Location and how if affects your style. - Topic of the day 11/10/24
Disregarding temperature conditions, do you feel like where you grew up or where you live has had an effect on your style? If so, which has had the biggest contribution and how so? Did you make your own twist on the typical oufits worn by the locals or did the environment help you develop something wholly different.
25 Replies
no
florida predispositioned me to be a fishing boy
but that’s about it
Cant wear this shit in texas
Not really.
yes
i don’t wanna shake the boat here but theres a lot of stuff i wouldn’t be wearing if i didn’t live in a big city
even when i lived in a more conservative city than i do now i didn’t push it nearly as hard
A bit! I grew up hunting and stuff so seeing camo in fits can be a little off sometimes but it mostly manifests as me not wanting to wear it rather than it looking bad on other folks.
Besides that, living in a place with all four seasons is nice.
For where I currently live (CO) western is easier to get away with. I’d include gorp but idt there’s anywhere in the US that that would be out of bounds
This is an interesting question for me being from South Dakota. I never even felt truly rural/Midwest, never felt inspired by northern yeehaw farmer, so I never incoporated that sort of thing into my own styling. Never really felt like I belonged despite growing up and living there for 32 years. And on top of that, there was virtually no one that had fashion as a hobby, let alone men's fashion apart from the handful of menswear stores around town. I think South Dakota shaped my fashion journey in the sense that I felt pretty alone with that as something I cared about. All of my inspo was online, from places I never been to, people I hadn't met before, clothes I hadn't seen or felt in person before.
Glad to see my totd idea was used
I grew up down south and my entire family is from Texas or Oklahoma so the way I dress (now) definitely makes sense when you consider the source. That said, it took me a while to get comfortable dressing how I like and how I feel comfortable while living in the northeast. I generally don’t mind sticking out like a sore thumb, and being in a pretty rural area definitely helps. I also retained at least a little bit of my accent, so that helps too, but there’s some pretty consistent preconceptions (often correct) that folks have of white guys that look like me. All I can do there is do my best to overcome those. Once folks get to know me it’s pretty clear I’m not a good ol’ boy, but I can understand why small college town people may be a bit taken aback when they first meet me.
All that is to say, I think location has an impact, but I don’t think it would ever outright stop me or change the way I present myself. But I have the privilege of not potentially being in danger for the way I dress and the way I present myself. That’s a pretty big caveat.
It's probably what I love most about NYC; you can generally wear anything you want and not feel out of place. Definitely a far cry from my central PA college days.
The idea of living in a city is so abysmal to me that I have to remind myself sometimes that cities are the only place some folks can feel completely safe being themselves
NYC is a horrible place (to me), but for any flaws I see it having I’ve never once felt like I’m dressed strangely or at odds with the folks around me when I’m there
of course it influences your style lol, curious as to why people would think otherwise. i grew up in nz and felt WILDLY limited wrt style bc all i wanted at the time was hot topic/fishnets/ corsets/egl etc and it was quite difficult and expensive to get stuff like that there in the 00s esp as a clueless and poorly connected teen.
the people who dressed creatively/subculturally/ in a way that "stood out" in nz were pretty few and far between too, which meant we'd have to be a little braver to wear something unusual. nowadays i live in nyc and the diversity of dress is insane - my neighborhood has a ton of people who dress in nonwestern traditional clothing and don't stand out at all bc it's ubiquitous, but if i get on a train to like the LES or whatever i see suits, sweats, homme plisse, crustpunks, egl, microtrends, etc etc. whatever you can imagine, i feel like it's someone's everyday uniform here. it feels nearly impossible to stand out which i love
Yeah I grew up in rural UK then rural Ireland, you simply couldnt hear about, let alone get a lot of clothing options. So the way I dressed was basically decided by what was available at thrift shops (the only place that had anything even slightly interesting)
Extreme yes, but I'm breaking out of it and feel totally comfortable doing so
Really dislike how much I have to rely on online shopping. Wish there were shops that carried cool clothes around here, or visiting popups. Never been to something like that but hopefully one day
Growing up in Ontario Canada led to my winter outfits being putting together an outfit exclusively for being indoors then fully hiding it by throwing on the warmest parka I can overtop of it for when I'm outside. Only recently started building a winter wardrobe where I can make fits that I can be outside in.
I wish there was more of a happy medium like the international cities I've seen, where you can get some space away from the city proper but still easily get in/out of the city when you want to. Sadly the transit in the NYC metro area is far from that.
I lived just outside the city before Covid. Absolutely horrible until we moved even farther away from the city. Green space hard to come by unfortunately :/
Fr
Westchester exists
You just need a car
I grew up in Greenpoint and left serendipitously before COVID - I love all the space and greenery whilst only being a 35 minute drive from Manhattan
This is where I lived lol :xd:
Lower Westchester is abysmal, but when I lived in South Salem that was nice and far away
The commuting into the city is horrible though
And the crumbling infrastructure isn’t exactly a joy to deal with
Growing up in west texas was interesting, really only in retrospect. One thing I've often felt a disconnect with on this server are how people who also came of age in the late 2000s/early 2010s talk of not wearing wide/baggy pants growing up, which was really all I saw around me (and something I wore into the mid 2010s). It also gives me a more complicated relationship with westernwear, which I mostly associate with people from smaller towns while also being a fun way to express my personal history.
Location mostly affects me by all the brands im interested in not being present in germany and the difficulty to source stuff.
The European struggle to buy cowboy boots
I live on a not too big, not too small city in Brazil. It's difficult to compare my experience to someone in the US or Europe as I haven't ever been to the global north.
From my impressions, though:
- Anything slightly avant-garde must be ordered online, by shopping at womens places or thrifting if you're lucky.
- Most clothes are trashy polyester or tropical cotton. I can see some rayon stuff when it's summer-spring. Linen I have never seen a blend with over 12% in person.
- Most pants are chinos, sweatpants (cotton), sweatpants (athleisure) or jeans.
- Women's fashion is vastly more diverse, although it can be difficult to find basics, ironically.
- That's talking about casual wear. Formal tailoring I'm not experienced with, but I think it's very odd we follow european cloth weights and suit colors for the formal stuff rather than getting things in more lightweight materials and lighter colors. I think that people generally view the traditional european ways as "more correct". Really, the first thing everybody complains about having to get into a suit isn't that it's stiff, it's tgat it is too hot to wear.
- Every material not mentioned above I had only seen in person outside of thrifts, but the most popular ones can be bought online from national places.
- Variety in products in general is smaller than the US. If you want something niche, it needs to be imported from overseas or custom-made. Brazil is pretty big, this is due to variety being expensive, see below.
- Labor is cheaper while imported goods (like clothes and shoes) aren't. For example, the price for an Adidas Samba here would directly translate to $140, and those sneakers are $110 new on retail in the US.
However, a minimum hourly wage here is about $1.10. Meanwhile, the federal minimum wage in the US is $7.25.
It translates quite directly in eight times less buying power. So pretend those Adidas were $880 and you got the picture.
Because of this discrepancy between the price of imported goods and the price of labor, above some point between $60-100 it would be more economical for me to order everything but formal tailoring 100% custom-made as a replica rather than importing it. However, I'm not at that price tag yet to make use of this knowledge. I'm just buying thrifted stuff at $10 max rn.
- Because I want nice things without paying the full price, I lean into oversized fashion by snatching the nice imported things out of the second-hand stores if they don't go too big and making them work.
- I'm fortunate not to live in a violent place so I can queer-code publicly.
- It is easy to stand out fashion-wise in the street. Even some "safe" looking americana here would stand out. Most middle-aged men and older don't pay too much mind on they dress. There is a resistance to the idea because of machismo, and the thought that worrying about fashion is something only "the gays" do is still common.
- The younger ones do worry. Those who do pay some mind usually go to athleisure with branded everything if they are 20s (which is somewhat a status symbol since the imported goods are expensive) or basic bastard if they are 30s+
- If I go looking into the right places I can find guys who like streetwear and goths (who only go really really goth on important ocasions because it's hot here).
- It's usually about 80F here (nearing 90F at mid-day) so I lean into lightweight fabrics and cuts. Can't wear that 20 oz denim shit in Texas.