Dressing Your Best Post #2: Mannishly

[ajnabieh]

Jacket: Vintage, from my father-in-law
Sweater: Banana Republic, hand-me-down
Jeans: GAP, hand-me-down
Invisible Tank-Top: Banana Republic Outlet
Shoes: I actually wore my sneakers out of the house; these I just threw on to run in the back yard.


There is a picture of me somewhere in existence, though I don't now have a copy. It was taken my senior year in college. I'm walking down the aisle of a ballroom set up for the closing ceremonies of a Model UN competition. I had just won a best delegate award for my committee (a reenactment of the 1947 partition plan drawing committee in Palestine, if I remember right), and the team's photographer was taking pictures of everyone as they walked back from getting their awards. (We had a pretty high win-rate--and were undefeated that year.) I'm wearing grey dress slacks, a blue oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and my blue-and-purple silk tie. My hair is pulled back, and I'm flashing devil horns at the camera with the hand not holding my cheap wooden gavel.

In my head, that is what I look like when I am awesome.



I've always been very comfortable dressing mannishly, and in men's clothing. However, I don't have a body that is masculine in any way; I'm just-below-average height for a woman, I had long hair until only two years ago, I'm large-breasted and large-hipped with a tucked waist in between, and I'd venture to say that I'm conventionally pretty--not a stunning beauty, but easy on the eyes in a distinctly feminine way. I don't mind being female-bodied, even in a body as female as this one (and I think I prefer being socially female to being socially male). But my aesthetic has always been--well, has been to try to dress like a metrosexual man.

Dressing as a man has been something I've done with some regularity for years. For the first day of high school, I spent days shopping to find black pants with suspenders to wear with my hot-pink silk shirt; alas, I was unable to find the black tie to go with it in to match my mental picture. In college, the queer students' association I was involved with held yearly drag days, which found me binding and packing and digging out the mascara to color the fine blond hairs on my upper lip into a passable mustache. ("I thought that was real!" a dining hall worker told me. "It is real. I just made it darker," I said. "So you do have a mustache?" "Not that you can see usually." We never satisfactorily resolved this conversation.) And Model UN--well, Model UN was a chance to wear a suit for three days straight, to sit down at the end of the evening, kick off my soft black loafers, loosen the tie at my throat, and drink with the boys. I loved Model UN, for exactly this reason.

But as I've gotten older, and I've had to become more professional looking, to discipline my fashion choices to fit my new adult life, I've had to confront the central problem. Men's clothes don't fit my body. Sometimes they do okay--the jeans, sweater, and jacket in this photo are all men's clothes--but I just don't have the body of a bio man. My shoulders are too narrow. My breasts don't fit in shirts that fit the rest of me. Jeans cut me in all the wrong places. I also have this thing called a waist, and I do rather like showing off my figure. I like my body; I want to display it in ways that emphasize the things that are lovely about it. But the clothes I love don't do that. They ask different things.

I've tried to do is port this aesthetic into women's clothes: I wear very tailored blazers and blouses, because they translate best in my head. But I've also started wearing skirts with suits, and even heels occasionally. For instance, when I went on a job interview this winter, I wore this. Note that I loved it enough to make it my Facebook profile photo. And I think I look like exactly as much of a badass in it as I did walking down the aisle with my devil horns and gavel. I'm comfortable dressing this way, in part because I recognize that it, too, is drag. I am performing normative femininity as I put on eye make-up ("You have such lovely eyes, you simply have to do something to highlight them," my friends said when I asked for make-up advice before my interview; I didn't ask "If they're so lovely already, why do I have to do anything to them?"), reapply lipstick, roll up my thigh-high stockings, slip on my boots. I'm comfortable giving this performance because I realize it's a performance. Although a viewer might not be able to tell, I know, and that confidence energizes me as I keep going.


***






One of the body parts I committed to talking about this week was my arms. I love my arms without reservation. They are also one of the two body parts most effected by the years I spent disabled; for about five years, I walked exclusively with crutches, and spent some serious time in a wheelchair, because of a series of leg surgeries. Because of this time, I developed seriously badass arm muscles. Despite the fact that I haven't worked out regularly since then (I'm starting to go back to it now), I've kept the badass arms.

These are huge part of my own performed masculinity, because these aren't a girl's arms. Women are supposed to get slender and defined; men are supposed to add bulk. Well, these are bulky, too big to fit in a lot of tailored shirts. And they're solid; probably I could stand with some firming up in the triceps, and I've lost some definition, but these are not flabby arms. I love my arms. I wish my shirts loved my arms as much as I do.

There's a moment in Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog (online here) where Captain Hammer says that "these [his arms/fists] are not the hammer." He then turns to walk away, but then returns to clarify: "The Hammer is my penis." Well, I don't have one of those, and am OK with the fact. But I've got a pair of guns on me at all times. And I'm proud of them.

***



Notes on the outfit:

• This outfit was for wearing for errands in Manhattan--I wanted to look put together and decent, and I wasn't carting around the baby, but nothing high-profile. But I could see wearing this for a casual meeting with a student, or late-semester teaching.



• Both the sweater and the pants came from my beloved roommate, J. He's also the photographer for the shot of me in my interview suit; don't blame him for the mess in the hotel room behind me.



• The jacket came from my father-in-law. My mother-in-law tasked me and my wife to drive the suit it comes from over to his apartment during the great divvying up of stuff during the divorce, along with a gray wool suit of his, both tailor-made in the 1970s or early 1980s. He looked at both of them, and said, "I'll never be this thin again. I'll just donate it." "WAIT," I said, and slipped it on. It fit. "I'll take 'em both," I said. "Go for it," he said. I'm such a good son-in-law. I also carry heavy boxes. In any case, this comes from a (wait for it) THREE PIECE WIDE-WALE CORDUROY NAVY BLUE SUIT. Oh that's right, there's a matching vest to this sucka. And the jacket has suede elbow patches. This is seriously the most awesome blazer in the universe. And the rest of the suit is sitting in my closet, awaiting me having the money to get a tailor to refit the vest for someone with breasts, and the pants for someone with hips.



• Though I think this tank top is supercute, I don't get much wear out of it, because it's very, very stretchy, and low-cut, which means that every time I pick up the baby or lift my arms I end up showing off my bra. And I don't care that much, but it just doesn't look very put together, now does it?