.. it was kind of great / strangers stopped touching me / I felt like I lost my gender in a kind of cool and then unsettling way / I stopped wearing make up.
Uniform: [ uni is from Latin for “one” and form is still Latin for, well, “form” or maybe “shape,”]
For two months of this year, I decided to go on an aesthetic diet. I and a few others, designed a uniform that I wore each day in order to explore what it felt like to reduce the agony of choice, and also reduce the gendered aspects and social cues associated with my clothing choices.
The term ‘enclothed cognition’ refers to the systematic influence that clothes have on the wearer’s psychological processes, internal states and behaviour. For example, wearing a lab coat has been shown to increase attention of the wearer, compared to no coat, or a painters coat, but only when the wearer perceives it as a doctor’s coat [1]. Wearing the same white coat but believing it belongs to a painter, elicits no such change in attention. Similarly, students made to wear a police uniform has been shown to increase attention to people wearing hoodies [2].
The concept of doing experiments on oneself, has been met with diverse responses. On one hand, self experimentation has been a long standing part of the scientific process [3] and has formed the basis of the quantified self movement, on the other the validity of such an approach is obviously questionable [4]. Interestingly, such ‘scientisation’ has played a major role in lending legitimacy to the process of self-knowledge through self measurement. But is it really meaningful science, or self discovery, or is it art? For me it was both.
Observations: Commonly I was met with ‘errr .. what is the point?’. And then people seemed interested in the idea that there is no point just yet, it was simply a personal exploration. It was interesting to me to note that people are affirmatively opting into fashion decisions each day, that are largely prescribed by others, but still expected there to be a ‘point’ in attempting to reject this influence. No one was offended by my choice to opt out of choice, but I was met with a the sense that it was a bit silly..
Day #1, Initial Observations — I find myself really just enjoying not having to think about clothes or what to wear. My bedroom space is clear because there are no clothes half strewn over the place. Laundry immediately seems almost a non-issue. Am also permanently in workout gear which feels good.
Day 2 — appeared in public with someone else in the same uniform at a fancy restaurant. The waiters thought this was some quirky silicon valley fashion (which arguably it was), perhaps due to the heavy accessories (myself with green hair, the other human with iridescent choker and bag). We were very popular with the staff there who asked us about it after dinner. So far, uniform is being seen as high fashion.. the experiment continues.
Day 6 — Had first moment of feeling tangibly less vain. Was at Gatwick airport in London, and had just brushed teeth and applied make up in the airplane toilet, and felt a wash of relief not to have to think about what clothes I appeared in as I got off the plane. My clothes felt warm and practical, and I had a sense of feeling justified in what I was wearing, whereas I usually feel a strange pressure/urge to change clothes at airports in order to look nice when I arrive somewhere.
Day 8 — Feeling noticeably less ‘produced’, more like a primate than a person. I am really feeling freedom around not having to choose what to wear.
On the train to Scotland, I had a funny moment when I left my book in the train carriage at Edinburgh station. A good 15 minutes after I left the train and had walked through two shops and bought a thing and exited the train station, a human that sat near me on the train finally caught up with me to tell me that I left my book and to return it to me. They said it was easy to find me, and track my movements through the station because of my green hair. So far, green hair is outweighing the uniform.
Day 9 — Had a really odd experience as I went into a clothes shop at a train station and realised that, as clothes were a no go for a good while, all that lay glimmering and sparkling in front of me, was utterly irrelevant to me as I was unable to be there as a consumer, only as an observer. I suddenly has the sensation of switching from being in a clothes shop, to being stood in the middle of a museum. The objects on display went from potential things to purchase, to odd things to look at that are only on display, artifacts from the lives of others for me to peer at and remark on, but not for use.
It is remarkable to me how quickly things can go from everyday to totally abstract — fashion seems like a strange concept already.
Day 11 — the first day I felt constrained by the uniform. I was craving having bare skin. My uniform felt like a cage for the first time, I felt the urge to have less fabric on. As summer hit, it felt tough to have lycra on my skin. After this point it all just melded together. I went to communes in London, spent much time in Cambridge, no one asked my about my clothes. It was smooth sailing!
At the end of the summer, I excitedly discarded my uniform, and started to adorn myself with colours and bare skin once more. Suffice to say, IT FEELS GLORIOUS.
Follow up observations:
One of the really weird things was this: Essentially, no one really noticed that I was wearing this thing. Over the summer I met a lot of new people, in Cambridge, in London and in other places. When I started wearing normal clothes again, I was met with a spackling of comments, about how I had lost weight, or how glamorous I suddenly looked — people noticed a change but not what that change was. I would gently remind people that their attention was likely being drawn to the fact that I had been wearing a baggy black uniform all summer, and now was back to my unusual circus attire. For the most part, my statement was met with surprise and suspicious looks. No one really noticed that I had essentially been wearing community service attire for the last two months! This experiment had dominated my sensory time, but seemingly went unnoticed for others. I was reminded of this experiment.
Within a few weeks to going back to default attire, I was reminded of the uninvited touching that comes with being a non-uniform wearing Zed.
A week after baring my skin, I am in Athens, I am sat on a doorstep reading a book. A human walking along the street sees me and rushes over to sit by me. ‘I must touch your skin’, they say before beginning to rub both hands all up and down my arms and shoulders. I am nonplussed and do much other than raise my eyebrows and survey the scene of being-rubbed-by-a-stranger that lies in front of me. This lasts maybe 5 to 8 seconds before they pause, thank me, compliment my skin and head off. I don’t move much the entire time, but am struck suddenly at how often things like this happened to me, and how it didn’t happen once during my uniform days.
Two weeks later, I am on a train in middle England. I am walking up the aisle of a jam packed carriage. As I pass through, a human sat to my left, yawns, stretches their arms up and to the side. Before I know it, they have their hand on the back of my bare leg, they slip it up to my ass, over my ass and inside my dress. They suddenly have their hand inside my dress, on my back and they have their face inside my dress and against my bare ass cheek. I can hardly believe it, but i turn around and really politely ask them what they are doing. As I turn, I see a full carriage of shocked faces. I say, “ex-CUSE me, but you just hand actually your hand, inside my dress. uuumffffwhat the hell do you think you were doing. I’d like an apology please”. They apologise, and I turn to continue on my journey down the train. AND THEN LO AND BEHOLD THEY DO IT AGAIN. If it weren’t so rotten I’d have to laugh. I turn once more and demand they explain themselves, they apologise, I walk on, no one says anything, blah blah. You know how these stories end, there is a million of them.
Anyway, the point here is that I genuinely can’t tell if I just got used to being touched before my uniform, if reverting back out of the uniform led to some change in my behaviour or choice of clothes that increased this kind of thing, or what. But a significant part of the uniform experience, came down to the absence of interest/touching/gendered interactions in my uniform, and ramping up of them as I emerged from it.
I don’t have any grand lessons, but it was certainly interesting to try this. I have tried a bunch of other things on myself, including changing my language. It’s interesting in a way that is hard to predict, and I am primarily left wondering why people don’t experiment with things like this more. Hit me up if you want to play.
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References
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103112000200
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00062/full
https://microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40168-015-0138-x
