The Clumsy Catwalk

I remember when I was around twenty-something years, I was growing up in Melbourne, around ten years ago, I was invited to a gig. It was fashionable in those days and even now I think, to have airs and ‘put together’ something unique and interesting to wear to see your friends play at a gig. The band was playing improvised punk rock music and some of the energy there was zany, awesome, lethally interesting. The lead singer was the guy I was dating and I must have felt very ‘called up to a challenge’ by this, because I went through great effort to turn up looking awesome.

Fashionistas, fashion designers, models and fashion pages today talk a lot about getting it right, and we flick through reams of full page models strutting with ink running over them but I often wonder, what’s the story. Something about everyone in the fashion industry with their banal stating of cuts and patterns and design terms from the Milliner’s fashion manual irritates my soul, because I find that hard to relate to. And moreover, they also have their so-called necessary audacity to be snobbish and seem to think that this, above, makes them eligible commentators and dissers of those who don’t have a ‘fashion sense.’

I remember this gig in particular because it was a strange night. I felt it even as I was scouring through racks of second hand clothing in op shops looking for this one thing that would express me. I found an amazing cross-tie cap sleeved top in a satin like fabric in beautiful shades of stripes of green. I also found an amazing hoot of a little skirt, which was designed and stitched like a curtain, in green, which I further embellished with little glittering beads along the seams, when I got home with it. I needed to sparkle at this gig. This ‘curtain raiser’ of a skirt- it only went from my hips to my upper thighs, so it generously flaunted my beautiful legs, which I was sporty enough to match with bright green fish net stockings. I was Temptation, that night. I was the teaser, looking the part of the not-so coy virgin, to greet you and treat you with mischievous impishness.

I was also wearing an amazing pair of white pointy shoes on pointy heels that looked like what Manolo Blahnik’s dreams were made of before he became Manolo Blahnik. I had hair that looked like retro 70’s hair with a fringe and I remember using some amazing green eye glitter for eye shadow that totally complemented my jet black hair and eyes and what I was wearing.

The evening of this gig came, and I dolled up and set forth, to paint the town red and show my support for my boyfriend singing with his band on stage. It was in a cool sort of indie club, not too crowded but also right in the heart of the city.
I was a heart stopper that night. I felt everyone’s eyes on me. I was vain. I was fertile, I felt like what a woman feels when she is peaking, and looking and feeling like the most covetable diva she can be. I danced through the songs and cheered the band on. When the gig was over, the boys came around to have a drink at the bar.

My boyfriend, who I was so proud of and so happy to see suddenly told me that he would not want to go home that night to his place with me, because he thought I was coming on too strong when I went up to him to talk to him. I remember feeling something very strange take over me that second.

I picked up my bag and started walking on the street, still feeling like I was on top of the world because partly, my vanity was outdoing and outlasting any comprehension of what was going on. Only later, much later, did I realise that my beauty was over shadowing my boyfriend’s gig. The way that first he, and then I rationalised this was that he had been rehearsing for a long time for this gig and all he wanted to do was have a few beers with his band mates and get some dinner and sleep with the after-energies of the noise he had just made on the scene. But this was the beauty of my soul and it had fully bloomed into character.

However, at the time, immediately after he stuck a proverbial dagger through my vain heart, I walked on, at the time feeling like I had dolled up for him and the band and the music and being his girlfriend had inspired me to ‘put it all together’ fabulously and now that he wasn’t interested, I felt dissed and dejected. But the ‘power dressing’ that was on me was working a magic all its own. The next thing I know, I was with an amazing person who came out of nowhere with all the right sensibilities to become my express date that night. This girl wasn’t going home without a long chat late into the night and kiss good bye cheek to cheek, before those stockings and that skirt came off of her. The sheer effort of dressing up to become Temptation itself was paying rich dividends to bring me the right sort of mature attention. Not the stupid kind too, not the oggling and the dumbing down kind. Something about the meticulousness of my character dressing was pulling off the amazing feat of manifesting a beautifully engaged and absorbed audience, that night.

I was also carrying a tarot deck with me that night. A great long conversation with my special find of an equally sudden friend ensued and this sweet stranger in town, sat down with me, and we began a very significant reading of the cards. We were sitting in a parking lot, one of those high-rise ones, high above in the clouds, with the weekend in progress around us, down below. It was a great spontaneous experience of being in the magic of the moment. Me, dressed as Temptation itself and and a young man, the both of us so sweetly divining secrets and symbols to understand ourselves, like he and I would have never imagines before. We later walked down the parking lot towards dawn and had a coffee. But what sticks in my mind as I recall it, is a sense of literal and spiritual ‘upliftment’, in the hours that we spent up there.

A lot of feminists ask, what do we do about connection? What should we go looking for when we yearn for emotional connection? When I see women crying out for the Ace of Cups- the emotional connection between themselves and a guy, I think back to this evening in my life and I thank myself for not getting dissed by someone who was not in a position to offer it to me, and I praise myself for striding out to meet what the universe was offering me.

I don’t think that the fashion industry is doing itself much good by not coming out to discuss ‘dressing’ in the context of ‘character’ and moreover, in the times we live in, it is taking some ill-advised risk to think that not taking a stand on ‘objectification’ is okay and the whole thing will blow over. No, it is not going to blow over. Like Temptation, we need to sew the human story of our anguish and emotion and our inspired moments of finding the right ‘fit’ to our moods and what impacts us, and tell that story through what we wear. Our lives, and why and how we dress to reveal much more about ourselves, than just our ‘being up to date’ with current fads and styles- we need the raw and unprocessed version of the story because that is the missing piece in the whole ensemble. We dress to reveal our souls and the story of our lives, we stride into a show wearing our true colours. We are fully present and we go wherever we go, as our archetypes, our shadows, our complexes, living and dressing as who we feel we are in the authentic story of our lives, and not as the poker-faced models would have us think- a numb expressionless strut around the ideology of true beauty and style. It is time to revamp the clumsy catwalk that goes for ‘fashion’ today.

Love the accompanying sketch from elefantaromatica.deviantart.com.

Right Said Fred 🙂

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