the oddities of fashion

My lack of interest in clothes has become more and more apparent over the years and it is with a deepening sense of Kierkegaardian dread I venture out to do some primitive shopping. Shops tend to make me furious, red-faced, dripping with sweat like a poor beast. 'Casual' strolling among the racks is always accompanied by the sense that someone, the Fashion Fascist, is looking at me funnily. I tend to feel like the guy in the gray overcoat who has some dirty stuff on his mind and even more in his drawers ('I shouldn't be here!'). My friend tried to convince me of something essential by telling me how important it is that we are aware how we are 'read'. I sighed as audibly as I could to make clear how odd I found his 'postmodern' tone. You, for example, he said mercilessly (after having dissected the critical comments directed at himself by the everyman Äijä) 'will be read as the typical, boring academic who dresses like a dude'. Fashion is fun, he tried to explain to me, but all I could here was a quite moralistic idea about how and why we should be "original", because it's so fun to stand out from the crowd. Feeling at home in one's clothes means the world to me. But the present world of genderism and shit like that makes homeliness difficult for me, when the body and one's general appearance is made into some kind of thing to be read and interpreted. For that reason, there is something about "fashion" that makes me queasy, even though I know I there are challenging and subversive ideas and solutions. Maybe it's a specific attitude that appears to be "detached", "critical" and "relaxed" but comes out as something else, as some set of requirements or standards that one should take into account, that bothers me (personally). I agree with my friends that clothes can be fun, but I often loose the sense of fun. Another friend of mine now and then warns me about the prospects of becoming-Sture - one of the teachers we had in primary school who always wore gray clothes and talked in an even grayer way. It is a revealing fact about me that I think Sture is one of the coolest persons in this world and I don't find it at all offensive to have him as a fashion icon.

That said, you know what? I miss my furry mittens! I bought them at a generic-capitalist, exploitative store for a delightful price and fell in love with them instantaneously. Those furry gloves, the fur was not real, of course, made me half-bear, half-person. My gloves were anti-human. They did not really protect my poor hands from cold and wind, as the gloves were too big and too wide for my physionomy - but nonetheless, I cared about those gloves more than I cared about anything else. The gloves only added to my clumsiness, but in a cool way. Not very sophisticated or 'grown-up', but very nice indeed. Gripping and fiddling and graceful movement in general were transformed into rather impossible undertakings. The love story with my furry gloves tragically came to an end one rainy day (those gloves were not suited for rain; when it rained, I felt like a wet dog) when one of the gloves, by accident, dropped to the street outside one of my favorite places on earth - K-Puhakka.

And there was the Luther cap. You know the picture of pudgy-looking Luther with the black hat? Well, a friend gave me a hat that resembled Luther's. I soon became totally at ease with the lutheran look. If I wouldn't have lost the hat at a sleazy gas station café somewhere between Borgå and Turku, I would have buyed myself a cloak or a cowl. My morals might have improved. For a few years, I couldn't hold on to a hat for more than three weeks. Afther that, a black hole mysteriously appeared in the ground, swallowing my hat. That created something of a hat fetish in me. I was always in the hunt for a hat that would look like the Luther hat. I lost another one of my dearest hats, a scruffy-looking, green fisherman's hat, at the Prague airport. I continuously lament these tragic disappearances.

I was never seriously into grunge music, the Åland surrounding didn't make for that kind of sophistication. I was familiar with Nirvana and Alice in Chans, but apart from that, my grunge credibility has remained poor. Regarding clothes, however, I grew up with something of a grunge style. I had a super-thick flannel shirt (black, blue and green) that I wore until it was barely in one piece. Then I found the Boots. They were metallic green. It was the nineties. They were metallic green like a car. They were big, clumsy and heavy to the extent that I was barely able to walk (running becoming even more of an impossibility). I think my feet were bloody and sore during the first two weeks of wearing these boots, but I heroically hung on to them until they were so worn out that some parts started to fall off. I remember my first year at Uni - it was in 2000 - and how people pitifully glanced at those poor boots. I was hopelessly unfashionable - the nineties. Lord, I miss my metallic green boots.

Sometimes bump into people whose appearance and style of dressing makes me happy, existentially happy. At my dear K-Puhakka grocery store I used to run into this person (who was not a gender) who wore a long, black leather coat and other cloath articles along the lines of edgy gothwear. But in addition to that, s/he carried a purse/bag with a picture of a cute monster painted on it. Sometimes I wonder whether it would make sense to compliment a stranger for her&his clothes, but that is easily taken the wrong way. I also remember one lecturer's wife/partner whose agrarian, no-nonsense style of clothing - straight from the barn to the university! - made me feel all warm inside at the moment I first saw her. It might sound stupid, but her clothing made me think that this must be a good person. And she is.