The earliest garments may not have been utilitarian. Modern anthropology suggests that the earliest forms of pure self-adornment practiced by humans, like seashell necklaces and body paint, may have come significantly before more useful garments like warm fur skin capes. In Seeing Through Clothes (1978), Anne Hollander argues for the idea that technology first developed for adornment practices like making jewelry or modifying the body was later repurposed for garment construction. All this to say: maybe accessories predate clothing.

If that is true, what is the true purpose of clothing but to express one’s self? To stake out an identity, affirm one’s belonging, and communicate one’s place in the world. Writers Maude Haas and Bella Vega explore these themes in this week’s Star Mail.

Writer and editor Bella Vega writes about self-expression through clothing and the homespun fibers that bind them to loved ones:

Lost & Found

BY BELLA VEGA

My masculinity was born in an H&M changing room.

I escaped a mother for whom my body was both punching bag and plaything, ran up the East Coast to the snow-covered twinklings of a Boston autumn. In the city, I developed a mean mug around perpetually red-painted lips, realized what it meant to be treasured when I gave my first kiss and first sex to a charming Argentine writer, and in the skimpy red Primark clearance bin dress I wore on my 19th birthday, I came into my body as a means of pleasure and ornamentation. I discarded a bra and adopted tight-fitting tops and once-forbidden skinny jeans. I was making up for lost time, experimentation taking the form of a far too delayed, but still liberating “slut era”.

That is, until my body was taken, raw and screaming, one cold night. And I was forced to take flight again, save my life again, which landed me in Holland.

In this H&M, my hands run through my newly-buzzed hair. The long hair I had been forced to wear my whole life, cut to my shoulders as I planned my first escape, now buzzed. I can feel my scalp for the first time, the ridges and grooves. My jawline pronounced, my deep brown eyes wider. But most importantly, I wasn’t a woman. I was… me. I had haphazardly grabbed any item that felt like the fantasy of a man I wanted to emulate - a black leather jacket, crisp white button-ups, baggy dress pants. Disheveled elegance felt like a fitting counterpart to my clumsy femininity.

Masculinity became protection for me - I loftily wandered into the men’s section of stores, donating the soft curves and lines of my former wear in favor of harsh silhouettes, jutting shoulders, jagged edges, straight cuts - every mannequin felt donned in armor. I’d bob my head to the music and allow my body to take up the mannerisms it had been screaming to enact for so long. My daily wear consisted of loose white tank tops, a brilliantly fuckboy-esque gold chain, short-sleeved button-ups, and gold-rimmed glasses. While I sat in a therapy office twice a week for a year to work on the small, battered little girl in me, I grew into a man, albeit a distrusting one. I never admitted it to anyone, but the green army jacket that became my signature was a reminder of the man who stole my life away - it was as if a part of me, deep down, felt that in becoming the aesthetic parts of him, I could protect myself from him ever hurting me again.

In August, I wandered to Paris to meet a friend from my snow days. I guess that in the background of the most romantic city in the world, it is impossible not to fall in love. She was a fashion student, all flowy silk dresses and scarves adorning her willowy figure - she walked like she could move mountains with just her gait. The morning I woke up with her on my chest, her snores soft and eyelids delicate, I looked up at the pink scarves that were draped from her ceiling. It was there, swaddled in all of her care and colors, that a little girl with deep brown eyes and a pink tutu came home to my heart. I wore one of the scarves around the waist of my jeans, to hold the little girl and my temporary lover closely.

My father found me in Spain, where I was desperately trying to coax myself back to life after almost losing it by my own hand. Unwashed baggy t-shirts, ripped jeans, mid-length hair - though chaotic, I had found a safety net in the blasé of grunge, which allowed me leniency with my bouts of exhaustive depression.

Papi and I have made a safe home together, far more beautiful and joyous than the one we were ever afforded before. He recounted stories of my sister, his first daughter, who passed two years prior to my birth. In stories, videos, and her clothes (which her mother graciously sent to me), I saw so much of the girl I used to be, the one I thought had died in the snow - the same airy giggle, the same deep eyes and protruding nose, the same unexplainable spark that drew people in like magnets - and above all, a girl who wore every single bright pattern known to man and did so unabashedly, making most of her clothes herself. I tattooed her name on my wrist, and despite our differences in body, her clothes fit like a glove. I cook in her long green knit skirt and love the feeling of the haphazardly beaded pink top. I embody a spirit that came before me and died with half of me, and somehow in it all, feel even closer to the girl who fled thrice over in the past year.

I sit and knit fibers now, as she did. I wander with divine intuition into the yarn store owned by a group of sweet old ladies who dote on me, their unofficial favorite customer. I let whichever yarn speaks to me come home with me, incense it, and allow it to tell my highest self what it is meant to be made into. I meditate as I do, relax with the bobbing of the needle, making myself all the clothes I wish I’d had throughout my life. I allow the disheveled boy and clumsy girl to take up equal parts of my gender identity, settling into the whole of myself, and allowing the same transience I’ve always allowed my style to take form in continue on. 

I spent a month free-handing a sweater for the man who will be in my life for the rest of it. My lover, my Scotsman. I emblazoned the family crest he showed me was painted by his forefathers in the castle window we kissed inside of with thread and care. I embroider the last name I long to take as my own onto the front. I show my love by putting all I am into garments, the same for him as I’ve learned to do for myself.-

Maude Haas writes about color and thread and finding one’s self:

The Color Weaver

BY MAUDE HAAS

There once was a grayscale forest at the hidden edge of the world, in the pleating where the ends of the earth fold in on each other. In that forest was a clearing, and in that clearing lived a decades-ripened woman who knew how to catch color with her hands. Every day, from sun-up to sun-down, as people waded and worked and wandered through the black-and-white tones just beyond the tree line, she stood alone and sifted pulsing rays of yellows and reds and oranges bright as fire through her clasped hands, weaving them into fabrics that thrilled the woods nearby. At moonrise, with the rest of the world falling foolishly asleep around her, she watched the stars throw a quilt of blues and purple over the flames, saw them wink in glittering delight at their creation, and used her two index fingers to unspool their offering into thread. Always it went like this, the gifts given so generously to and cherished so greatly by the color weaver, who, like the sun and moon and stars to whom she felt indebted, did not sleep. When she had her fill of thread and fabrics, she piled them into cupboards and closets in the cottage where she lived, the excess spilling out of her windows and chimney.

One night, acres away, a young girl found herself unable to close her eyes. She tried and tried in front of her mother’s looking glass, even stitching wire through her eyelids to keep them together, but for all her effort, they simply sprang open, unmoored. Well, she thought, if I cannot sleep, then I will walk, and get to know the world better.

So she walked, and walked, and walked, feeling the chill of the night glide alongside her as she made a path through the forest, always returning to her bed before the rising sun tipped the scale of the world from black into white, always pretending to have slept when her mother came to her room in the morning. For years this went on, and inside her grew a private shame, hard as the pit of a plum and pledging itself to her stomach. The day that it spread to her heart, she knew that staying in her home meant forsaking her pulse. That night, she took to the trees like a salmon swimming upstream, peeling back branches to find what she did not yet know existed and coughing up bits of black shame onto the forest floor along the way.

The girl arrived inevitably at the clearing just as the stars began to lay down their quilt. The first sight upon which her eyes came to rest was a billowing heat emanating from the chimney of a small cottage. Heat was the only word she could think of for it, clinging heavy to her tongue, the tendrils reminding her vaguely of the fire her father used to stoke in their hearth in the dead of winter. But this was nothing like the flat, far-away static of those evenings. It seemed to the girl to be a song, glowing as it sliced through the night air and knifed its way into her heart. She fell to her knees and thought, in turn, of her grandmother’s locket, the juicy pulp of her favorite fruit, the day’s shift into night – all of which, she knew now with a shock, breathed the same breath as this chimney. Just as soon as she came to understand this, the quilt of night descended cleanly onto the clearing, snuffing out the flames upon which her life now seemed to depend.

In awe, she watched as the door to the cottage swung open and the color weaver stepped out. She watched her take the night’s gift into her open hands and saw suddenly that the sky had taken the same form as the bell-shaped flowers in her mother’s garden, which had the same heartbeat as the birds that made a nest outside her window every spring. She could see that the night was only a darkened version of the day, the richness of that same sky set ablaze by the noon sun. She saw, too, that this was the color on the inside of her, and so began to cry. She cried with such force and for so long that she almost did not notice the color weaver take her body into her arms, almost did not notice being carried to the middle of the clearing, almost did not notice that her eyes could finally stay closed.

The color weaver lay in the grass next to the girl and, when her tears finally slowed, caressed her face. I knew I would not be alone forever, the color weaver whispered, the first words she had uttered in the thirty-one years since she had left her own life behind. She took the girl’s hands into her own and showed her how to spin the stars into silver. She taught her how to say the word purple, lips hugging the air at either end of it. She brought her spools of fluttering emerald thread, shivering ribbons of turquoise, and pink velvet as soft as the cloud from which it was made. Soon, they were swimming in every brilliant blushing bit of fabric the color weaver had ever conjured. Slowly, the girl floated to the surface and lifted the white slip of her nightgown, which evaporated like mist into the night air. The color weaver followed suit, her black dress becoming a sigh on the wind.

They stood in each other’s gaze as if approaching the edge of a cliff. The girl took a piece of the moon, full and heavy as her cheeks, and molded it into a needle, carving a slit in one end with the edge of her nail and sliding through a thread of the night sky. She touched the soft skin of her own chest and took one deep, rattling breath before plunging the needle back and forth through her heart. After, she threaded golden orange into her palms, bright as the cottage flames that had brought her to life.

The girl ran her new hands through the color weaver’s shining silver hair, feeling every strand as though she had never touched anything before. Who are you? She asked. The color weaver exhaled an answer in the shape of an ocean, so the girl knitted blue-green seafoam into her back and smiled as she became a wave. Every crest of her unraveled the shame that had calcified in both of their bodies, and this too became a color, plentiful in its darkness, rattling its limbs into the night to remind the stars to burn. The color weaver took the needle and, seeing what nobody else in the girl’s life could, turned the girl’s stomach into a field of roses. They burrowed into each other in turn, spinning flesh into fabric into forest, into fire, into flowers and feathers and fruit, forging each other into something new and real.

Spent, as the sun cast its pink light across their faces, they lay together upon what remained of the color weaver’s work. Why? The girl asked. Having no answers, the color weaver simply kissed the girl’s forehead and held her close at the rose of her waist. Together, they slept for the first time in years, their bodies shuddering the same gasping, ecstatic dream.

Demna’s Vetements AW 2017 played heavily with themes of identity and “social uniforms” with everything from runway styling to id card invitations:

The Will to Adorn: African American Dress and the Aesthetics of Identity is a multi-year collaborative research and public presentation project initiated by the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. I was really interested by the research into Afro-Punk fashion culture in Cleveland:

Cool article on identity formation through clothing in literature:

And, finally, some Poly Styrene: