What is Clothing?

           What is clothing: Clothing serves the basic purpose of protecting us from the cold/wind/sun/rain/raining meatballs, and also of preventing us from being in a constant state of flashing everyone. Which some people may be into, and that’s cool, but nudity is illegal in most public spaces. So to avoid bodily harm by way of meatballs or arrest, we typically have to wear clothing in public. Clothing also serves the interesting role of presenting the person inside of it. As clothing is one of the few features people can change about themselves on a whim, it offers an excellent medium for self-expression. With a few thoughtful arrangements the already necessary layers of cloth can become a way to convey one’s mood, attitude, personality, opinion, and aesthetic.

This man was ready for a meatball storm because
he remembered to get dressed this morning

This is what I enjoy about fashion; it provides new ideas as to how to achieve this goal of expression. I take issue with how fashion is presented to us. A magazine will inform you that you should dress in a particular way because it’s in style and the other people who are informed about fashion are also dressing that way. This does not foster individuality, or actual thought about how designer ideas work on unique bodies, or present unique minds. When I looked up ways to dress for different body types, I found most of the advice was about hiding nonstandard features, as opposed to embracing positive ones. Such advice will not teach people to embrace themselves, only to hide what others might not approve of. 

This blog will serve a few purposes. The first is to educate you on what is in style and how this can be individualized if you want to incorporate it into your look. Secondly it will advise you on how to dress in order to embrace your natural features, whatever they are. Finally it will look at historical fashion and aesthetics, both to draw inspiration from, and to show that no standard of beauty is anything other than arbitrary. As all beauty really is in the eye of the beholder—or the prevailing idea of a particular time and place—why not form your own definition of beauty? That is the purpose of clothing—to declare that you are beautiful, and to define exactly what beauty is to you.