I haven’t talked much about clothes or style in the last month. But if you’ve been here for a while, you’ll remember that it’s not about the clothes.
As I’ve gotten older, I've realized that my goal in life is just to be the truest version of myself. It’s my goal for parenting, that my kids feel free to be that too. It’s what I help my clients figure out how to express through their wardrobe. It’s a constant process, listening to how I feel, without outside influence.
This includes accepting myself (and helping my clients to accept themselves), including all the parts that don’t align with what we’ve been conditioned to see as the ideal image of beauty. By accepting them, we are being ourselves without apology. The body that changes over time and isn’t the same size it was in college, the body whose proportions don’t fit neatly into mass-produced clothing, the skin that is too pale or too dark, the hair that is grey, the wrinkles and sags.
What does this have to do with anti-racism, my main focus for the last month? It’s all connected.
As Bryan Stevenson said in a recent interview with The New Yorker and as I hear from Black women's lived experiences, “Black people in this country have to live this very complex existence when they live and go to work and go to school in these spaces which are largely controlled by white people. They can’t really be their authentic selves.”
How much harder do Black women have to fight to be able to be unapologetically themselves in a world that tells them their hair is “unprofessional”, that their skin isn’t the right shade of “nude”, that their very names might lose them a chance at a job interview?
None of us benefit from conforming to the Eurocentric standard of beauty. When we normalize being our authentic selves, without the perfect wardrobe or the perfect makeup or the perfect hair, these unrealistic standards will break down.
P.S. I’m going to be offering my workshop Uncover Your Authentic Style for $37 on July 11th. I’ll guide you through the process of discarding the external messages you’ve been told about how you should look and get down to the truth of what you actually want to wear. Click here to be the first to sign up, and don’t forget, 10% of mindful closet profits go to support Jamaa Birth Village.