One trap I often catch myself thinking about in fashion and art is “how could I make something that showcases my entire self?”

Whenever I start contemplating that question, I always spend a ton of time without coming up with anything good; and after some deliberation, I think it's because trying to represent all of myself is the wrong thing to do there.

I think the story of most people are quite complex, and not really possible to capture in something as simple as a single outfit or a single work of art. For one, there isn't really an overarching “designer of our life” that sculpts our life to have certain aesthetic qualities. For two, in different contexts we can be into completely different things.

For example, I enjoy both Japanese and Italian cuisine at times. However, it's impossible to capture a representation of how I enjoy both cuisines in a single dish. Since meals are usually considered one slice of immediate experience, a meal that tries to be both Japanese and Italian can only represent a meal of fusion cuisine, rather than the pleasure of eating each authentic cuisine individually, just like how an Italian sushi of shrimp wrapped in soft bread is likely delicious, but nobody would argue that it's authentic Japanese or authentic Italian food.

In this way, a single song, picture, or outfit fall very much short of having enough scope express our different likings fully. They only express a slice of our immediate experience, not a collection of them. While it is possible to combine two different likings to something entirely new, a part of the authenticity and directness of each component is lost in the process, and that can remove the effectiveness of the art itself as a whole.

It's no longer possible to convey the joy of pure Japanese food or pure Italian food in a fusion context. Conveying the liking of a single style within the scope of an immediate experience (a song, a picture, a meal, etc.) requires commitment to that style.

On a broader level, in order to authentically express a person's different likings (and most people have such different likings) fully, something of higher scope than an immediate experience. An artist needs an album or a menu, or beyond that, a discography or a set of restaurants, in order to fully express the idea that they can like things from different contexts at different times. Pinning it all on a single dish or a single outfit is, as I have found at numerous times, a purely futile endeavor.

What this means, luckily for me, is that I have license to make multiple pieces of art and to shop for a wardrobe instead. :)

— Categorized under: #fashion, #art, #communication, #identity

I was chatting with a friend about the murals in Denver yesterday, apparently the street art in Denver is refreshingly positive – instead of “Fuck Society” and “Tear down the Power”, it's more like “Stay Kind” and “Love this City”.

This reminds me a lot a phase that people go through.

A decent amount of people I know went through an ironic phase of fashion, where they tend to dress dark, edgy, and loud. After that phase, the sense of fashion tones down a bit but you can sometimes tell that it's still present. Out of the people I know who went through that phase and came out the other end, it seems that they tend to be a bit kinder and more thoughtful than usual (though usually also less idealistic about the way that society works).

Thinking and talking to people about this, the common thread about that ironic phase was a sort of discontent with the world, a desire to distance from that world (blended sometimes with a desire to be unique), and an expression of both. This naturally make them feel a bit harder to approach while in that phase, but what does that say about people who went through that phase and dialed it down?

Thinking about it, I can come up with the following possibilities:

1. Workplace dress code
2. No longer discontent
3. Better to be integrated with society to change it
4. No longer feeling the desire to stand out
5. Feeling that the fashion choice doesn't express their personality
6. Not wanting the attention anymore
   

I think that outside of the first one and last one, the reasons are all indirectly connected with why someone who went through the ironic phase might appear kinder and more thoughtful compared against the average population. Of course, there are tons of kind and thoughtful people who bypassed the phase altogether, but I do think that someone who has gone through the phase is on average more able to discuss some important topics, albeit the ones that are darker and more personal in nature.

— Categorized under: #fashion, #psychology, #sociology

In a random walk the other day, I realized that the typical fashionability of bisexuals and the typical social awkwardness of neurodiverse people are actually quite related.

One of the important facets of social skills is to understand how people will react to what you do. We implicitly use this skill to avoid doing awkward or offending things. Neurotypical people have an advantage on this because they can use themselves to simulate how most people will react to the situation. On the other hand, neurodivergent people will struggle because they could only learn this from observing how others react to the situation. This has the further effect of making socializing much more painful to neurodivergent people, further reducing their opportunities to get feedback.

The generally-higher fashion skills of bisexual (and gay) people serves as an illustration of the opposite phenomenon. Because these people are attracted to people of their own sex, they are often immediately able to use their own emotional responses to simulate how attractive they will be to others of their sex. This is something that heterosexuals don't have easy access to. Unless there is a way to tap into increasing their own attraction to their own sex, the best that they can do is to either run simulations from other pictures of attractive people of their sex they have seen, or to have friends who are attracted to their sex give tips for them.
In productivity literature, there are a lot of verbiage on how important having an immediate feedback mechanism is. Thinking about examples like those in my life, the salience of that type of mechanism suddenly becomes amazingly clear.

— Categorized under: #psychology, #productivity, #social, #fashion