As I Was Saying
A ramble on the relationship between fashion and language.
Hi! This post’s another little brainworm wild card on the relationship between language and fashion, with a few random pieces to shop at the end—do you enjoy these more stoner-brained pieces, or do you prefer HR at its most commercial? Let me know in the comments! Also, this is totally unedited because I’m honestly afraid to try to reread it, so if something makes literally no sense, it’s DEFINITELY not you, it’s me. I can’t wait to hear your thoughts on any/all of the below.
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Last night, after enjoying some “herbal refreshments,” as Tai in Clueless would cutely colloquialize, courtesy of my newly befriended neighbors, I lay in bed listening to an interview with Natalie Mering/Weyes Blood and fell into a rapturous state. I felt so grateful, proud, and excited about my past year’s endeavors in various forms of language, both in my reified commitment to various forms of writing and in my journey toward becoming bilingual.
I then thought about my other great love and realized that I conceptualized a unique connection between the mediums of language and fashion. This thought process is very much a process, and I’m not sure if anything I write here will come across as coherent, but let’s workshop together?
I think fashion and language are two of the most phenomenologically complementary mediums of creation. I envisioned a matrix of creation within a spectrum from stringent pragmatism to indulgent, pure aestheticism. Some forms of generative practice, such as cooking, have aesthetic elements and potentials but in essence prioritize pragmatism over abstraction—in its base state, cooking is a survival mechanism, and it’s easy to live a life never experiencing food as a predominantly aesthetic experience. On the other hand, painting and music, though obviously integral to the human experience and pragmatic in their attendance to our souls and relationships, are first and foremost aesthetic experiences. Humans can conceivably stay alive sans symphonies and surrealism. Nothing about the positioning on this pragmatic-aesthetic matrix connotes a value judgement, in my mind, it’s just an interesting paradigm to consider, and leads me to the idea:
Fashion/wearable sculpture and language are two mediums that ride similar wavelengths in their relationships to both necessity and indulgence. The basic human experience necessitates food (which, as mentioned above, has only relatively recently in history gained explicit aesthetic dimension), shelter, which I conceive of as clothing and architecture (I don’t know enough about the latter as separate from sculpture to really bring it into this thought process, but I see both clothing and spaces as forms of shelter), and communication.
Pulling on the threads of fashion and language, I noticed that both comprise seemingly similar tapestries of interdependence between pragmatism and aesthetics. We need clothes to protect our bodies, to keep us comfortable, and to allow for certain forms of activity, and we need language for the same reasons, though explicitly in a relational sense. Both mediums seem to inevitably develop their own aesthetic semiotics, which then becomes an intrinsic aspect of their pragmatic deployment. For example, the development of dialects like AAVE start as creative responses to the symbology of a specific way of being, in the case of AAVE, being a Black American, and are then absorbed into the general lexicon as structural components that end up in English textbooks and institutional language. The development of clothing necessarily points to the human body (because to wear clothes requires the acknowledgement of a physical form and the need to sheathe it for one reason or another) and thus absorbs huge chunks of corporeal signification, such as “trendy” body types, which are then replicated and proliferated by the fashion industry to clothe the bodies that are molded and attended to by these trend cycles.
Basically, I think we experience fashion and language in a similar phenomenological vein, as an experience both unavoidably pragmatic and inherently aesthetic, with the matrix in a state of constant fomentation—it’s hard to tell where necessity stops and indulgence begins, and vice-versa. Of course, there are modes of both fashion and language that play with these dimensions, deliberately eschewing pragmatism (learning Klingon, foot binding) or aestheticism (this one’s harder, because even the most orthodox creations have their own aesthetic codes), but in most cases, shelter and communication seem to coexist on a plane of semiotic potency underlined by bald necessity.
I was thinking about this while listening to the Weyes Blood interview because I, comfortably stoned, was luxuriating in Natalie’s choices of words and how plainly she was able to lay out ideas that resonated deeply with me using very deliberate, aesthetically indulgent language. This made me think of how frustrated I often feel when trying to converse in my broken Spanish, how I never realized until aspiring to be bilingual that I take great joy in carefully selecting nuanced vocabulary to deploy, not to confound or obfuscate or revel in pretension, but to try and most effectively communicate, to connect on a meaningful level with other humans. While babbling in my second-grade level grammarisms, the lack of potential for conveying complex ideas, jokes, subtle imagery, etc. makes me feel a dire lack of agency that, quite honestly, shakes my personhood to its core. It’s an incredibly humbling and VERY generative experience that I am privileged to be undertaking right now, but I thought this potent feeling of claustrophobia in my language pointed towards a common experience in fashion.
To speak only a portion of a language feels, to me, a lot like looking in my closet and having “nothing to wear.” My language in Spanish is the equivalent of a t-shirt and jeans that make me feel like a fifth grader. You know the feeling—when you put on an uninspired outfit to run to the store and accidentally run into someone you like or admire and are suddenly hyperaware that your outfit is, in TikTok parlance, “not giving.” Not giving to the world what you want to give to it as a visual phenomenon. Not giving onlookers the chance to internalize your desires, your priorities, your idiosyncrasies as manifested in deliberate choices of clothing. You’re using clothing to cover your genitals, maybe to stay warm or keep cool, but an entire dimension of intentionality and nuance is missing. As I croak out the skeleton of my life story to a new acquaintance en español, each word feels like a broom handle tearing an intricate spider web of experience and lived reality to shreds. I feel like I’m wearing a burlap sack.
I’m working on my Spanish, and always, my English, but I’m most interested in the context of this blog how you think about all this in terms of fashion. Some questions that ran through my head last night (and that I would desperately love to hear your answers to, as well as some of my style idols’) were:
What are three things you find yourself often trying to communicate with your choice of clothing?
What clothing item you own feels most effective in communicating one or more of these things?
What piece of clothing on someone else has felt most legible to you? What did it say, and how did it make you want to relate to the wearer?
Please feel free to respond below (preferred, I LOVE replying to comments here) or on Instagram. One day soon I’ll try to engage with these questions in a fun, creative way on this blog, but I REALLY want your insights, as I can’t tell if Argentine weed got me acting up (unlikely, as I often suspect it’s cut with literal lettuce leaves in its typical impotence) or if I should pursue this line of thought more, maybe with special guests?
All that said! Here are a few random items that I wish I had to use as tools of communication, I’ll leave what exactly they’d communicate up to your interpretation, feel free to sound off:
Thanks for being here and letting me communicate with you. It’s a true privilege.
<3 HR
reading thru your archive now that I’ve finally paid and as someone who also obsessively loves languages and fashion and constantly feels like I have no personality besides idiot in my non fluent languages this post as they say is GIVING
Ugh your brain 😭 choosing clothing in precise and deliberate ways in the same way I choose words to communicate as effectively as possible ideas that which are important to me. Pragmatism is an aesthetic choice in itself I think but only when it’s deliberate rather than forced. I think my inability to commit to one aesthetic reflects the multiculturalism I’m exposed to having been raised in a country with over 10 official languages. Maybe that’s too literal an interpretation