Picture that moment in the morning when you stand in front of your wardrobe, half awake. You think you're choosing what to wear today, when really you're choosing who you'll be today, the way you'll inhabit the day ahead.
You probably hear it in your head: “I've got nothing to wear”, “What's the weather doing?”, “I have a meeting at 2 today”… Beneath these practical thoughts, something very intimate is at play: how you want to be in the world that day. What you're ready to show, and what you'd rather keep to yourself.
That moment is the one that interests us.
This letter won't talk about trends, or “how to wear it”. I believe we talk enough about clothes as objects: their cut, their fabric, their price, their moment. And far less about what they do inside us, how they play on our mood, our courage, our modesty, our confidence…
What we wear carries us
We choose, perhaps unconsciously, to believe that we dress only according to our taste, when our clothes also tell the story of how we feel.
One day, you put on what protects you: an oversized, dark piece you can disappear into a little, because you simply don't feel like being seen. And another day, you look for the opposite: a fabric that follows your body, a cut that holds you upright, and suddenly you stand taller. The garment hasn't changed your day. It has changed the way you carry yourself within it.
It has a name: “enclothed cognition”, the idea that what we wear can influence the way we think and behave. I like the idea because it puts words to something that feels fairly instinctive to me.
You know it, and you live it without necessarily noticing: a collar that closes just right, a shoulder in the right place, a waist that falls exactly where it should, and already you're standing differently. You speak differently, you take up space differently.
A garment doesn't simply rest on us to cover us; it is in dialogue with our body. And sometimes, it changes the way we inhabit it.
And the body is intelligent. It feels these connections.
Dressing for yourself
We often say: “I dress for myself.” I think it's harder than we imagine.
For a long time, we also dress for other people's eyes: the ones we imagine on us, the ones we hope to charm, and the ones we dread.
We learn very early what is “pretty”, “elegant”, “feminine”, “masculine”, what is “appropriate”, what suits us and what doesn't. Through references handed down to us that we absorb (few of which are truly our own).
So dressing for yourself sometimes means unlearning: telling apart what you truly like from what you've learned to like, what you feel good in from what you think you ought to feel good in.
Choosing a piece because it resembles us, and not simply because it makes us resemble everyone else.
That's where a garment stops being a façade and becomes what it should be: a way of inhabiting your body. A companion.
So what is this letter about?
It will be about all of that.
Clothes, of course.
But above all, everything around them.
Here, we'll take the time to listen to the dialogue between the garment, the body and the mind: why we feel invincible in some pieces and invisible in others. What a uniform says about the desire to belong. Why we wear black when everything is going wrong, or when everything is going wonderfully. What an inherited garment carries of the person who left it to us. And more.
No style lessons. Just attention. The same attention we give, at copain.e, to making little but making it well, applied this time not to the garment as an object, but to the relationship we have with it.
Because getting dressed isn't simply covering yourself. Sometimes it's a way of finding yourself again.
And perhaps, every morning, of choosing yourself once more.
Speak soon,
Copain.e