Encapsulated: Part One

    We start forming our own battery of likes and dislikes from the moment we pop out into the world. As soon as our eyes open, and we can see with clarity, we begin piling things into, things I like, and things I don't like.  At first, this is good enough; the simple black and white of absolutism.  But in short order, those two polar opposites in our minds divide, divide again, and yet again, until many years later, we have our own personal, fully formed organism of preferences.
    How this refers to the Attire language and its usage is simple, we bring all of those preferences to the table each time we think of adding to our vocabulary of apparel.
    In our very early lives, we are most of us hamstrung in that to a major degree, since our clothing choices are being dictated by our parents.  They not only select the clothes we wear because they pay for them, but because they believe that their choices will be better ones, and no doubt to a significant degree, they are.  They can select the correct size, and make sure the quality level will at least last to the next growth spurt.  What they cannot do with accuracy though, is see into our little minds and know what we would prefer to wear, given the free choice.

    So, our earliest free choices tend to be pretty out there in terms of style, color and practicality. Given our first free rein, we, most of us at any rate, choose things that are more emphatically stylish, more boldly colored or patterned, and aren't especially practical in the long term sense.
    As we enter our teen years, our choices continue to evolve, growing more reasoned as we begin to learn the subtleties of things like fit and make.  As well, our style choices take another turn too, since our internal growth into adulthood, expresses itself outwardly.  We both consciously, and unconsciously, often choose clothing that will make us seem more adult than we in fact are, because we want to hurry the day when we will be free to move about in the world, without parental constraints.

 
    Once the bounds of parental control get cut, things change dramatically.  The chief reason, beyond our actual freedom to choose for ourselves without regard to another whims, is that we are paying for those things on our own, and so considerations of budget, and long term wearability gain more importance to us in our choices.  Its during this period of young adulthood that we really finalize our approach to how we dress ourselves.

 
    There are those whose career choice makes them be quite decided in how they differentiate between their work and other lives.  Many is the person I know whose work garb is never used after 5 or on weekends. Others have a much less defined line between work and non-work apparel, and some, none whatever.
    For myself, the line is pretty murky, since I work in a very casual environment, so there are few things I own that are really not ever worn to work.  And this fact has affected the overall expression of my own Attire dialect.
    During our middle years, and by that I mean the mid 30s to the 60s, we tend to be the most attached to style and its expressions.

  As we transition into our elder years, we tend to choose less overtly stylish clothes, opting for comfort over fashionability.  Part of that is that so much of what is produced is aimed at the young market, and what is being made for more mature people tends to be more conservative.  So, rather than fight that we allow our attire to change again.  Of course, its important to note as well that as we get older, the vast majority of us end up living on smaller, and entirely fixed incomes, so budgetary concerns become a very big player in every choice we make.

    So what we have here, in the over arching sense of it, is a method of scrolling through our lives, and looking at the arc of our progression in terms of apparel.  When we look at those things again, through the lens of our accumulated years we can, if we wish, gain some very real insight into who we were, and what we dreamed at the time, and with that get a clearer picture of the totality of our path.