Getting Comfortable: Exploring Comfort Zones.
I’ve been thinking about jeans a lot, lately—definitely more than you’d imagine someone who hasn’t worn jeans in nearly a decade would think about jeans.
In last month’s Fashion From Scratch, I delved into the remarkable and largely untold history of denim: from its roots to a fabric known as 'slave cloth' – a sturdy but coarse material described as feeling like “needles sticking one all the time,” used for clothing enslaved Africans to distinguish them from their linen-and-lace-clad owners—to something so ubiquitous that, at any given moment, half of the world’s population is wearing.
As someone who pretty much exclusively wears skirts and dresses, denim as this embodiment of ease and comfort is interesting, to me. I personally find skirts to be infinitely more comfortable than pants—physically, that is. In certain situations, however, wearing a skirt can come with a certain weight that almost entirely negates the physical freedom: I think about the woman in corporate who struggles to be taken seriously by her male colleagues; I think about the trans boy whose skin crawls at the idea of having to perform femininity; I think about the best friends in high school who coordinate days to wear skirts together so that neither has to do it alone because there’s nothing worse in high school than drawing unwanted attention, especially for wearing something “different.”
Many of my clients would describe their style and preferences as “comfortable,” but for some, that means heels everyday, for others, that means exclusively stretchy fabrics—I’m sure for some, that means just being naked. But even those very personal ideas of comfort are not just about physically feeling good. So, what are they about?
Social Comfort
To exist in society is to agree to countless unspoken “rules” about everything from how you respond to small talk to how to split the check at the overpriced dinner party where you definitely only got a single cocktail and some fries and everyone else got top shelf liquor and tomahawk steaks with a side of gold-plated lobster. All of society may not agree on certain specific nuances, but every community has some sort of consensus on most things—even if that community is just you and your friends. Going against the social mores of a specific community or environment—knowingly or otherwise—can carry a wide set of consequences from persecution and harassment to self-consciousness and discomfort.
This is one of the strongest factors in determining what we wear—most of us fall on a spectrum between being very interested in going along with social mores and explicitly going against them—that often overshadows physical comfort.