Dressing Room Dilemmas

For as long as I can remember, I have been captured by the sight of beautiful things, directly correlating to my daily wardrobe. This has led me to be pretty well-versed in the experience of ~the dressing room~ and the anxieties that it can entail. However, it never fully dawned on me how problematic a dressing room, or just the shopping experience as a whole, can be. That is until my roommates compared my room to a dressing room— a cave-like, beautiful wonder. This description was paired with how overwhelming it can be at times. Nevertheless, it made me really wonder why dressing rooms are the root of such an ostracizing experience.

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The shopping experience, itself, is highly designed to not only play into your visual and social perception of the world and specifically into your insecurities. From thin mannequins, to the body and race selective ads, to the store’s environment just being unfriendly (usually to dissuade certain types of customers), the act of shopping is harsh, confusing, and at times degrading to one’s well being. It brings a lot more to the table to worry about than just finding clothing that you personally enjoy.

This has led the shopping experience to be tumultuous, and it has made some people hate shopping or fashion in general. The jarring nature of staring at your body— especially with our current fixation on appearance greater than ever before due social media— can make anyone anxious, stressed, and overall uncomfortable just from entering the store, let alone the dressing room. It turns fashion, a form of art and expression, into a trigger or stressor. How is someone expected to see and appreciate the beauty of a garment when it is being forcibly entangled with our perception of self?

Entering a dressing room— I can’t help but feel pressure to make the clothes work for me as if returning to the salesperson is a sign of defeat, but it’s as I struggle to live up to this image I’ve doctored for myself that I start to hate the clothing, itself. However, entering it, I also feel an intense excitement at the possibility of a new addition to my wardrobe, but this excitement only exists because of my “love” of clothes and deep-rooted capitalism. I am not sure when exactly one of my favorite activities, shopping (or at least mainly online shopping), became riddled with pressures and stressors relating to my own insecurities. It only makes me wonder what pushes people, who don’t care about fashion, to even step into a clothing store.

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In recent years, I have started to hate the experience of shopping in person. There’s so much pressure to find clothes that are interesting, different, and look appealing on you. I remember there were times when I started working in a boutique during high school— the first two shifts, I would start stress sweating. There was always so much stress around the store, from how to act with the customers to just how to carry myself. The relationship between our clothes and bodies has seemed to have created this ever-present tension in the air.

People are so drastically affected by the size on the tag of their clothes. Something that is known to vary from company to company. These constant expectations about being a certain size and its intense link to our self-worth allows the idea of finding your style to be daunting and, at times, impossible. This overwhelming sense of trying to be perfect leads the whole shopping experience for customers and employees to be much more uninviting.

Through working in that boutique, I saw first-hand how employees can affect your shopping experience. It became apparent that the half-assed comments I dished out during my shift to customers of “wow that’s so your color”, “oh wow you look amazing!”, etc. made them feel more comfortable in the clothing pieces and shopping at the store. It just shows how brands and their brick and mortar stores can directly influence the entire act of shopping. Decor, ads, and even the employees they hire all equate to the stress that shopping is now associated with.

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In reality, there just seems to be unmeetable expectations at this point. The customers are so pressured to be perfect or to look just like the model on the ad through society’s expectations (mainly rooted in the rise of social media) that they get upset when any issues arises or when there isn’t a specific size. They hold on to the notion that the missing size would have been the perfect one. We give these fashion conglomerates too much credit for the most part, mainly in caring for their clientele. Most of these fast fashion cemeteries (i.e. F21 lol) or even “boutiques”— that put on the facade of being a better alternative or more original when they really just buy from wholesale— just want the profit at the end of the day. It is all about the money.

The way the majority of customers and brands think has been so skewed by the supposed expectations of society that the view of fashion and shopping has made the dressing room, and sometimes the shopping experience as a whole, a place once of beauty and art but now one riddled with self-judgement. The world we live in focuses too much on the appearance of things and making profit. It makes total sense, with the obsession with image, that dressing rooms, a place where we are forced to examine our bodies, have become associated with negative emotions and experiences.

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One Person, Many Styles

People always talk about each other style; “so-and-so dresses edgy”, “she dresses elegantly”, and “he’s preppy”. Of course people have style preferences- I for one have never been a fan of wearing anything bright or sparkly unless it’s something red or it’s New Years Eve- but this labeling of individual style kind of forces them into a position in which they feel like they have to always dress in that style. And if fashion is about expressing oneself and wearing what they like, why is this happening? We’re all multi-dimensional individuals, so shouldn't our style be the same? Of course some people might like dressing preppy or girly or sporty all the time, but even within those categories, can’t you have variety?

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I first starting thinking of this when I was thinking of times I’ve seen clothing items that I’ve liked at a store but then not bought it because it wasn’t my usual style and I thought it would be weird for me to wear it. Then I was thinking about different outfits that I’ve re-pinned on Pinterest or what I would wear for different days or occasions; I typically love preppy, classic outfits, but I love a good edgy outfit every now and then (my freshman year edgy phase never really ended) and I like wearing something extra or girly as well. Whenever I wear these other outfits, I feel like I get more comments on my outfits than usual, since people aren’t used to seeing me wear these styles as often and I always feel a little strange or out of place when wearing these outfits, since a small part of me worries that I’m either trying to look like something I’m not or that I’m wearing a costume, since it’s not a style I wear every day.

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But why should I, or anyone else for that matter, feel this way? Everyone has different sides to them, and different days will determine what side will be more on display, so why shouldn’t your clothing reflect that? I’m obviously not going to act and conduct myself the same way at a job interview as I act at a party with my friends, and I would not dress the same way either. This does not make me an imposter, or two-faced, this is me being human and acting differently in different situations. I’m not going to wear a polo shirt and ballet flats to a Fall Out Boy concert , not only because I would look out of place, but because I wouldn’t want to wear that to a Fall Out Boy concert- I’d want to wear my black skinny jeans and my Converse.

Because what you wear a lot of times is consciously or subconsciously reflecting you, whether it be your personality, your likes, or something else, but there are different aspects of these things that you might want reflected on a given day. We are humans and multi-dimensional, so naturally we will have different style preferences on different days, just as we’ll have different interests or different aspects of our personalities. Dressing in different styles is normal and as long as it makes you happy, that is all that matters, since at the end of the day, what you’re wearing should be about what you want to wear and display.

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The Invisibility of Pain

I have worn a wrist brace for more than two months now. I don’t know what my injury is or how to treat it. My pain has graduated from bursting out daily when I pull on my pants to only spiking if I bend my hand in certain ways.

The pain is an indicator of damage: it is my body’s way of telling me that something is breaking. The question is how to tell anyone else. When I went to see a doctor, I waited for an hour and a half for her to arrive. She finally burst into the room. As I scrambled to keep up with her brusque manner, she reprimanded me for wasting other patients’ time. She told me she would send me to get an X-Ray. At the time, I only sensed that her solution was not one I wanted, but I couldn’t tell what the objection was. Writing this now, I’d say, no, I don’t want you to send me somewhere else, I want you to tell me what is wrong and what to do. Instead, I asked if she could give me a wrist brace, “or something.” She told me to buy one at CVS, and left.

But at least I have a wrist brace: a visible marker of my damage. The flag of my injury means I can cite a visible reason for the limitations that come from my pain: I can hold up my brace when refusing to help move something (although my stubbornly agreeable personality means it’s still hard to say no). It’s my excuse, one necessary not in order to avoid responsibility, but to have others understand why I do it: my pain has put me into the kingdom of the unwell, a place separated from the world of good health. Each week, I promise to see another doctor if my wrist is doesn’t heal, but each week, I feel like it gets closer. I refuse to entertain that it might go the way of my leg pain and never heal. So I wait, donning my brace each day to show the uncertainty of my unwell status.

In Today's Burnout Culture, Useless Hobbies Matter

Only after I began to knit did I force myself to stop hating knitwear. The activity itself is arguably useless. I don’t sell my knitting, nor do I really give it to anyone. There is little to no return-on-investment on knitting; in fact, I found a beanie for sale at Forever21 for $3, less than a ball of yarn and a pair of needles, without even accounting for the time it takes to hand-knit the hat.

It isn’t efficient, either: a knitting machine, or even sewing, could accomplish the same job in a quarter of the time. Pulling fibrous yarns through each other to the clinking rhythm of my needles takes time. But it’s not only enjoyable, it is necessary. The world would be far more dangerous without this wasteful hobby.

Engaging deeply in a profitless hobby seems like the antithesis of what a productive young person should do. My former boss, an ex-investment banker, once told me that you should only do activities that will build towards a career. Neither training Ki-Aikido martial arts, playing tabletop RPG’s, nor knitting helps with any of my longer-term goals.

For such activities, their collective net worth is a net loss; the activity counteracts goal-setting and other important career skills, and it creates things that have no use for our society, which is why I call them useless. But the value in having a useless hobby is not its end result, but rather in its process.

In sharp contrast to the goal-oriented, results-driven perfectionist mentality that classes and work pushed onto me, I am able to enjoy the process of knitting. Mistakes merely tickle me. They can easily be undone and fixed before moving forward.

More important than the sensory engagement of knitting is its lack of expectations. If I don't create any standards to compare myself to, then there simply are none. I can let myself fully ignore the thrumming awareness in my mind that is my perfectionism. The idea of millennial burnout is spreading quickly, and the needs for perfection and optimization at its core demand a solution if we want to avoid crashing and burning out.

It’s telling that we have to engage in specific activities to relax, rather than having a lack of tension be our default state. Unlike other activities, such as watching TV shows or reading, knitting involves many more senses. My fingers brush over the yarn’s textures, each loop meeting a slight resistance and then almost popping through. The needles hit each other and release their small clicks under the whirring humdrum of activity around me to create a familiar echo for my ears. Finally, the piece I’m knitting grows over time, and transforms from a string into a two-dimensional fabric into a three-dimensional piece whose final form is in my mind’s eye.

Knitting is an activity I enjoy because it has no purpose in my life. The second I begin to drive it towards a direction, I begin to fret over my mistakes and think of what I can do better. Knitting, my useless hobby, is one of the outlets that draws me away from the structural problems that plague young career-driven generations. If we want to avoid the burnout that comes from productivity optimization, then we must allow ourselves to be unproductive. I’ll wear the hole in my hat with pride, thank you.

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