There Is No Joy in Mudville

This ending line from the famous baseball poem, Casey at the Bat, somewhat describes my disillusionment with fashion in America today. There is no fashion in Middle America. I’ve talked before about the state of dress but it was never so obvious as during a recent trip to Indiana on family business. Wherever I went, sloppiness was everywhere. Pity to the poor girl that goes to the mall to learn fashion by watching other ladies and how they dress.

An interesting comparison would be the patrons of IHOP in Muncie (IN) and the IHOP here in Merida. What did I see in Muncie? Fat butts in too-tight leggings, torn jeans (whoever thought that was style), baggy and unkempt, ill-fitting clothes and footwear that consisted largely of sneakers and flip flops, and not the $500 flip flops that you can buy at Nordstrom. The upgrade to flip flops were sandals with almost neon plastic straps. The sale of steam irons must be at an all-time low because I don’t remember any clothes with creases in them.

Compare that to IHOP at our local mall here in Merida. Women in lovely printed dresses with flats and 1-3 inch wedges, fitted jeans (no holes) and lovely embroidered blouses. The clothes were cared for and fitted well and they took pride in appearing feminine.  On any given day at the mall, probably 30-40% of the women are in dresses compared to maybe 5% at an American mall or big box store.

IHOP Merida

But it’s not just Middle America. New York is considered America’s fashion capital and one of the world’s most stylish cities. Carolina Herrera is a NY fashion designer and she hasn’t been impressed with the fashion she’s seen lately. ‘If you look at the people walking around the streets of New York at this moment, it is horrendous!’ she said. ‘I have never seen people so badly dressed in my life! It’s amazing the way they look! I don’t know why…I don’t know what’s going on…but it’s really, really bad,’ she says.

“I was sitting in traffic this morning looking at the people on the street, and I thought … ‘What’s going on here?’ Everybody is wearing the wrong clothes. Proportion is very important. Wear clothes that are flattering to your figure and appropriate for your personality. It’s about finding the style for the right figure or the right age. Sometimes you see women that don’t realize that age is changing your style, and they don’t change. What you wore when you were 15 doesn’t look that well when you’re 30 and certainly looks terrible when you’re older. So, you have to change with the times. It’s the same thing with a fuller figure or a very thin one.”

It’s interesting to look at vintage photos of any decade of the 20th century through the 1980s, and compare it to your average shopping mall photo of today. I’d say it was around the late 1990s that people gradually started slacking off more and more in the wardrobe department, perhaps due to the widespread adoption of casual Fridays in the workplace (which eventually became casual Monday through Friday).  Clinton Kelly, from the TV show, What Not To Wear, confirms that American fashion disappeared in the ’90s. The rise of the dotcom industry, with its laid back company culture (which allowed people to ride scooters inside the office; I worked for one of these places myself.) It was a privilege to wear jeans on Fridays, but now it seems we’ve gone to the other extreme, and in many offices the dress code is too lax, or nonexistent.

You guessed it, “Walmart”

The massive decline in dressing nicely and appropriately in our country has gotten so bad that Bill Maher addressed our world of “slob culture” on Real Time in October 2013 (when Crocs were introduced in the late ’90s, Maher quipped that people won’t be happy until they can go shopping in a diaper…but wait, they are) and I’ve read numerous blog posts attesting to how our European counterparts dress compared to us (hint: we’ve really let ourselves go.) I read Lady of Style, a German fashion blogger in her 40s, and she is an exemplary example of how to dress well while still being casual. My favorite bloggers are mostly Australian with Imogen Lamport of Insideoutstyle blog being my favorite.

Oh! it gets better. There’s the case of the woman who ditched her clothes for body paint and no one even noticed. Julie volunteered herself to become living, breathing art at the hands of Pusher House, a professional body painter. To do so, she stripped down to just pasties and a pair of nude underwear. Then, House outlined a design with a base coat followed by adding more details including buttons, zippers, rips, and holes, as well as shading and highlights. Lastly, sealant was sprayed all over Julie’s body to set the white T-shirt and ripped jeans.

Julie spent some time in Japan and had this to say on her return to the U.S. “Most people cannot even put together a decent presentable outfit, much less have their own personal style and dress themselves right. The difference between here and Tokyo really is a huge hurdle and it makes me feel quite disappointed. Why is it that the general American populous is unable to dress themselves and why are the Japanese so far ahead of us in terms of clothing and fashion?”

Are you starting to get the picture?

Now compare this group of shoppers on the left to our crossdressing shoppers on the right.

L – mall shoppers R – Donna Kelli (CD) and friend

And we wonder why wearing a dress or a nice blouse and skirt outfit will get you noticed! 2011 in El Paso. I was wearing a midi length printed skirt, turquoise top and matching sweater and a turquoise statement necklace while shopping at the local Albertsons grocery store. A lady stopped me as I was leaving and said, “I’ve been following you around and you look like you just stepped out of a fashion magazine.” Now I’m no beauty but the compliment was gracious and earned even though I just considered the outfit normal female attire for a middle-class woman. It doesn’t take much to stand out.

We dress more casually because we can,” according to cultural historian Deirdre Clemente from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, who was interviewed by The Washington Post. Americans gravitate toward casual without even realizing it. Clothing doesn’t obviously signal wealth or social status as it used to do, but it instead proves that Americans can freely express their individuality.

It wasn’t always this way. For much of the 20th century, Americans didn’t dress casually all the time. There were dress codes and customs. Men wore suits and hats; women wore dresses. Jeans and T-shirts were for laborers, not professionals. “Casual is the sweet spot between looking like every middle-class American and being an individual in the massive wash of options,” Clemente told The Post.

As it turns out, historians can point to two major periods in the 20th century that changed the way we dress today: The 1920s, when women started breaking away from dresses and fewer men attending college wore full suits, and World War II, when women cared more about their work in the factories and the victory gardens than what they were wearing on the particular day. Since those times, the long slide to where we are today was inevitable. The 1960s and ’70s hastened things along and as I mentioned earlier, the 1990s saw the final decline to mediocrity.

So, are there any lessons in this rant. Yes.

First, be the best that you can be.

There’s lots of help on Sister House. Check out our Stylish Crossdressers in the Dressing Room and the many fine accompanying articles. And don’t forget the “All About” section in the Library. Our authors in the “Putting It Together” section should be particularly helpful and don’t forget “Femme d’Certain Age” if you are a more mature woman.

Sister House Stylish Crossdressers

Next, create you own image Lookbook of styles that appeal to you.

A good way to start is have your Pinterest page and if you need ideas, check out the many fashion boards on the Sister House Pinterest page. I’m always finding pictures of outfits that show me how to pair the clothes in my wardrobe.

Lastly, ask for help

Do you have either a female or trans friend that you particularly admire for her style of dressing or makeup skills. Ask her for help. They are usually more than willing to shop with you or help with the makeup. And don’t forget our list of image consultants in the Library. We will be adding our own special service in this area soon.

If you enjoyed this article, please visit us at Sister House or on Tasi’s blog or of course click my name in the header of this article for my many other fine article on TG Forum.

Tags: crossdressing, fashion, featured, opinion, style

Category: Style, Transgender Fashion