The power in a uniform
The clothes make the woman, and the woman makes the clothes
Growing up, the school I went to had a uniform. It consisted of a white t-shirt with the school emblem paired with jeans (either pants or knee-length shorts) and sneakers. The color, style, fit, bedazzling, ornamenting, accessorizing and anything else was up to us. In all my years there, from primary, through middle school, until the end of high school, I never saw two people dressed the same. Not even in that awkward preteen fase when everyone was trying to wear the same clothes, do the same things, talk the same way and do anything else to avoid standing out.
It's curious how, even in the confines of well-set restrictions, we inadvertedly set ourselves apart anyway. If not even a uniform (albeit not a strict one) is, in fact, uniform, it is only natural that, when faced with both endless options and limiting dress codes, we might find it equally hard to get dressed.
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When I got to college and there was no uniform, no rules other than basic decency, I remember staring at my closet and feeling lost. Can you guess what I wore on the first day? A white t-shirt, jeans and sneakers.
There is power in a uniform, a sense of control. So much so that, when faced with endless options, I turned to the only one I knew to be tried and true. After so many years of picking the perfect wash and fit of jeans, pairing it with the exact color and style of all-stars and wearing so many bracelets and rings that I barely had any exposed skin left, all just to try and let my personality shine through, it turns out I had grown to quite like the confines of my uniform. Or at least its simplicity and familiarity.
As time passed, I started exploring and experimenting. I tried wearing leggings once to class, felt horribly underdressed and decided they were strictly workout attire for me. I never considered wearing shorts or flip-flops, not even in the sweltering tropical heat, even though some of my classmates did. I started adding prints and a bit of texture, I switched from a backpack to a grown-up tote bag (the first was my black Longchamp, which still features heavily in my rotation, though much worse for wear) and developed my own sort of uniform. I still remember the day I took off my signature stack of bracelets. I didn't need them anymore.
My style, as well as myself, has of course changed a great deal since then. I graduated, became a doctor, and, in 2022, started Residency. After six years of med school, six years of being a student, I was thrown into an environment where I was still learning, but also expected to already know. Where I had the responsability for caring for the actual lives of people, when up until then I couldn't even legally prescribe tylenol. I had to learn to behave a certain way, to express confidence and serenity in the face of despair, and to be able to carry my patient's burden for them, even if just for that little time we had together. I already felt like the amount of pain and knowledge I'd come into contact with during med school had aged me, but nothing made me grow up quite so fast as those three years of Residency. I ended a relationship, fell in love again, moved out of my mom's house and actually entered the worforce as a fully functioning adult.
Even though a lot of these changes were internal, I can see them clearly reflected in the way I dressed then, and the way I dress now. It might seem shallow, after describing such serious matters, to talk about clothes. It seemed that way to me too. I could never reconcile how much I cared about the way I dressed, the clothes I wore, when I spent the day dealing with objectively serious things. The thing is, I don't think the evolution in my style was an exact consequence of my internal growth, but rather that the two walked hand in hand. Whenever I would face a new challenge, or had a particularly hard day ahead of me, I'd purposefully choose an outfit that made me look more confident than I actually felt. In the last few years, I developed a closer relationship with my wardrobe than I'd ever had, and again I found myself exploring and experimenting, just as I did that first year of college. I embraced new silhouettes, added new colors, new materials and whole new categories of clothing such as blazers, trousers and ballet flats. I abandoned the white t-shirt, jeans and sneakers combo. I don't need it anymore.
Instead, I created new uniforms for myself, and decided to start sharing them here. Going further than that, I now feel confident enough in my own knowledge of myself that I freely stray from these uniforms without feeling completely lost.
To drive my point home, I want to end this with a little anecdote: In my first year of high school we got a new transfer student who showed up to the first day with the hem of his pants turned up. It seems a detail so small, and so insignificant, but my friends and I were so struck by it that we proceeded to call him “cuffed pants guy” for the next three years, and were basicaly collectively in love with him for the following month. To this day, I wonder if, before leaving for a new school that day, he thought to fold the hems on his jeans on purpose, or if he did that everyday and never gave it a second thought. Or if maybe his jeans were just too long and he absentmindedly, even irritably, folded them just so they wouldn't get on his way, not knowing it would shape the interactions between a bunch of teenage girls for years to come.
The fact I even remember that might be a testament as to the seemingly random way our brain chooses to hold memories, or it might be a testament as to the impact something as small as the cuff on a pair jeans can have.
There is power in a uniform, and there is power in transgression. So, build your uniforms, construct your formulas, and, when you're ready, break them.
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See you at the end of your next shift,
Beijinhoss xx