In the first picture, I had to dress up because my roomate wanted to take pictures with me for her instagram. I was feeling especially lazy that day, but dressed up for her anyway. It was interesting that in a way, we are curating a certain aesthetic of ourselves to show the world. This is what people will see and how they will remember us. Normally, we would just be ugly and comfortable around each other and we usually have to both agree we would dress up to take pictures before we do. There would be a sense of class disparity if one of us dresses up and the other does not. When both me and my roomate dress up, it feels like we are on the same frequency. It is a visual representation of our friendship even though we are wearing different articles of clothing.
In the second picture, I am wearing a cheongsam because I was going to a ball the next day and I could not decide what to wear. I wore this terrible clashing of cheongsam, platform boots and heels to annoy my roommate and joke that this was what I was going to wear. However we later decide that the cheongsam was not appropriate as it might seem too ethnic, which is nothing wrong, but somehow, I felt the pressure to wear something more modern and less traditional, I was also going with my boyfriend who was white, so it just seems kind of “extra” to wear a cheongsam. I was assuming the role of a feminine date. I felt kind of out of place even though Chinese culture and clothing is something that I am very familiar with.
