I interviewed my friend Yiwen, who is a junior student at Parsons, about her dress practice. She loves fashion and photography thus she has a consistent, unique dressing style, which is vintage, classic and exquisite. This dressing style is coherent with her aesthetic, personality and lifestyle. I always knew her as a well organized, meticulous, gentle and loving girl who enjoys a high-quality life. During this interview, I have noticed something I hadn’t notice before about her daily dress practice, is that she owns a lot of beautiful, exquisite heels that she never wore before. Those are all expensive heels from luxury brands, they are stored in the original boxes and never be worn. However, to me, I never buy clothes that I will not wear. If I get something new, I want to put on as soon as possible instead of save for later or as a collection hobby. From her point of view, she just loves buying whatever clothes and shoes she like, she does not care if she can actually wears them, it already makes her happy if she owns them. Sophie Woodward once wrote, “ In all cases, clothing spills out throughout the whole house and is not just confined within the wardrobe. The different locations of clothing in the house relate to how often it is worn, whether it is about to be disposed of or whether it is in part of clothing’s ordinary household cycle of laundering.” When I go through Yiwen’s wardrobe, it is clear that she wears the sneakers and boots on the rack more often than the heels in the boxes.
This interview has made me realize clothing does not have to be worn on the body to shape a person. There are both clothes for the body of our mind and our physical body.
Woodward, Sophie. Why Women Wear What They Wear. Oxford: Berg, 2007.
