on the internet. It’s a fleeting moment. I like taking pictures of the clothes I wore because the photo transports me back to the day and what I did wearing it.

Personal Aesthetic

Through the process, I’m curating a look that isn’t on trend. It’s a bit of a grown up art hoe with callbacks to childhood through novelty accessories. Sometimes it references Fran, and it’s great to defer to the monochrome look encouraged by The Nanny’s costume designer. Overall, it’s become my own.

Bringing it back around

It’s spring! I tout the idea of art every day in every way, and dressing is one of the small, necessary everyday acts that we can inject creativity into with minimal additional effort.

More importantly, when I was wearing the outfit below with the blue dress yesterday, the first thing my teen son said when I greeted him after school was, “ooo! Hello swag boy trillionaire!”

“Oh, you like the outfit? I didn’t—what is it? Is it the necklace?”

“All of it!”

So, how can I not?

My (mostly) Thrifted Looks