You Couldn’t Escape It if You Tried
Welcome to Yeehawt (again)
Fashion is something we engage with whether we want to or not — we all have to get dressed every day. You couldn’t escape fashion if you tried.
This means it’s all the more important for us to critically engage with it: analyzing how it impacts our world, thoughtfully interrogating the powers in the machine, and exercising our eye for its influences as we move through everyday life.
I hope you’ll sit in the dentist’s chair with me and see 1996 Prada. I hope we can read trend predictions and question their historical and political contexts. I hope the shimmer of a jewel beetle at the Natural History Museum will inspire you to hunt down metallic clogs on eBay. I hope you want to experiment when you’re getting dressed, play with your wardrobe, walk fearlessly into that closet to pick out the ugliest thing you own, and wear it with pride in the name of research.
This is all to say — Welcome (back) to Yeehawt. Or welcome for the first time! Either way, I'm really happy you’re here.
If you aren’t a family member or a close friend, you might not know that Yeehawt was born three years ago. (Pre Substack app, if you can even conceive of those times.) I started this newsletter in early 2022, sent a few personal essays to a small pool of subscribers, all of whom knew me personally, and found it incredibly difficult to maintain consistency. So I dropped it for years. The truth is: I never permitted myself to write what I wanted to write.
Though I’d written about fashion, politics, and a host of other beats through college and was working in an editorial capacity in an office, something was holding me back from publishing on personal time. I became unsure if I had anything to say.
Perhaps it was a side effect of my frontal lobe clicking into place when I turned 25, but at some point last year, I finally, truly, stopped caring about what anyone else thought about me. (This wasn’t something I’d previously thought was much of an issue, but I can see in hindsight how it had seeped into my life. It’s a lesson I hope I get to relearn time and time again over the years.) It was through permeating that shame membrane that I was able to pick up Yeehawt again last fall and write what I wanted to.
I published this essay two days after my birthday last year in what turned out to be a somewhat prophetic moment of clarity:
“This is also a way to say I wasn’t sure if I had anything to write anymore. At least for a while. Even this is almost barely a subject. I wasn’t sure I had anything to say. I thought, maybe it’ll come soon, maybe it’s gone forever, what is ‘it’ anyway?
But then I started calling my cat Smooch. And I got an urge to sit down and write about it. And I realized maybe ‘it’ was actually sitting in the room with me right now.”
I hope you’ll critically and thoughtfully engage with fashion with me here, and I hope you’ll give it another chance, whatever thing you’ve set down for a while. Just when you think there isn’t anything left, you find some more. You couldn’t escape it if you tried.
I know this feeling well!! Thanks for sharing.
love this