Dressing well in New York is easy. Everywhere you go, the streets are full of people in spectacular clothes. There are models, fancy ladies with Birkins, actresses, singers in cool bands, fashion people, bloggers, and people who are just really, really, ridiculously good at finding designer vintage on eBay. It seems like everyone is trying really hard to look like their best possible selves, and in that environment it is only natural to want to take part. But what do you do when the vicissitudes of life lead you away from the 24/7 fashion show that is the L Train and drop you in a tiny little village in the middle of nowhere?
(Related: Late to the Party: How I Finally Came Around to Fashion Sneakers)
It can be tough to motivate to get dressed up in a small town, especially one where things run very casual. Once, not long after moving to a new town, I went to dinner with some friends and I wore a blue silk Equipment blouse with some dark jeans and ankle boots. That’s a pretty low-key outfit for most cities, but my dining companions acted as though I had arrived in a Philip Treacy lobster hat. If I wore a maxi dress to the grocery store, creepy dudes stared at me as though I were running around completely naked. (I still don’t know what they were looking at. I’m not even busty or anything.)
IMAGE champagne bridesmaid dresses
As if that weren’t enough, my town was covered in beautiful, idyllic, old-timey cobblestone streets. They looked fantastic on Instagram, but they made it impossible to wear anything but flats. Considering that at the time I only owned one pair of flats, and those were sandals, that was infuriating.
I spent the next year or so feeling like it just wasn’t worth getting dressed in the morning because I had nothing to do but go out and wander around my tiny, extraordinarily casual little town. It was just a whole calendar year of jeans and T-shirts and unwashed hair, and not in a cool model-off-duty kind of way.
Dressing like that is just fine if that’s what you like, but for me it just made me feel crummy all the time. It was as though I were on hiatus, waiting for my life to start happening again. (I did not move to a small town because I wanted to be there, and I deeply resented every dumb cobblestone.) But that sort of thing can’t go on forever. I wasn’t on hiatus. Days were passing. Life is short. If I ever wanted to wear my cool stuff again, I figured I should just get to it now and ignore the people staring at me for wearing a vintage dress to the grocery store.
It’s still tough to motivate to put in a bunch of effort when nobody else is, but it can be fun to do it anyway. Instagram helps, but the real thing that did it for me was thinking that if I got hit by a bus tomorrow, what would I want my last outfit to be? If I must be hit by a bus, might as well have people say, “Man, that bus hit a lady who was wearing a whole lot of sequins.” (Heck, in this scenario maybe the sequins will make it easier for the bus driver to see me and thus spare me an untimely demise.)
Besides, if you treat an ordinary destination like an event, it does feel more like one. Just try wearing false eyelashes to the Starbucks and see if it doesn’t make that Frappuccino more fun.
READ MORE bridesmaid dresses plus size
