I have a habit of dressing like characters, especially those in books. This is an old quirk that finds its roots in the 'phases' of my childhood and adolescence—I often wanted to be more like those favorite characters and have funny little characteristics like they had, if not those exact quirks—that are more or less visible in my manner of dress these days. I can't kid myself, this is obviously something that exists in my adult tendencies as well. Sometimes, if I am writing some funny little story or doodling the same person over and over, I try to dress and be like them as well! The desire to play dress up will hopefully never fade away, and especially in the last year or so I've noticed a much more directed manner of dressing—that is, specifically dressing as a character. It's the kind of thing that I think I've written all sorts of papers on (I say think only because I'm afraid I'm victim of some strange and noxious pills at the moment, courtesy of my missing wisdom teeth!), the roles individuals play in their clothes, wearing the part, masks, costumes. All that sort of thing. You know, the body as a text and so on. And then, also, I have a perhaps peculiar habit of allotting specific items of clothing or accessories to certain book or film characters.
But I don't really mean this in quite that serious and academic way. Rather, it is just the vague thought that I have certain items of clothing and I assign to specific characters that I have a terrible fondness for.
( I also wear it all the time. Seriously, Sirusly. And that is only as far back as free-flickr lets me go!)
One of my favorites is my Professor Lupin sweater. I'm quite sure that my penchant for funny, frumpy, and fusty sweaters is not solely due to my beloved Harry Potter character, but all the same I've referred to it as such since I bought it. It's a relatively nondescript sweater, from Gap a few years ago during the beginning of that boyfriend-clothing-craze. It is slouchy and light and somewhat poor and worn looking. I wear it often, and while my boyfriend has a sweater that is much more Lupin-ish (it's wool and has suede elbow-patches. Although my sweater does have a slight advantage in the Lupin department because it's dowdy and rumpled). To add to the Lupin-esque attire, my lovely boyfriend got me the most delicious tweed blazer! It is not pictured, but it fits much better than the child's Brooks Brother's one I thrifted. The new version is now my Professor Lupin blazer, and to add to it, I finally found a pair of appropriately worn and soft corduroy pants. Ahh, the outfit! It is quite happily complete, although ideally it would be more a mixture of taupes and the occasional brown, and I can be a content little grey mouse of a girl in my Professor Lupin garb.
There is, of course, the bowler hat and its rather obvious nod to Sabina a la
The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Books by Francesca Lia Block also gave way to items of clothing associated with those characters even if I never did seem to acquire anything quite as cool as what they had.
I know there are more, things I searched for specifically to mirror someone, or an item I came across that vaguely reminded me of so-and-so in that book and forever named it for them. To an extent it has to do with an intense desire to be totally absorbed into a certain world of a book or a character, that painful desire to get as close as you can to a world and people who only really exist on the page and in the mind, the terrible unjust nature of fantasy stories and the real world.
Similarly, when I was little I had this funny little outfit (that doesn't really have much of anything to do with the topic of this post besides the activities I wore it for) that I thought of as my Writer's Outfit. The vague outline of the kind of person I was playing was some kind of young traveling woman with a suitcase full of odd things. The suitcase was tweed and it didn't hold together very well since I think its base was cardboard. I used to fill it with old looking books. My two favorites, though I had no idea what they really were at the time, were a book of Emerson's Essays and a collection of Oscar Wilde fairy tales and sonnets. I liked them because they were cloth-bound and looked old. I had a fake feather pen, it was pink, and some other strange odds and ends. The outfit consisted of some kind of hat and a brownish black velvet blazer with buttons shaped like twined rope and a funny little collar. The same blazer doubled for part of my suit when I later pretended to be a member of MIB.
I guess in the end it's all more dressing up than anything else. That, and the funny names I give things in my head, the strange and nonsensical or personal associations with clothing beyond things that are sentimental in a traditional, familial sort of way. What a clunker of a sentence! I've been really bad about it lately. My sentences are long, trawling things that wander around and are atrocious and have little to no grammatical or logical structure. I am not sure that I care! To add to this nonchalant treatment, I refuse to wrap up this rambling thing in any real way. Ha!
