DYBW: Hair It Is! (+a little Rancière)

Draft:

Draft:

hair (I got it from my mama)

purple turtleneck (H&M)

micro plaid trousers (Express)

black wedges (Lauren Ralph Lauren via Amazon)

Composition:

I'm wrapping up Academichic's Dress Your Best Week with this outfit that draws attention to my hair.  Normally, I'd put a jacket over the turtleneck or wear a statement necklace, but I find that I get the most compliments on my hair when I'm wearing a turtleneck, so I kept this outfit fairly simple.  I think there is something about the way the turtleneck and hair frame my face that draw extra attention to my hair.  For most of my life, I've been a short hair person, so getting used to long hair is taking some time.  My hair is thick, it's course, and if I don't tame it, it borders on out of control.  I love my hair, though, so I'm continuing the long hair experiment.  Do any of you other long haired ladies feel like your hair sometimes covers up the details of your favorite tops?

Anne-Marie's post yesterday got me thinking about how DYBWeek relates to my academic interests, as well.  I'm currently working with Jacques Rancière's theorization of aesthetics, and I think DYBWeek has demonstrated a lot of the things I find empowering about his theorization.  According to Rancière (as I understand him), aesthetics is an egalitarian system of determining what gets to be seen or heard in a community.  Aesthetics is egalitarian because any object can be aestheticized.  Once something is aestheticized, it reconstitutes the community that recognizes its aestheticization.  What I see us doing through this project is aestheticizing looks that may or may not have been recognized as "beautiful" by the mainstream fashion/style/beauty critics, and by doing that, we're working toward reconfiguring our communities so that they will incorporate an understanding of these looks as "beautiful."  And I think that's fantastic!  I'm happy to be a part of a community, even an electronic one, that celebrates so many different features as aesthetically beautiful.

At the same time, I think we've been deconstructing the stereotype that women are "catty" or "competitive" by nature.  I think I qualified my five favorite features in my original comment on academichic because I was afraid I'd look bratty to the other readers if I just stated them definitively.  Thanks to all of you for helping me realize I shouldn't have been so worried about that.

Thanks again to the ladies over at academichic for putting this theme week together!  Like Katie, I'm still trying to finish up my final papers, and I'm looking forward to spending some more time with your blog posts once I'm officially on break for the summer.  Thanks, also, to those of you who found our blog through this activity and have kept commenting and coming back!  We hope you'll stick around and keep the conversation going!

Happy weekend, everybody!

Prompts:

• Are you a long, medium, or short hair person?  What makes you prefer one length over the others?
• What have been your favorite things about DYBWeek?
• Am I misrepresenting Rancière?  Or if you want to indulge me by talking more Rancière, please do!!

Dressing Your Best Week: Curves, Calves, and Coloring

Draft:

Composition:
blue and green dress (Macy's)
tan heels (Steve Madden)
car (my roommate's...not intentionally part of the outfit; side-effect of my poor photography planning)

Usage:
As part of Academichic's Dress Your Best Week, I'm happy to offer up this outfit.  While thinking about the parts of my body that I want to celebrate, I came up with this list and the reasons why:

1) Curves
Contrary to popular belief, I did not always have a very curvy body.  I was flat as a board with no hips well into high school.  Around age 16 or 17, my body started to develop.  I went from lamenting my lack of womanly attributes to celebrating them before quickly realizing the problems they presented - I simply did.not.fit into certain styles of clothing or could not wear clothes from specific stores because they were incompatible with my body.  I may fill out clothing well, but sometimes I fill it out a little too much.  With my curves, particularly my chest, there's a fine line between looking curvy and cute and looking inappropriate.  However, despite my wrangling with finding appropriate styles and despite any societal connotations about curves (side note: why has "curvy" become a synonym for "fat" in certain circles?  discussion for another time), I love my body.  It makes me feel feminine, but also powerful.

2) Calves
Liz wrote a great post about legs here, and I know other bloggers have addressed this topic too.  I'm lucky to have a genetic predisposition to well-defined calf muscles.  My mother has always had great legs, and my calves generally have a good shape, and they tone up really easily.

3) Eyes and 4) Hair color and 5) Freckles
I'm the outsider of my family, coloring-wise.  My entire immediately family has very dark brown hair and brown eyes.  I have deep blue eyes and pseudo-red hair.  I have one grandparent on either side of my family with those traits, so I clearly inherited the recessive genes.  My hair has brown, blonde, and red tones in it, and depending on the lighting, it takes on one of those colors.  Usually, it has more of a red hue, especially combined with my freckles. 

Though most of the posts thus far have highlighted one or two aspects, I wanted to think of an outfit that at least marginally captured all of these attributes.  I chose this dress because the blue and green would bring out my eyes and my hair color (which, as I said, I think the freckles naturally add to).  The tie at the waist emphasizes my chest and the curviness of my body without being in any way scandalous.  Finally, the dress hits around the knee, showing off my calves, which I further highlighted with a slight heel.

Prompts:

• Are you curvy?  What do you love about it?  What do you dislike about it? 
• How do you dress for your coloring?  I want to write a post about this soon, so please give me some suggestions and ideas, or if you've written about it, please send me a link!
• I'm going to steal Liz's prompt because it's a good one: What are some of your favorite posts from DYBW so far?  I'm deep in the middle of final papers right now, so I don't have as much time to surf around as I'd like, though I do plan on going back and looking at more next week.

Dressing Your Best Week: Legs for Miles!

Draft:

Composition:
eyeglasses (Kate Spade)
white and brown button down (NY&Co)
brown belt (Kohl's)
dark dark skinnies (American Eagle)
brown wedge sandals (Old Navy)

Earlier Drafts:
I suggested these jeans as a stand-in for leggings.

Usage:
It's Academichic's Dress Your Best Week!  I'm excited to chime in with my first contribution to the discussion.

Last month, I asked you to help me think through why we, as women in academia, often find it easier to handle criticism than praise.  I was happy to that in S.'s first DYBW post, she addressed a similar question in regard to this week's project: why do we speak freely about our insecurities but feel like we have to justify our confidence?  I'm thrilled to follow S.'s lead and deconstruct this gendered norm by participating in DYBW without feeling bad about celebrating my assets!

This exercise, for me, has to begin with my legs.  My legs are the gatekeepers to my positive body image.  Why, you ask?  Growing up, I was stick thin, which came along with body issues of its own.  When I went to college, I gained the Freshman 15(x2).  An endless supply of Cherry Coke, Miller Lite, Ben & Jerry's, and fried food did not do this body good.  Before my senior year, I spent four months training for the Chicago Marathon.  I'll admit this was inspired equally by a desire to lose the extra weight and an aspiration to run 26.2 miles consecutively.  I didn't lose any weight, but I gained a new relationship to my body.

Marathon training helped me think about my body as a living, functioning organism that I was living inside rather than just an object to dress up in a way that would please others.  I became conscious of eating as something that provided energy rather than merely a social activity. When you're running long distances, you can measure hunger in minutes.  If you haven't eaten enough the night before, you're acutely aware of the fatigue and it translates to the time you see on your stopwatch.  My physical body's distinguishable reactions to my nutritional decisions helped me to understand that good nutrition must facilitate brainwork similarly.

At some point, I just had to acknowledge that the weight was not going to come off.  I couldn't cut calories and still hope to complete my training runs.  I was able to accept my body because, despite the extra lbs I was carrying around, my legs looked fantastic, and that reminded me that those legs were taking me a long way.  In one of my favorite short stories, Mary Austin's "The Walking Woman," (available here), Austin writes that the title character "had walked off all sense of society-made values," and I think running allowed me to do something similar.  I thought I'd have to lose weight to develop a healthy body image, but for me, the opposite turned out to be true.  Once I'd developed a healthy body image, I started making lifestyle changes that led to the weight coming off fairly naturally over time.

Still with me?  That's why it always comes back to the legs.  My legs are long, they're lean, they're toned, they're powerful, and they carried me over 500 miles last year.  (They also help me negotiate the Snickers and Hershey's addictions I haven't been able to kick!)

To celebrate my legs, I put on my skinnies with my tallest heels.  I didn't have any good ideas about what to wear on top to draw attention to my legs, so I put on this button-down top to keep the top half of the look simple. I belted it to draw attention to my small waist.

Prompts:

• Any suggestions for what else I could have worn on top?
• Why IS it so much harder to talk about our strengths than to acknowledge our weaknesses?
• What habits or attitudes have you found that help you think of your body more positively?
• What are some of your favorite posts from DYBW so far?  Post some links!  And since we're not being shy about celebrating confidence, feel free to include your own!

Dressing Your Best Week: Ahoy, Toned Abs and Arms!

 Draft:

Earlier Drafts:

Oh, have we met, linen skirt?

We're in cahoots, nudie shoesies.  

Composition:

Breton Stripe tee (H&M)
linen skirt (H&M)
braided leather belt (Target)
red patterned scarf (snagged during La Merce in Barcelona)
nude suede heels (Seychelles)

Usage:
This week Liz, Katie, and I are excited to participate in Academichic's Dress Your Best Week!  We're cooking up outfits which flatter our best attributes, and we encourage you to join our feel-good fashion fest.  Last week, in preparation, Academichic readers contributed lists of five favorite features*.  Here's my list:

1. complexion
2. toned shoulders and arms
3. small ankles
4. clavicle bones
5. flat stomach

There they are, the motivators of my private fist-pumping.  Behold.  Admittedly, it feels awkward to boast about my body, but I'm encouraged by the exercise.  If I so readily own my flaws, why not own my features as well?

Today I'm also thrilled to hop aboard the Breton Stripes boat hosted by What I Wore.  For a complete roll call of Jessica Schroeder's nautically-bedecked readers, stop by her notable blog!

Luckily, the two sartorial themes - Dressing my best and dressing Breton - have converged on the very day I had hoped to celebrate my arms and my stomach.  Over the weekend, I struggled to compose ensembles which highlighted these attributes.  After scouring my closet, I realized many of my tops, like this one, include detailing which detracts from my middle.  I have to confess: I typically use fabric to beef up my figure, to give the illusion of a curvier body.  I don't often wear body-hugging silhouettes precisely because I think my frame is too boyish.  To compound my Dress Your Best predicament, I felt stumped by the question of dressing 'tastefully' (the cultural definition of which likely merits a separate post).  I asked myself, how can I feature my abs in a sophisticated way?

Then I remembered one of Liz's posts challenged the perception that narrower equals more flattering.  She contended that a woman should embrace low-slung belts and horizontal stripes specifically because those garments highlight her hips and abs and breasts.  I'm not curvy, I thought, but wearing horizontal stripes might serve my purpose, too.  Casting a visual line across my body - rather than down my body - might draw attention to the stomach and arms I love so much.  And choosing a tee of the cap-sleeved variety would further showcase my arms.  (Is it just me, or do women cover their arms all too often?)

I won't lie.  While sporting this outfit, I felt proud of my body.  Why don't I wear horizontal stripes more often?  Perhaps, as Katie suggests, the "no horizontal stripes" rule is another one I should revisit.  I might benefit from assessing whether or not it works for my own figure, rather than presuming its universal application.


Prompts:

• What's your take on the "no horizontal stripes" rule?  Always a no-go?  Depends on the person?
• Do you think this outfit accomplishes my goal?  Would you have styled it differently?
• What do you like about your own body?  Hop aboard the Dress Your Best Week train!

*For a directory of Dress Your Best Week participants and links to their personal lists, visit Academichic's run-down here.