silkidelic

Last week, I started going through my old journals, scrapbooks, and photo albums from my most prolific era so far: ages 8 through 16, during the years 1995 through 2003. 

This blog is partly an effort to process what happened to me in those years, during which my family moved to and fro across the Atlantic four times. While we were away, American culture took a dive into a smoldering pit of nationalism and overconsumption. I’m examining my own experience with that through the lenses of personal style, body image, fast fashion, and consumerism, all with a queer tint to my glasses, and as both a victim and a complicit consumer.

It’s been a slow burn, the idea of piecing together my unusual American experience through examining my undercover obsession with personal style and beauty (not claiming to have a specific level of style and beauty here, just a fixation on visual self-expression that is in turns inspirational and stifling). Style trends have predictably turned back toward the early 00s in the last few years, but I have largely been able to ignore it. And then, I visited a certain massive online thrift store last month to find a costume piece. All around me, an explosion of late 90s and early 2000s-style clothes from fast fashion brands.

My teen years were plastered all over the screen, in varying states of polyester and elastane.

It might sound frivolous to the anti-capitalist saints among you, but as I browsed 2000s-does-70s swirly marble prints, baby tees with a tiny graphic on them, or one-shouldered, spaghetti-strap, and handkerchief-style tanks, strong emotion started to surface.  

Instead of feeling indignant that low-rise jeans might be lurching out of their graves, I felt an overwhelming mixture of nostalgia, grief for my young self, and, surprisingly enough, childlike excitement combined with a burning desire to own some of these items.

I know these new clothes aren’t the same ones from my youth, and the companies behind them are hoping to cash in on my losses by selling scraps of my ravished identity back to me cheap, but the feeling was there. It still is. 

I know that even buying from massive online thrift stores can indirectly endorse the endless cycle of buying and throwing out clothes, while the workers who make those clothes suffer deeply for our ephemeral delights. Having a digital warehouse of inexpensive new looks at our fingertips is not exactly a sound treatment for an unhealthy dependency on new looks.

But I also have to admit that I love sifting through the secondhand heap of fast fashion, finding the perfect piece, and discovering what inspiration lies dormant there. I enjoy expressing aspects of my identity through clothes and costumes, as much as I’ve tried to suffocate that enjoyment with a more sensible minimalism over the years. 

I’m trying to figure out how to generate and self-bottle those feelings so that I don’t have to continually shop for them anymore. Until then, languishing here at the crossroads of repackaged femininity and end-stage capitalism, I browse.