I am finding loop holes in my project, but trying to resist them. Like yesterday, I wore the dress all day with jeans and a thermal shirt on underneath, but as soon as I got home I HAD to take the dress off. I laid my pj's out on the bed, but then I got distracted and forgot to put them on. A friend came over for dinner and called me out. Oops! So I changed.
I have started to get a lot of comments about Andrea Zittel and her AZ Uniform. The comparison is interesting because I have been thinking a lot about uniforms lately. What I am realizing is that uniforms in a way make things easy, they are a kind of control group in a whole range of fashionable or unfashionable variables. They can define a person solely based on aesthetics: private school student, janitor, doctor, mechanic etc. But what I am seeing in my own project is how by altering the uniform I am trying to wriggle away from the stereotype of a woman who dresses in the same garment. Hmmm, a woman whom dresses in the same dress, what does this mean? I am changing it, transforming it, trying to make it change with me. Maybe I am trying to change myself by trying to change it. Although I wear this dress daily, I still feel like it is an accessory. I wonder, if one day I shall wake up and it shall just be a part of me, a part of who I am and when my body moves to the next dress it will feel like shedding my skin?
I went for a hike today up Mt. Philo and wore my L.L. Bean shearling duck boots. I felt like I was channeling my inner Gutter Punk. I started to feel a little self conscious watching all the hikers in their lightweight hiking garb and started to wonder what they must have thought about this woman in a dress and mud boots hiking in Shelburne. I guess this could have been seen as exercise and I could have chosen to wear something else, but I felt like I needed to know what it felt like to hike in this dress.
The dress is morphing now... It is no longer a little black dress, i added part of an old wool sweater to the top and now it is warmer. I also sewed a little humming bird to honor the memory Deborah Veselka,my science teacher who was also my first teacher for my first class ever, in my first uniform ever, for 6th grade at The Kinkaid School in Houston.
Pictures soon to follow.
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