The Gift of Transience

On buying new clothes, & embracing change.

As a self-proclaimed sustainability girlie, I’m proud of my capsule wardrobe. The exploitative horrors of fast fashion have completely disillusioned me from being one of those people who engages in “micro-trends” or even someone who changes their outfits with the seasons. I wear the exact same outfits year-round—jeans + professional blouse + cardigan—except in summer, I take off the cardigan when I step outside (this is enabled by my very-inside career, itself a massive privilege). I point out this fact whenever someone online accuses me of exemplifying “exaggerated hyper-femininity”, an insult wielded against trans women as though cis women aren’t rewarded for hyper-femininity for the same reasons we are (a promised-though-rarely-delivered protection under white supremacist patriarchy).

Aaaand, now that I’ve mentioned climate change, colonialism, racism, sexism, and transphobia all in the first paragraph of this post, it’s time to turn my attention inward. This post is not a manifesto; it’s a self-analysis.

My commitment to sustainability doesn’t erase my very human need to shake things up from time to time. Every year or so, I become completely bored with my current wardrobe, donating what I never wear anymore to a thrift store and gaining new clothes, often from that same thrift store. Recently, I’ve been having that craving for

m o r e

and it’s been difficult to unpack. This craving partially comes from living my entire life in a culture of increasingly-turbulent capitalist excess, with all the media around me insisting that there is a Correct Way To Dress. But there’s another factor too: good, old-fashioned gender dysphoria.

So, to address this issue, I did what any sane person would do: I made a Lex post about it.