It Will Find You
I keep thinking about John Travolta’s berets.
Never mind how truly great of a look it is for him (it may or may not have reignited the crush I’ve had on him since I first saw Face/Off aka the best film of all time), I love what he had to say about it:
“The old school directors wore berets and the glasses. And I thought, that's what I'm doing…I'm a director this time. You're an actor, play the part of a director. Look like an old school director.”
You could easily read this as just a guy putting on a costume (which, as I’ve written before, is a totally valid way to treat your wardrobe and your style), but, to me, it’s something else (“Of course it is, Lakyn,” I hear you saying as you roll your eyes.). To me, this is a man—a person, even—using clothes to step into a new part of their self and their life. For John, it’s going from the person in front of the camera, being observed and taking direction, to the person calling the shots who’s responsible for bringing a story to life. A huge transition, no doubt—the kind of transition that kinda begs for a major change elsewhere, not just to help with the shift, but to honor its significance.
Like a beret.
Now, I’m not a very spiritual person…until it comes to clothes. I believe the way we dress has the power to put us in alignment with the person we truly are, and vice versa. Yes, sometimes we need to work very hard to determine who that is and what that looks like, but, other times…it comes to you.
Like a beret.
In the same way we can look at someone else’s life and feel a draw toward a path we’d never considered before meeting them, we can look at a piece of clothing and feel a draw toward a kind of expression we never considered before, and in following that draw—that urge—we can unlock what I feel is a higher level of being but is really just cuter outfits (same thing, though, right?).
What we have to be mindful of, though, is figuring out when that call is based in something real, and not just a fleeting trend or a fantasy we’ll never really act on. When you feel this urge to try something so completely new and left-field, is it because you like the idea of being someone else, or because you’re actually becoming someone else?
