Wear It Well
Shopping with my grandmother.
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Do you remember a store called 5/7/9? I do. I really do. It was my go-to mall destination because I only ever went shopping with my grandmother and Abercrombie & Fitch’s prices were “meshugennah.” For the duration of my teenage years, my grandmother would take me to 5/7/9, never permit me to even browse full-price merchandise, and proceed to hold up no fewer than six dozen discounted garments asking me if I like them to which the reply was literally always no. It’s so funny to me now as an adult, the need to participate in clothing selection for other people. I had hands, I flipped through sale racks myself, but no…I think she wanted the win.
I had zero sense of style as a kid (still don’t TBH, fully okay with this), and no one in my family ever bothered to help me as long as I looked clean, so the way I chose clothing was typically by viewing it as social camouflage. Which items are most likely to help me blend in during passing period, drawing as little attention to my existence as possible? My childhood associated attention with shame, for good fucking reason, so my defense was invisibility. I wore a lot of neutral solids. It was fine.