The old joke goes like this: I’m a person just like you, I put my pants on one leg at a time.
Maybe it’s not so much a joke as it is a saying, sure. But the sentiment remains. I’m only mortal. I, too, get dressed in a clumsy ritual of squeezing and zipping and buttoning. I look in the mirror and I slip over and tug on and lace up and I’m naked until I’m not.
Still, for me, dressing up is something more than just the clothing of my body. A former Catholic school kid who, yes, wore the prescribed uniform (pleated plaid skirt from Target, white button up, also Target, blazer “borrowed” from the rack at school), getting dressed as a newly-minted adult is an exercise in experimentation. Sure, the pant legs still go on one leg at a time—but I find myself in a dialogue, where dressing becomes an act of storytelling. Will this 80s Victorian-inspired lace long sleeve work under that t-shirt with a graphic of the Microsoft founders? (No.) Can I wear this navy gown over those jeans? (Yes.) It’s a playful process where I’m curious about what each piece is doing, separately, and what they say in turn when they’re next to each other.
Behold, the delightful syntax of an outfit. Grammar isn’t the sexiest metaphor for dressing up, granted, but I want to underline the capacity for communication clothing holds. My wool army surplus trousers paired with a secondhand Batsheva blouse, puffy sleeves and all, is a peculiar kind of statement. Putting together two frictional, anachronistic pieces, each with their own historic etymologies, yields a new meaning, an original declaration. Repeat after me: An outfit is a sentence.
My mode of outfit-building is against aesthetics, is in pursuit of style. We’re in an internet-fueled era of ~eras~ where individual garments coalesce to signal allegiance towards a particular aesthetic. (See Romy Levin’s dissection of nostalgia-fueled trends︎︎︎ and Catie Knight’s chronicling of a complicated relationship to the indie sleaze resurgence︎︎︎.) E.g., I wear pink cashmere shrugs to signal fluency in balletcore, or My True Religion low-rise jeans and butterfly belly-button ring are a y2k tribute. And there’s a joy in abiding to a coherent aesthetic, of course—we’ve all heard the lore of Steve Jobs’s Issey-Miyake-designed iconic ensemble, the brain space it saved him, the ensuing invention of the iPhone, yadda yadda.
The limitation of this mode of dressing for aesthetic adherence is, I think, that it avoids the contextual constraints that produce(d) a particular look. Bleached-white hair with grown-out-roots, a style so emblematic of the late aughts (think Sky Ferreira), was reportedly produced by the 2008 recession and young people’s subsequent inability to afford salon bleaching services. As Leila Sheridan argues in her review of Adidas’s history︎︎︎, clothing items are not just aesthetic accessories: they are utilitarian objects that reflect the cultural contexts they exist in.
I’ll ask, here, for you to close your eyes and agree to a conceptual distinction between aesthetic and style. Aesthetic is’t style; it’s a flattening of style to a reproducible image. Divorced from the communities and traditions that pioneer styles, aesthetics disseminated by algorithms are interested in the look of things without asking their contexts. I think what so-called microtrend reporters miss when they define fledgling aesthetics are these histories inherent to clothing.
To reduce a garment to its image leaves out the nuances it carries. It’s a shallow reduction, making a surface out of a dimensional artifact. I can hear the peanut gallery laughing—Isn’t fashion shallow? Isn’t clothing just another mode of superficial consumerism?—but Hoot is about exploring the storytelling embedded in style. Hoot is interested in the depth, texture, and multiplicity of the garments we decorate our bodies with. As Cate Mok’s delightful photo essay︎︎︎ evidences, sartorial objects are pockets of history. As rings, they’re beautiful, yes. But as stories? As stories they’re transcendent.
So I wear cowboy boots from Idaho with a 20th-century English wool dress and a laptop bag. It’s an impractical, impossible ensemble. And its inconsistency is exactly why I love dressing up. I call this a sartorial joke: colliding garments to form a pun in the form of an outfit. Knowing the stories of the things I put on my body—whether they’re personal memories of scouring the Urban Outfitters Black Friday sale in eleventh grade, knowing my partner’s mom hand-knit this balaclava, or researching the history of my sneaker’s brand—makes dressing up a more pleasurable, creative practice. Becoming curious about clothing items, asking who made this and when, inspired by what, for whom, has ratcheted open a new and playful dimension of getting dressed for me. I’m not just wearing those earrings with that top and these shoes because they share colors, I’m pairing them because they say something, and put together, they say something new.
To be clear: I do not labor over every outfit. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar; sometimes a comfy airport outfit is just what’s necessary for the six-hour plane ride home. Knowing the personal history of every clothing item and its maker can be an expensive, eccentric habit I don’t believe can (or should) be a feasible concern for college students. Getting those pant legs on can be its own journey on certain days.
What I hope is revelatory here is that how we dress doesn’t have to signal broader aesthetic allegiance to trends—which have proved to be remarkably fleeting; one need just see the Depop exodus sale of Paloma Wool pants for proof—but instead idiosyncratic interests. It’s a mode of dressing more interested in thoughtful borrowing than passive belonging. There’s a durability to style that underlies what I see as the ethos of Hoot: a rigorous interest in dressing as a mode of communication, as a fact of utilitarian necessity, and as an artistic practice, while maintaining a sense of play, of joy. Of dress up, in all its childhood fantasy connotations.
This is, to be sure, the manifesto of a person haunted by Miranda Priestly’s cerulean monologue and 99% Invisible. Still, I insist, no part of our world is incidental or neutral. If my closet were a house, it would be haunted. Clothing is a material fact—an evidence—of economic, geographic, and social peculiarities. What’s revealed when we become interested in these histories, looking beyond the surface towards the strata of substance dormant in our garments? What might this practice of pursuing style over aesthetic change for you when you get dressed?
I can’t say, not for sure. But go ahead and try it on.
