My earliest memory of style: my aunt in tights and a skirt that falls a few inches above her ankles. I’m maybe three. I’ve never seen a woman in my family wear tights before. They looked like a mystery, or a secret. My mother would laugh about it after: how I’d say I wanted to dress just like her.
Where does it come from, our style? The curation of the self using fabric, cut, colour. “That’s me,” we say, when trying on a pink jacket, or white sneakers, items with nothing in common except that we had been the one to pick them.
Throughout my life, I’ve lost my sense of self in my style then found it again, but when I know it’s good, it begins with play. My mother sews all our costumes for my cousin’s fancy-dress birthday parties by hand after work. I’m amazed by how a string of yarn becomes a wig, a square of foil a flourish of jewellery. One year I’m a cowboy, the next Cleopatra. When my mother leans close to paint her eyeliner on me for the first time, I hold my breath. The first elegant flick of a cat-eye. I’m four when Pocahontas comes out, and my mother makes me a costume in the Disney princess’s image. A questionable choice now, but in 1995, it led to my first fight over style: refusing to wear shoes to the party in the park, because in the movie, she didn’t. Somehow, I win.
Growing up, a lot of my clothes come second-hand from older cousins. The cardboard box is stuffed with oversized shirts with horrendous collars, cheesy floral prints, dated Tweety Bird tops. I hate their arrival, always timed just before the school year and shutting down what I dreamt could have been “back-to-school shopping”. At nine, it seems there’s nothing worse than marching to class in clothes chosen for someone else. But one day, Baba gifts me a new box, tied with a bow. Out emerges a black velvet dress with a giant yellow sunflower. I don’t know why this image lives in my mind for years. Decades later, when we’re silently driving down a stretch of California freeway, Baba turns to me and asks out of the blue, “Do you remember your sunflower dress?” Of course I do. Clothes become the details of our life story, a marker of time.
For years, I wear hijab, the uniform of women in my family. Black to match my hair colour, Calvin Klein counterfeit prints we’d bought in Turkey. I always pull my bangs out, my signature. My style, in those years, was this: taking something that had been picked out for me, and making a small twist to make it mine.
At home, Mumma insists I change into shalwar kameez. Our most frequent fights go like this:
“Why are you ashamed of who you are?” she says, holding up the cotton shalwar kameez.
“No,” I say, pointing to the faded blue jeans that I’ve tried to tear with a cheese grater because Mumma wouldn’t let me buy ripped jeans, “This is who I am.”
Many years later, I’ll meet a woman from an Orthodox Jewish family and it is clothes we will bond over. How strange, we both marvel, that our young selves started to navigate the big questions (what kind of life do I want to live?) through the simple desire to make choices about our clothing. We wonder where it begins, the divergence of the self from the community, and turn to each other and shrug, saying: “I just wanted to wear what I wanted.”
Through high school, my hijabi cousins and I throw girl-only parties in our basements and curtained living rooms so we can do just that. We dance in bedazzled off-the-shoulder dresses, leather minis and silk blouses, knitted tanks and sheer organza outfits that have waited for months in our closets. We dance to desi ballads and Cyndi Lauper, we sing along, we’re girls, we just want to have fun. There is a delirious freedom to these parties where we dress for ourselves alone – no man we want to impress or whose unwanted attention we try to ward off; no auntie whose judgement we have to evade; no photographs taken for social media. We eliminated every audience until there was no aim to the styling of our outfits except personal delight.
It’s that freedom I’m after now. Too often I’ve stood before my closet asking not: “What do I want to wear? How do I feel?” But some version of: “Who do they want me to be?” The “they” could be the person interviewing you, co-workers, family members. So much is projected on to a woman’s body, so many wait for any reason to dismiss her, that it’s no wonder that standing before a closet can sometimes feel like working out a complex puzzle.
In retrospect, this emphasis on who I “should” be has been the source of every regrettable style choice. The first time I taught creative writing at a university, I felt so far from the label of an “adjunct professor”, I went out of my way to wear stuffy blazers and starchy button-up shirts I ironed on my ironing board that, on my student budget, also doubled as my desk. Later, the jump to a “novelist” from editing alone in my apartment, wearing my red hoodies and Adidas soccer pants, felt sudden and expensive. So began the start of too many outfits where I played it safe, exclusively wearing a series of unfortunate turtleneck sweaters.
I’d supported my writing by waitressing, tutoring, teaching, sometimes even doing henna for parties and events. Most of my clothes I’d hung on to since college. I didn’t know what I’d wear on my book tour, or how I’d afford it. After asking my publishers if there was a styling budget and learning there was not, my sweet editor heard her friend Stacy was throwing out her old clothes and offered them to me. I found myself opening another cardboard box of hand-me-downs, just like those I’d resented growing up, this time filled with real silk blouses, the first cashmere sweaters I’d ever try on. They were so soft. Sometimes, even now, I think of it as “Stacy’s sweater” when putting it on.
After my book had come out and I no longer lived pay cheque to pay cheque, I tried on an alpaca wool sweater on sale for $200. At the time, I’d never spent so much on a single item of clothing before. I left the sweater, then walked back to try it on again. I see-sawed between “I have to have it” and “How could I get something nicer than what my mother allowed herself?” It’s a feeling that has followed every expansion of life: swimming for the first time in an ocean; exhaling my body into a yoga mat; looking up at a band on stage and feeling the song in my whole body; touching the rough-softness of wool. The immediate thought after the wonder is wishing my mother could give herself this exact experience. Every new coat or soft sweater felt like another layer between me and my mother, who once held up my shalwar kameez, and only now do I understand she was trying to say: “Be like me. Stay with me.”
Personal style evolves as we do. True liberation of style is something I’m still working towards, one that eliminates even the thought of how I will be perceived, though in recent years I’ve let my values guide my choices. Recently, I wore a pink minidress, pink tights and pink platform shoes and I laughed – I loved it, the play of it. Like my mother slipping me into my cowboy hat and mask, like zipping up a mint-blue Valentino caped gown, and I’m transformed. I’m trying to honour the mysterious feeling of landing on a colour or pattern or cut that externalises something true and authentic about the self, whatever that is. Until the outfit is changed, and it is remade again.
Fatima Farheen Mirza is the author of A Place For Us.
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