Issue #8: Style & Daydreams
Of Clothes & Daydreams.
Intro
Does anyone else view personal style and daydreams with the same lens? I do, because of them are windows into our identity. Personal style serves as the perception we want the world to have about us; our daydreams, through their audacious authenticity also serve as outlets to express our identity – style outwardly, and daydreams inwardly.
CROP TOPS AND LIME GREEN UNIFORMS
[Image created using DALL·E by OpenAI]
Age: 6/7 years old
Style Story: “I have crop tops (honestly we called them half tops back then) with Flintstones and Powerpuff girls’ images,” I lied to a childhood friend.
We were 6 or 7 years old, seated in the classroom of the Islamic school we attended in the evenings on Thursdays and Fridays. On brown benches, wearing lime green uniforms consisting of a knee length dress and trousers, covered with a hijab, she and I sat there, boasting about our closet. I wish I could recall the genesis of that interesting and enlightening intellectual conversation.
Did she know I was lying? Was she playing along and chuckling in her mind?
The first time the same childhood friend visited me at home, she caught me wearing a traditional lace dress (knee length) but without the skirt. I glanced at the entrance of my parents’ house, recognised her, jumped into the bedroom and changed into a black and white striped jumpsuit. She’d seen me already, walking around my house, half-dressed and in traditional clothing! The horror. I prayed for amnesia.
Who was I trying to be?
Daydreams: My daydreams were ambitions to possess Barbie dolls and the life-like Baby Born doll. I harassed relatives who made promises to buy me Barbie dolls (successfully), while I imagined holding the Baby Born I saw daily during cartoon breaks.
Reflection: Growing up watching Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network, I defined sophistication as ‘anything on TV.’ Hence the lies about owning crop tops, changing into a western outfit and yearning for the toys I saw on TV.
THE CASE OF THE MISSING BAGGY JEANS
[Image created using DALL·E by OpenAI]
Age: 8 – 13 years
Style: I adored a pair of baggy jeans that my mother DESPISED. I genuinely believe that their disappearance was a joint operation between my mother and my elder sister who equally hated the jeans too. One day, the truth will prevail! One day.
Daydreams: I joined a boarding school when I was three months away from turning 10. Honestly, my daydreams then were restricted to various yearnings for my bed at home, good food at home, and how much I missed my family.
Reflection: My jeans made me famous. I partially owe my childhood fame to them. A childhood friend informed me that her mother was friends with a relative of mine, someone who identified me as, “the one always wearing trousers.”
Like the disloyal person that I was to style, I quickly forgot the curious disappearance of my baggy jeans and shifted to skirts and dangling earrings (hoops especially).
POLO DREAMS & FASHION MAGAZINES
[Image created using DALL·E by OpenAI]
Age: 13 – 15 years
Style: After I escaped from boarding school (I made a deal with my mother that I would ‘test’ my new school as a day student before transitioning into a boarder – never happened), I became the person flipping through the huge stacks of magazines at the tailoring shop, choosing this blouse in this picture, and the sleeves in that picture. I was always proud of my choices, and the compliments I received. During my sister’s rowdy and claustrophobic primary school graduation, a parent asked me to pose because she wanted to copy the style of my outfit. At least, I was finally seeing the elegance of our traditional clothing.
Daydreams: I was a quiet student then, and my daydreams were audacious and vastly different from my reality.
The one I recall the most is the one where some school mates of mine would arrive at a field and become enthralled by the excellent polo player wearing a helmet. The player, tired and fulfilled, would then step down from the horse, remove the helmet, and voila! It’s me! I’m the polo player!
Reflection: During those years, I’d dress up at night, wear heels, splash make-up on my face and pose for my poor younger sisters, bribing them to take me pictures until I got tired. I allowed them to join some of the pictures too – so, it wasn’t all that bad for them.
Looking back, it seems as though I wanted to be defined as ‘bold’ and ‘sophisticated.’
THE DISCOVERED ARTIST
[Image created using DALL·E by OpenAI]
Age: 15 – 17 years
Style: My time away from home, in a foreign land, surrounded by people who I had very little in common with, especially in terms of style. Then, I was the Nigerian student with a scarf on her head. I wanted to belong, but pretended otherwise.
I’m not sure that I had a particular affinity to a specific style, I tumbled up and down, switching things up, and buying things I shouldn’t have - as a student.
Daydreams: Oh, this is embarrassing. My favourite daydream was the one where I’d be discovered in my room, singing and dancing, the voice of an angel, the moves of a butterfly. Most of the students around me were so talented in the arts, I wanted to belong too.
Reflection: My outward appearance, one I couldn’t change, made me to stand out. Internally, I really wanted to just feel like one of the girls in our year. Not the “foreigner.”
Closing Thoughts
I never owned crop tops, I never played polo or became a global music & dancing sensation, but they all lead to one conclusion: my greatest aspiration in my early years was to become a more confident person. One step at time.