I Dressed Like Me for 10 Years: Day 2

For the past few weeks, I’ve been taking a pottery on Saturday mornings. It’s not totally a “class” in the sense that I expected when I signed up; most people have been “taking it” for years (one lovely woman for 30 of them), so they do their own thing while myself and a couple of other relative newcomers try to learn centering. Anything I wear there is liable to end up covered in clay, so I’ve set aside this one pair of jeans I never wear because they were ripped on purpose in a way that looks kind of corny, and put on whichever shirt I am least worried about. Another chance to be a fashion plate in the pages of Beehiiv Magazine.

Everything that’s ever been said about having a hobby that forces you off of your phone is correct. It’s good! If I wasn’t at class on a weekend morning I would probably be lying in bed scrolling TikTok, which is eating me alive in every conceivable way. Just one of those ways is how I shop and dress.

This past spring, I made my first clothing purchase from the clock app, as my fellow young people call it. The nominally dusty rose but really more like salmon “linen” drawstring pants ($29.98) look quite nice with a denim big shirt, and I wore them, conservatively, more than every day this summer. After that came a bright green milkmaid dress ($21.13) that I was told will hide my “apron belly”¹; I have to admit that it does. For at least a few weeks it was the only item of clothing that made me suspect I was still a human woman and not an egg wrapped in a big shirt. Finally, I bought a blue-and-black gingham matching set ($20.39) billed as perfect for busy moms that might have broken the spell; I wore exactly once, and felt stupid as hell the whole time. Maybe it only works if you have kids? All of this junk was absurdly affordable in our inflation hellscape and advertised me to exactly 97 million times before I gave in and hit purchase. I feel awful about each item. They’re terrible quality, which is reasonable considering that, priced under $30, they’re legally considered free in this economy, and they were almost certainly made in labor conditions that would make the child of Omelas blush. If you’re a betting person; odds are I will buy something from there again.

Wearing down my defenses until I’m complicit in human exploitation for the sake of a slutty polyester dress is one way the app is getting me. Another is that it’s seemingly the only place where people do what I used to do, back when I used to really do it, which was make silly things for the internet.

I’ve had occasion recently to spend a little time and energy thinking about how much the media landscape has changed in a decade. For one example, in 2015 there was a paid online publishing ecosystem robust enough that many, many women could write pieces about how they dressed like famous people! So many that at least one gal could write a “har-har” parody about dressing like herself. There were seemingly dozens (or at least… a dozen) websites putting out funny, voicey, person stuff that people then read and also responded to. It was a different time!

It’s not that people don’t make fun stuff anymore, it’s just seems somewhat unlikely to be written down. Stunt journalism is perfectly suited to TikTok. Why read about someone doing something wacky when you could watch it?

When I first decided to revisit the general idea of dressing like myself and started to map out some of the topics, TikTok came up again and again. I started to think… should I do this as a TikTok? The original had a visual punchline, so is that the perfect medium? Is this finally the right time to pivot to video? Should I film myself, my own face and body, and then record voiceover where I talk about my fears around aging, my complicated feelings about the space I take up, my admissions to ethically indefensible purchases? Should I edit that all together into kicky little clips, and deposit them into a terrifying mystery box of nothingness, fleeting viral fame, and hate where strangers can see I tried to do something, the way a total loser does?

I didn’t count it out. I spent a few hours, spread out over a few weeks, trying and trying to get myself comfortable with filming. In the vast majority of the videos, I get mad about 15 seconds in because you can’t flip to the front-facing camera in the middle of recording². In a couple, I get confused by the mirror, how far from it I should stand, and then start externalizing my long-running inner monologue about how much better I like my reflection than the orientation of my actual face, and how if there were a plastic surgery that could flip your head I would cash out my 401K. Quite frequently, I devolve from speaking into making rude noises (“bleh, blep, blehhhh blehhh,” or sometimes, “mmmmnnnnaaa”). It wasn’t the most fruitful experiment.

While the idea that I’m too old of a dog to teach new tricks to makes me anxious and sad, it’s still not as anxious and sad as I feel when I think about personally being on TikTok. Still, I do hate to back down from a self-imposed challenge, so for now I’m growing out my bangs instead. Probably also a bad idea!