Clashing with Confidence

by Andrew...

Hi! Joui has asked me to post a little bit this week as she is busy getting clothes and dancers together for the Chicago show. I thought I would give a guy's perpective on Joui's fashion.

One of the interesting things that I have seen while watching Joui's fashion lines come together is how women naturally identify with beautiful clothing. For instance, as I was standing around after the Mazura by Design show last May, I found it fascinating to see the visceral excitement people had for different outfits. The women from the audience would come up and check out the garments, looking them over, trying to remember how they looked on the models, tensely negotiating within over whether this really outfit would "work" for them.

Only recently as I have gotten more interested in expressing myself using clothing have I come around to start understanding the intensity of these reactions. That very evening at Mazura, as I modelled some of the ties in the show, I got to feel what it means to place myself ~in the vibe~ of each tie I was wearing, each paired with a model's dress. Then I started to understand what was going on here.

For me, it comes back around to the art. Do the motifs, the colors, the shapes, in one piece really express something that is true to you? Do the clothes on the outside match a psychological state in you that you want to express? If you're at the event, does that vibe the models carry resonate with you? Is it something you want to bring home with you to wear?

This was all new territory for me.

Last night I was putting together an outfit to see a friend of mine get all drag queened out in a play. (by the way, if you're in SF, go see Beautiful www.elasticfuture.com it rocks!) I wanted to be a little wild with my appearance. I wanted more than my standard blazer-over-t-shirt look that is rapidly becoming de rigueur for some circles. What I really wanted was to express something about myself with my outfit.

And as I thought about what to wear, or more precisely, what kinds of ridiculous color combinations I could get away with, this old Andy Warhol quote popped into my head: "Art is anything you can get away with." I was a conpiracy of one deliberating over what I would attempt to "get away" with, and the nylon brown shirt slightly clashing with tan tie and linen jacket that got selected was my own unique expression.

This act of standing up for what YOU think looks good is a small, quiet rebellion. Yes, the colors clash, but in my eye, they look good together. What are you going to do about it?

When you're just out there, clashing with confidence, your appearance becomes less about what you're wearing, and more about what you think looks good. You're never going to look like someone else, because who else is going to come up with your crazy combination? And you get to remind yourself the whole time, who cares what they think anyway.

All that makes getting dressed lots of fun. And this is one of the biggest lessons I've learned by watching Joui-- that what you wear should be fun.