Blog #03 - There are such things as stupid questions.
Updated: Aug 27
7 ways to answer a particularly stupid question, from a neurotic fashion writer.
11:04:13PM PST—dispatch from a hotel in Napa Valley, CA as I attempt to align my spine.
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Do I dress well?
Define “well.” Is dressing well a tenet of following trends in just the right way, or do you consider dressing well something that comes from taste? It used to be that there was only one way to dress well—to be tasteful. It gets confusing because a lot of the fashion industry also has to do with commerce, but I guess what the larger part of this blog post is going to be about is how accessibility is not always a good thing when it comes to fashion, style and dress, because it blends the three very separate terms into dollar signs—and not even chic dollar signs at that. Don’t ask me if you dress well, don’t be shocked when I tell you that you don’t. If you have to try so hard to be yourself, to know all of the TikTok names for new “microtrends” before making a choice yourself: you’re not concerned with dressing well, with style, taste, or fashion, you’re concerned with not being made fun of, which is pussy. Those who dress the best are many things, but they are not pussy.
Do I dress well?
The want to dress well and the fear of not dressing well are two completely different things. If you want to dress well, you care about taste, and you care about yourself. If you’re afraid of not looking like you belong, you don’t care about taste, and you don’t really care about yourself—you think a fear reaction will produce swag out of pressure and effort. To a certain degree, you cannot put effort or pressure into learning about taste, and you cannot forge swag from fear. It’s the Kardashian effect—if you try hard enough, people will admire your effort so much that they begin to confuse that admiration for your ability to do things with you. But really, if you want something, you can get it. If your claim to fame is trying really hard to do something but never being able to do it, re-evaluate. Figure out if you want or if you fear, and then circle all the way back.
Do I dress well?
I had this conversation with my dad the other day about passion—we both hate that word because we actually love a lot of things—and how saying something is your “passion” is possibly the scariest thing a person could say. It used to be that people just were, and because of that, no one ever felt the need to talk about why they were. For context, he went to Berkeley in the ’80s and Howard in the ’90s, so he’s at the epicenter for literally every cool thing that doesn’t surround white people for the 15(ish?) years it took him to become a doctor—I digress. Essentially, when someone says that something is their passion, they’re only real passion is being seen as the kind of special person that could be described as passionate. They don’t feel, they only want—they don’t strive to do, they strive to be told that they look like someone who does. We’ve come to define ourselves by this pathology, and it becomes an obligation to be prudent to all tastes to be a good world citizen. This is where I agree with Alex Jones with his incredibly misguided and vague accusations toward globalists—everything becomes glass and wood and metal facades, like the new Jack in the Boxes in the suburbs, because it has to, to survive aesthetically. We’ve made it so—being alive, paying taxes and voting aren’t enough anymore. You have to know what a semifreddo is. You have to know the right niche bands from the ’70s, you have to want a pair of the Wales Bonner sambas. Trendiness is no longer reserved for the mean girls in high school, it’s become the label of a law-abiding, well-functioning citizen. Trendiness is wanting people to see you as perpetually wanting something and never getting it, hitting pause at self-aware and never reaching self-actualized.
Do I dress well?
No funny shit: do you really think I can tell you that? What would make you think that I, Maya Yasmin Kotomori, possess the ability to tell you something about yourself? The qualities that possess someone to so seek such direct validation from another person are qualities that I cannot even feign interest in—as a writer, as a scoundrel and as a general sensitive person.
Do I dress well?
Most likely, not to me. And I wish you the biggest peace I can possibly wish while you figure that shit out.
Do I dress well?
Not everybody can.
Do I dress well?
Not everybody should.