Clothing Choice and Unhappiness

I'm finding something aesthetically displeasing about my dress.  Disappointingly early on.

I've felt this way from the time I finished the dress actually, a few days before the ODP experiment.  I'm drawn to T-tunics.  I've seen T-tunics look great on people at SCA events.  They have centuries of history behind them.  I have T-tunic garb.  So why am I not 100% happy with the way the dress hangs at full length?  I keep fiddling with the belt to try to balance things out.  Is the dress too long?  Is it too narrow?  Is the belt too short?  Is it too thick?  Is the body too full?  Is it too untailored?

I see two ways of interpreting this problem.

First, it might mean that simple or Plain dress requires some mental effort.  A chosen uniform or style should be selected to have near-universal suitability.  It should be functional and easy.  It should feel slightly casual and slightly dressy.  It should adapt to changing work or weather conditions.  It should be sturdy. It should match one's ethical standards. It should be comfortable, both physically and psychologically.  All of which means, of course, that you can't just run to the store, grab the first thing you see, and make that your Plain.  This is more of a problem for women than men, because we have almost endless styles available to us, each carrying their own cultural meanings we may or may not wish to convey.  And while men have style options too, there just aren't as many.  So while it seems that the men outside of Plain communities are able to easily settle on Plain pants and shirt (and myabe suspenders and hat) for themselves, we women are *agonizing* in blogs and internet forums over what to wear.  Not that it's much different for men and women who aren't going Plain.  Which leads me to...



Mennonite Women, 2005
Photo by atomicity via Flikr, used under Creative Commons



Second, my dress problem might mean that it makes A Lot Of Sense to be part of a community where style is regulated.  We rely far too much in the West on expressing our "selves" through our clothes.  Not that I don't understand it; I do.  I'm quite obsessed with clothes, and always have been, in a hippie/costuming/ritualistic way.  And I have a lot of clothes, else it wouldn't be a big deal to me to wear one dress for a month.  But most people in the world today have only a few sets of clothes.  And for most of human history of the West, we too had only a few sets of clothes.  And it was just fine.  Now with the externalized environmental and human costs of productions, we can acquire a lot of clothing for very little money as well as afford to change fashion every year.  In addition to being abusive and wasteful, this gives us too many options, and we end up wasting our lives agonizing over decisions. 

Really and truly.  Barry Schwartz showed in his book The Paradox of Choice how having more choices makes us unhappy.  (If you're not interested in reading his book, he gives a 20-minute video summary here.)  We think, "With all these options, I can make the perfect choice!"  Then when we make the choice, we feel bad, thinking "Did I make the best choice?  I could have done better.  I wish I had made a different choice.  I'm a failure."  Or, wanting to put off feelings of regret and failure, we postpone or avoid making decisions at all.  Paralysis.  All because of choice.  In this light, a uniform is freeing, no matter what it looks like on you.

So I stand in the mirror wondering why my dress, which I could have sewn a million different ways, isn't perfect.  Kristy at ODP gave good advice in recommending we clear out and hide away the clothes not part of our experiment.  Out of sight, out of mind, so we no longer think of "missed opportunities" when we put on our One Dresses. By simplifying and accepting limits to our wardrobes, as well as to other parts of our lives, we are happier.