Wearing What You Love Is Wearing Who You Love

By Kayla Pabst (@kaylageorginapabst), FEDISA, 1st Year, BA Fashion Retail Student

There is something beautiful about mimicking the ones we love in the way we dress.

The innocence of sticking ten tiny toes into mom’s heels. The fallible comfort of raw hems of a hand-me-down hoodie at the bottom of every week’s laundry basket. The nostalgia in watching the shoulder pads of grandad’s tweed blazer fit more snugly as the gangly limbs of teenage youth grow longer and stronger, and all of a sudden, grandad’s hugs aren’t such a distant memory.

Fashion carries so much nostalgia and child-like admiration between the thread and stitch. A closet can never just be a space filled with clothes, but rather a casket of the identities we yearned for, outgrew and came home to again.

Identity is largely formed through how we choose to express ourselves in the creative forms we resonate with as people. Clothing just happens to be a creative medium we all take part in.

Whether you always felt too big for the world and oversized coats make you feel smaller, or your first love told you that green makes your eyes shine, we all carry sincere truths in what we wear each morning.

To wear what you love is to wear who you love, and then you realise it really is always all around us. There is love in a crowded cafe full of damp jackets on a rainy day, lying crumpled up in the back of someone’s car boot in traffic, in and among the heavy silver stack of rings strewn on her bedside table, in the boots kicked off at the front door. There is love in the way you watch a dress fall off a woman’s hips, and there is love in the bargain box in the corner of an old thrift shop.

But there is also love in the craft. In the designs that come to you at night or in a conversation with someone between their collarbones and their eyes. In the details that many would overlook, or in the satisfying contention of perfecting a French seam. There is love in the eyes of everyone’s first runway, and there is love in the decision to chase that dream every day.

To be in fashion isn’t just about trend cycles and fabric samples. It’s about dedicating your art form to a garment that someone will wear on every first date, wrap around their lover in the chilly evenings, stuff into a suitcase for a last-minute trip, hang to dry on the balcony of their first apartment, tuck into a donate pile and pull out again a few months down the line, pose in for every picture and look at a lifetime of memories on the back of your children’s children one day.

Fashion isn’t just an expression of self; it’s an expression of life. A life we can’t spend naked.