Clothes from my youth

At 17, my wardrobe was largely white and lavender with a great many multicolored floral pieces. I often paired floral skirts with plain tops or floral tops with plain bottoms.

I got involved with the future ex just before I turned eighteen. For forty years, circumstances beyond my control have dictated my wardrobe and style choices. For just one year of my life, I dressed in what pleased me.

My mother was super conservative. She worked as a maid for years and wore white tops and pants to work so she could bleach them. On weekends, she would go shopping in a blazer with slacks, like business casual.

My sister is six and half years older than I am and when I was seventeen she already had a college degree and office job. She changed my diapers as much as my mother did -- I guess I was like a doll to play dress up with to both of them -- and people had been mistaking her for my mother from the time I was thirteen or fourteen.

I don't know exactly when that started or how often it occurred. I know when I was thirteen or fourteen, we went to a swimming pool on Fort Benning. There's no entrance fee but you have to show ID and sign in.

So we are both in like bathing suits and jeans over them or something like that and at age fourteen I was 5'7" having grown four inches in the previous year. The guy signing us in is clearly charmed by my sister and flirting with her and says to her "You don't need to sign in your daughter." which bombed big time because my sister was shocked anyone could mistake her for being old enough to be my mother when she's in a bathing suit and some kind of cover up but not very covered up.

It got worse with her having an office job and wearing business suits. 

Probably the Christmas I was seventeen, there was especially upscale, classy office wear for sale at the PX on base and mom bought a few pieces for each of us. We were the same height but I was very flat chested and my sister was not -- so the tops fit her better than they did me -- and the colors were plum and grey and she's a Scorpio and I am not (those are Scorpio colors) and she had an office job and I was a senior in high school and girl gamer.

I had quite a lot of serious business suits because my mother bought my clothes and that was what she liked. I liked some of those suits but it wasn't really appropriate to my lifestyle.

So I traded my sister the matching plum and grey or silvery pieces plus other suits for her old high school clothes which included stuff like floral peasant blouses. That way I had high school appropriate clothes and she had a fabulous office wear wardrobe.

I kept a very casual unlined white jacket that wasn't a blazer style and wasn't part of a suit. That was kind of officy but worked well for a seventeen year old high school student with no job.

I had an extremely gauzy white cotton dress with a red sash. Once while grabbing a bite to eat by myself and wearing that, two South Americans -- most likely officers attending the School of the Americas -- paid for my bagel and soda. 

I had a plain lavender wrap skirt. I wore a lot of lavender and white but I don't clearly remember other lavender pieces. I do remember this skirt.

I had a floral wrap skirt in light, muddy colors including some light shade of purple that wasn't exactly lavender. I wore a variety of plain tops with it. I loved the skirt and felt like it went with nothing and everything. It made a strong statement in its own right and I felt pressure to wear something that played second fiddle and didn't compete with it which was a challenge because it's more the norm to wear floral tops and solid skirts.

I had a pale yellow peasant blouse with little lavender flowers but I may have had that from age fourteen. I wore it a lot with jeans and looked rather like a hippie in it.

I had a peach colored long-sleeved blouse that I wore for my second set of senior photos after cutting my hair and getting them redone because I didn't like the first set. I think it had embroidered detailing on the collar and probably elsewhere. It was a subtly very feminine version of a covered up button down blouse of the sort you might wear to the office.

I had a walk-in closet worth of clothes and no walk in closet. I added closet organizers and added hanging bars to both sides of my closet door which got permanently propped open and something flatter to the inside of my bedroom door. Most of the organizers were bought but my father made me a custom extra hanging bar for within the closet to add more room for short items like tops while leaving a section for long pieces like coats and dresses.

The purple striped pants seen in some pieces on my comic November West is based on an actual pair of pants I owned at about age seven or eight. When I got too tall but they still fit in the waist, mom added a couple of inches to the length but ran the stripes horizontally so it looked like a decorative detail, a thing I spoke of elsewhere

One year in elementary school, maybe fourth grade, denim with rhinestones or studs was in. She made me half a dozen denim jackets with matching pants covered in rhinestones or studs. 

This was laborious and time consuming. It was a labor of love and I felt very special and each one was unique.

I had one in pale blue and one in brown and the rest in dark blue. One day at school my troglodyte classmates asked me why I wore the same outfit all the time. Didn't I have other clothes?

Another year, mom sewed me a fuzzy faux leopard print winter jacket and matching vest with black edging. I liked wearing plain black under it to showcase the leopard print.

In recent years, I mostly have worn plain pieces in solid colors. In my youth, it was much more the norm for me to wear a strongly patterned statement piece like that with solids in coordinating colors.

Then I began dating the future ex and wore a lot of black and once someone remarked on how much I was dressed like a ninja while paying for tickets to a ninja movie for the two of us. Though on that occasion I actually had on an electric blue top with black details to go with black everything else.

I have an Aries rising sign and I do well in certain shades of red. This piece is titled If Red is your Neutral... because I've gone through periods where my purse was red and I owned multiple pairs of red shoes because red was my neutral.

I had a red dress with wild butterfly sleeves that I used to wear as a top tucked into jeans while breastfeeding because it had an extremely unusual neckline that made breastfeeding convenient and also made me feel pretty during a time when I mostly felt poor and unattractive.

Should this velveteen rabbit of a clothing line become a REAL clothing line, I hope to use that to inspire pieces that are maternity friendly without looking dowdy. I LOATHE the fashion world's tendency to insist you can have practical, comfortable clothes OR attractive clothes that are an exercise in torture in the name of sacrificing for your beauty but you cannot have clothes that is practical and attractive and comfortable.

I only look like a ninja in plain dark clothes when  with the photophobic ex and/or stupidly dirt poor. Which has been every day of my life since I turned eighteen, unfortunately.