Removing Intimidation From Fashion - Topic of the day 4/15/25
Sometimes there's an element of intimidation when people discuss clothes - "I wouldn't even know how to look like that", "That couldn't work for me in the real world" etc. What do you think causes this feeling, and how does one deal with it?
59 Replies
put the lace skirt on coward!!!
that fear is a moral, character failure and should be punished
social constructs and expectations of displaying masculinity/femininity forced on you by people who have horrible opinions on everything
growing up in a conservative christian household and social environment, i have had to unlearn SOOOOOO MUCH to make space for acceptance and respect of the unique and nonconformist ideals, outfits, perspectives etc
it’s easy to say “why do you care what people think” but that can just be unrealistic in certain areas
the way that i personally have combatted this is simply putting that shit on
but this isn’t always that easy, i am well known in my community for not being the typical southern conservative man
just joining a space like this is the first step in combatting the idea that you should be wearing this or that because of where you’re from and the culture surrounding
I think this is speaking to more avant garde/statement pieces so let me know if i’m deviating
but i’m very passionate about breaking social norms in search of who you really are
Was so stressed about my first time wearing a skirt and then I went outside and I was like oooo this shit is swishing around I look so cool and everyone gave me compliments
Hell, I think what counts as a statement piece can be very influenced by the fashion norms of where you live
I agree!
Avant garde in modern central louisiana is a bowling shirt with jorts and loafers LMAO
louisiana brain melter
A ton of what I wear now I woulda been deeply uncomfortable wearing when I still lived in Arkansas. Sometimes I still feel awkward about it even living in a decent sized city now, but fuck it I ain't ever gonna see any of these people again
"Not ever gonna see them again" actually got me over a lot of my fear of wearing louder pieces
Good perspective for people in larger areas
just put that shit on
spin it next time
(*as long as it is physically safe to)
Ya you just got a send it, it does get easier
nooo aha don’t convince me to buy the $600 cdg skirt of my dreams
But also fashion is about you right? Like you don't have to do the loud things or skirts or whatever, just dress how you want. And know your surroundings but honestly like, if you go out with the expectation of being the center of attention like that's gonna be tough at first but you'll start to look forward to it
Also like, it's built on a house of bricks
Just be out there trying shit
Steppin out where nobody else is doin it is even harder
definitely is lmao
even in the more progressive towns in la i’m getting looked at weird
I don't think you can remove intimidation if that makes sense
This shit is about looking cool
i think i push it a fair bit for where i live despite it being a big enough city and the positive attention is worth as much as the “what the fuck is this person doing” looks
Attention will always be part of it
Everybody wants to look cool but no one wants the failures that come with that
i am once again posting
Also I do modulate my style when I go to the rural ski town vs my day to day in the city lol
but also now wearing a lot of jewelry and cute clothes makes me feel good and that’s what matters
This is it
Honestly I get this, as one of the less loud dressers in here. Even just very visibly trying in a way that’s not conventionally Handsome can be a challenge
It's funny I'm moving away from all the statement pieces back to formality being a differentiator again lol
While I don’t share many of the experiences that many of you have I do maybe have something to say about using fashion as a way to remove intimidation from other things.
That’s where most of my style comes from- trying to fit in with a more academic/higher socioeconomic status crowd and removing the hierarchy of dress that seemed to be prevalent in school and university where I studied. This has worked in boosting my confidence in kind of a circular way where I grew more comfortable with my new-ish environment as well as with the way I was dressing to fit into it - up to the point where I now have taken it and made it my own.
But ya if you try to dress people will notice
Even if youre doing artcore like people still notice that
And that's good
Yeah I think this is always where I’ve felt more comfortable
Yeah I was gonna say art is dressing subversively also
walking round in a cowboy hat in england is sometimes incredibly sucky
so i don’t wear it as much, only so many times i can hear “is that dude in a cowboy hat” during the day and “omg grab it [insert drunk persons name]… get the hat!” on an evening
sometimes people can be incredibly shitty, so for me i’ve found it can be very beneficial to pick the spaces you go against the norm in
discretion is self preservation
Ill get so many skirts once I get past dysphoria
but also, the joy from wearing cool shit far outweighs this
When I was a little kid my ma would let me wear whatever the fuck I wanted—cowboy boots, tie dye shirt, swim trunks and a cowboy hat was the go to, which in retrospect is hysterical and incredibly formative lol, but I think the point stands. When I lived down south I went to a school that was really accepting, especially for the 90s/early aughts. I had very long hair, braids, etc. She grew up in an area where how you dressed had a direct connotation with your value as a human being, and because she was poor I think she had a really rough go of things when she was a kid/teen. So she put a huge emphasis on me being able to express myself however I chose.
It was unironically a really fucked up and rude awakening for me to go from that environment to highschool in the northeast, as I’m sure you can imagine. I felt that shift and I felt myself change just so that I could blend, and even then, it was tough. I stopped growing at like 11. Ya boy has had beard of some sort since I was 13. So I was a 6’ 3” mustached teen cowboy with an accent, hair down to my ass, and braids.
I cut my hair, I changed how I dressed, tried to change how I talked, and basically tossed aside a lot of shit that made me…me. And it sucked, to this day it’s probably one of my biggest regrets because I feel like the friends I made in highschool didn’t ever actually know ME. I started coming back a bit my senior year but I think the damage was pretty much done.
Finding a space, and friends both online and in person, that accepted me and how I chose to present myself is probably one of the most pivotal moments of self discovery for me. And there’s a confidence that comes from that. Whenever I have convos on here re: the oft repeated advice “you just have to have the confidence to pull it off” I always have to pause and remember that the confidence isn’t something that flows naturally, it’s not a river, it’s a canal—it’s built up by everyone around you.
I was gonna make a joke about being confident once I learned that I could reliably win fist fights with idiots, but that felt reductive so there’s my long-ass thought piece. Y’all got me on the peak of my mid day meds :xd:
Love y’all
I made a lot of progress by deciding to touch more grass and people-watch in public. Just walking around and seeing the sheer variety of looks that ordinary people are wearing and looking great in can be super encouraging
For this space i dress pretty normie / mfa house style, and nothing too experimental or avant garde, but clothing / style has always been a way for me to get closer to expressing my desired gender identity .
It’s funny because now on the street i just look like A Regular Dude, (i think,) but there’s years and years of trial and error, gender identity turmoil and a lot of internal confusion behind that to now come out on the other side to be relatively unclockable but hopefully still unique in my style expression.
I feel like i always have clothing / style to thank as a way to express my desired identity even before i had the means to get closer to that via other means such as hormone therapy and surgical procedures etc.
clothes don’t have to be super important but can be such a helpful vehicle to explore who you are
emo rant over
I think you’d look great
“MFA house style” is killing me lol
i am not twink enough for the size i found
i call it as i see it :xd:
The right one will come
I technically don’t fit in my sacai skirt because therealreal can’t measure anything (if I close it the correct way it’s like a 26 waist so I do an insane thing with the belt to get it to stay on)
So with some belted stuff there’s some goofy things you can do as an option as well
growing up, even in a very liberal area in the northeast, there was a huge pressure to not dress in anything other then sweatpants. im on the spectrum, and hit 6”3 in 5th grade and was tall all of growing up, so the most i wanted to do was fit in. in highschool, despite lack of a dress code whatsoever, it was the same with sweatpants. i had a “freind” (he’s kind of a dickhead) who was openly queer and dressed however the fuck he wanted (he’s now in fashion school in london). highlights included coming to school in the dead of winter wearing only pasties as a top, or wearing a curtain as a top. i decided to leave the sweatpants and t shirt wardrobe senior year bc i just got tired of trying to blend in, and i already had bridge purple long curly hair. food for thought
i honestly feel the sweatpants and tshirt thing so hard, coming from a region in the north of england which is incredibly impoverished this was the default for a lot of the community. in my hometown looking vaguely nice get you looked at funny when you’re under 40 - nevermind anything particularly alternative. combine this with angsty teens roaming the streets it gets a bit nasty - i once got shouted at by a group of lads wearing this fit, and called a nonce while walking my girlfriend home (same age lol). shit sucks hard but i think the core takeaway from a lot of these stories is when you commit and have the confidence in yourself it gets easier
my glasses always get dahmer remarks
on a personal level, accepting that I will likely be judged, regardless of what i wear (either because I'm obviously black, openly queer, or the intersection of the two), made it easier to say "what do i want to wear" vs "what will make others feel possibly more comfortable even at the expense of my own comfort"
on a practical level i think some of the intimidation comes from fear of the unknown - of how you'll look, or how you'll feel, or how you'll be perceived. (this ignores situations when in environments where you know you'll be mistreated by wearing a particular item)
to me the way to counter that is to be a badass and wear it anyway (to paraphrase someone in a non-clothing related server), that way you at least know what happened based on lived experience vs your own biases or perceptions. i think people often overvalue how much others care about what we wear, or how much they would judge based on that, and use that as a way to avoid facing the thing we want to do. it's hard to reverse that thinking, but it's rewarding each time i'm able to do so.
semi related but - comparison is the thief of joy. just because person a, who looks a certain way, looks cool wearing x, y, z, doesn't prevent you from also looking cool in the same or similar ways (provided you aren't hurting yourself in the process). if you think it's cool, put that shit on
Often when I try out something different, I’ll feel uncomfortable and have to mentally debate whether it’s because it isn’t “my style” or because I’m intimidated by it. I think getting past that intimidation is a good thing to work towards (and arguably the feelings of “it’s not my style” too)
I also grew up in the northeast and also felt pressure to dress a certain way. Not dressing that way would definitely draw negative attention. Something I’m realizing now that I’m older is that most random people on the street aren’t going to care
If they care enough to give a compliment, they have great taste. If they talk shit they have horrible taste and you shouldn’t listen to them
obviously bbsp is cringe at times but some of his writing hits if you can get past the language, this is in the context of wide pants but the concept applies to anytime youre trying something new
Jawn Dysmorphic Perceptual Shifts When I first put [wide pants] on I was like, Chill, I look like Charlie Chaplin. But I kept wearing them, and what do you know, they very quickly started to look “the way pants should” to me, and now pants I used to think were h*lla ample look fitted by comparison !! ... The lesson here is simple ... There is no such thing as “too-big pants,” at least not in any fixed, non-contingent sense. ... This is a way that all style moves, in microcosm.
Wearing wide pants is the first step towards those pants turning into straight or even slim fit
100%
One thing I’ll add is that you should never dress the way that someone else wants you to because it feels “safe.” I know from experience that you’ll probably end up regretting it somewhere down the line, like what Warp said
It's rarely appreciated - tokenistic safeness.
makes me think because while I'm comfortable with the edgier stuff for myself and my daily life I feel the want to dress conversatively when I go to visit my christian family
I never questioned that really but I think I should stop doing that now
mleh
masking isn’t necessarily bad
my family called me a slur for wearing light wash jeans so
this isn’t exactly on the packing list for visiting home https://discord.com/channels/1116793467654381685/1116800072093532191/1300171860779995176
Yeah it really helps to be around supportive people
If your goal is to just survive family gatherings for example then it’s ok to mask
I don't think there's anything wrong in wanting to just avoid conflict. Dealing with fights, esp family ones, is really rough and there's nothing wrong with sidestepping that.
Sometimes it makes me feel guilty for copping out but its also just nice to be mindful and remind myself that I just need a break and that it accomplishes just that