Dressing up or dressing out or dopamine dressing, you may have heard of this. Dopamine being the feel good chemicals that you make in your body, putting on things that make you feel that way, usually brightly colored, often patterns.
Like this! / Reno, NV // November 2023
So, as I was thinking about this theme, the very first thing that came up was this quote from Ru Paul, which you may have heard:
“We all come in naked, everything else is just drag.”
And I think that's absolutely true, right?
If we were in olden times, we would be running around with loincloths, probably not so much fashion to speak of. Just for protection's sake. Clothing would be protective. But we use clothing in all kinds of ways, and everything that we wear really is a costume. Some kind of costume.
A mere sampling of my own topical antidepressants!
That's why “everything else is just drag” is so, is so poignant to me.
A costume tells a story about who a character is.
I'm an actor from way back, and putting on a costume, when we would finally get our costumes, and run through, it's an entirely different experience.
For instance, if you're doing a period piece, it's one thing to lift your chest, and, tilt your head in a particular way and tilt your body in a particular way. But it's another thing to put on a corset, have your dresser cinch you up, and you can't breathe! So you have to find other ways of placement. You wind up breathing up here. It's a pretty anxious thing. Your voice might raise in its register and its pitch because of the way that your clothing is acting on you.
These are my favorite glasses, and they are my favorite glasses for many, many reasons, but, the most important to me is that I walked into this store and put on these glasses and thought, Wow, these, these are the glasses of the me that gives the TED talk on the big stage. And I'm gonna live into that. I'm gonna buy these atrociously expensive glasses.
Headshot by Cameron Radicé Photography / Los Angeles, CA
Now, I haven't given that TED talk yet, but two weeks later, I got the notice that I was a finalist in the TED Global Idea Search! So there is a correlation, and there is a manifesting principle to dressing how you want to be perceived. Dressing for the job you want, etc.
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