~ On Matching...or, At 26, I Still Cannot Dress Myself ~

An excuse that I find myself articulating on a rather frequent basis points to the fact that I do not own a full length mirror. Indeed, I own but one mirror and it is barely large enough to encompass my face. On most days, I play this self-deceit game in which I balance myself on the edge of my bathtub in an effort to glimpse a reflection of my appearance in my small mirror mounted to the wall adjacent the bathtub. The other method that I utilize to evaluate my appearance before entering into the public sphere is to look downwards. Combined, these two methods fail to allow me to understand my appearance in the way that others perceive it. Frequently, I find myself looking into the large mirror in the bathroom at work, wondering what was in possession of my reason when I dressed myself. Last week, for example, the morning before a Board meeting, I realized that I was wearing a silk floral patterned skirt with a horizontally striped cotton pollo shirt. The outfit was similar, but not at all the same as this outfit which I posted onto the internet as myself having worn. At least in that latter outfit, the material for the floral patterned skirt is the same sort of cottonish material as the diagonally striped cottonish shirt. In a sense, I was matching in the way of fabric texture, though not the pattern of the fabric. In the former outfit, however, the fabric texture clashed, the fabric pattern clashed, the colors clashed, and even the degree of formal / informal clashed.

Which brings me to my friend Amy who would probably prefer that I not discuss her tendency to match at all times, but I am far too busy to consider such things as her feelings. So Amy, in stark contrast to myself, has a knack for color coordinated outfits. Several times a week, we find ourselves standing side-by-side at the coffee bar or water cooler, and this reveals very prominently our divergent matchingness. Over things such as coffee and wine, we have discussed the concept of matching. I have indicated a desire to improve upon my matching, thereby matching more. Amy has indicated a desire to alter her matchingness, and match less.

I have started small. In the way of my professional outfits, I have endeavored to roughly correlate the color of my shoes with that of my jacket. From all that I understand about matching, this creates a balanced effect that is pleasing to the eye. At some point in my misunderstanding of coordinated outfits, when I was very young and wee, a fellow classmate disclosed her secret to matching: socks must always be the same color of one's shirt. I found this matching objective unachievable because I was one of those children with silly-patterned socks (for example, pink zebras on a green background). Therefore I have abandoned this piece of advice. Presently, I am unsure about the wisdom of the sock / shirt linkage, and I defer to the expertise of Amy. Part of my hesitance about matching my socks with my shirt centers around the fact that when I do wear socks, I usually wear them in a manner that they cannot be seen, either in the form of super low ankle socks hidden behind my shoes or underneath the legs of my pants.

I feel that I have lived my entire life under the premise that if I own cool clothes, the outfit will come. By and large, this has been true for my personal life, but has proved inappropriate for my professional life. Which is something of a shame, if you consider the drawbacks to having two entirely separate wardrobes and you live in a small apartment with nary a closet space.

Posted by jennifer at 9:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (1)