Notice Me, Or Else!

    Not all of us want notice, in fact many people actively avoid being noticed, and their apparel tends to reflect that desire in their choices of colors and garment shape and fit.

    For others, though, the need to be noticed is powerful, overriding considerations of appropriateness, taste or even the willingness of others to observe and understand that yearning.  In fact, for many of those who deeply crave attention through their apparel, its vital simply that others do notice, whether they like what they see is of little consequence. 
    This is nothing new, of course, this has been with us always, though as the world becomes more confusing, and vastly more populated, getting noticed becomes harder and harder, so the bar must continually get raised.

    How does that bar raising effect manifest itself?  It shows up in ever more extreme body modifications, plastic surgeries, more encompassing tattoos, hours at the gym, more fierce dieting, and of course shorter and shorter skirts, tighter pants, more cut outs, more sheer panels, and a plethora of other things we can take to greater heights.

    This isn't all a bad thing, and I wouldn't want you to think I felt that way.  We always have to aspire to something more, so its an inevitability, really. And most of us, manage to find a balance point between that need to be seen, and the need to be able to operate effectively in our society.
    But for others, balance is not part of the program at all.  The desire to be special, different, outrageous, possibly forbidding, or even deeply disturbing, overreaches everything else. The end result is that we are presented with truly extraordinary folk who have chosen to take the Attire language, and by using its words in entirely new ways, create visual statements nearly incomprehensible to others.

   

Understanding does come in time.  The more people attempt similar ideas of self expression, the more we begin to grok the meaning of them.  And through that eventual understanding, the fiercely individual statements, become accepted parts of the apparel dialog, and move us along to the possibility of more complex conversation.