I recently rewatched the movie Uptown Girls. I did so in part because I'm beginning to write more about clothes and the main character, Molly Gunn, is an heiress who really dresses like an heiress.
This is possibly lost on a lot of people watching the movie. She dresses completely differently from other people in the film and the way she dresses is something that is wholly out of reach of most people with more ordinary lives.
She wears things like see-through dresses with leggings underneath so she won't be arrested for indecency and a lot of her clothes has very unusual and expensive detailing, like applique. And this is like normal, routine stuff for her.
It's not stuff she wears for special occasions. It's stuff she wears to go to, say, a laundromat.
For most of my life, I bought the family line about how they were humble working class stiffs. Only relatively recently has it occurred to me that I spent much of my life kind of dressing like Molly Gunn and oblivious to the amount of privilege it takes to do something like that.
I never actually learned to tie my shoes. Instead, my mother crocheted me a blue vest I loved and made a tie-closure for it. I learned to make a bow to close my vest and then transferred that skill to tying shoes.
In kindergarten, most of my dresses were sewn by my mother who took the leftover material and used it to make matching shorts. So I dressed to the nines as a girly girl and also did whatever the heck I wanted on the playground because my frilly panties were NOT going to be exposed. If I climbed the monkey bars or did cartwheels, my matching shorts were going to be exposed.
In like fifth grade, studs and rhinestones were all the rage. I had half a dozen home sewn outfits covered in a zillion studs and rhinestones. My oblivious classmates failed to realize I had so many different, unique rhinestone covered outfits and asked me why I wore the same thing to school all the time.
I got to go shopping with my mother and pick out the material I wanted and list other details. I stood for fittings.
I never learned to knit, sew or crochet like my mother, so I have to buy my clothes and I've never had money to hire a seamstress and the like. I haven't stood for a fitting in years.
I don't know how I go from being a dirt poor schmuck living in men's t-shirts and sweat pants to some kind of fashion mogul, but I rewatched the movie to help me wrap my brain around the fact that what I know about clothes is more than average and maybe my desire to do something in this space isn't straight up crazy talk.
In the future, probably most of my comments about clothes will happen on Reddit and on The Genevieve Files. This piece isn't about clothes per se. It's more about identity, so I think it fits here.
This is possibly lost on a lot of people watching the movie. She dresses completely differently from other people in the film and the way she dresses is something that is wholly out of reach of most people with more ordinary lives.
She wears things like see-through dresses with leggings underneath so she won't be arrested for indecency and a lot of her clothes has very unusual and expensive detailing, like applique. And this is like normal, routine stuff for her.
It's not stuff she wears for special occasions. It's stuff she wears to go to, say, a laundromat.
For most of my life, I bought the family line about how they were humble working class stiffs. Only relatively recently has it occurred to me that I spent much of my life kind of dressing like Molly Gunn and oblivious to the amount of privilege it takes to do something like that.
I never actually learned to tie my shoes. Instead, my mother crocheted me a blue vest I loved and made a tie-closure for it. I learned to make a bow to close my vest and then transferred that skill to tying shoes.
In kindergarten, most of my dresses were sewn by my mother who took the leftover material and used it to make matching shorts. So I dressed to the nines as a girly girl and also did whatever the heck I wanted on the playground because my frilly panties were NOT going to be exposed. If I climbed the monkey bars or did cartwheels, my matching shorts were going to be exposed.
In like fifth grade, studs and rhinestones were all the rage. I had half a dozen home sewn outfits covered in a zillion studs and rhinestones. My oblivious classmates failed to realize I had so many different, unique rhinestone covered outfits and asked me why I wore the same thing to school all the time.
I got to go shopping with my mother and pick out the material I wanted and list other details. I stood for fittings.
I never learned to knit, sew or crochet like my mother, so I have to buy my clothes and I've never had money to hire a seamstress and the like. I haven't stood for a fitting in years.
I don't know how I go from being a dirt poor schmuck living in men's t-shirts and sweat pants to some kind of fashion mogul, but I rewatched the movie to help me wrap my brain around the fact that what I know about clothes is more than average and maybe my desire to do something in this space isn't straight up crazy talk.
In the future, probably most of my comments about clothes will happen on Reddit and on The Genevieve Files. This piece isn't about clothes per se. It's more about identity, so I think it fits here.