DRESS LIKE YOUR ENEMY
On dressing like your dad (in suits and ties)
I’m a teenager and we are at Moore’s which is the go-to department store in North Vancouver to shop for men’s attire. My mom marches us straight to the section of ties, after she’s finished picking out a suit for my dad so she can complete the look and get out of there. The environment is a sea of burgundy, navy and black suits, button up shirts, khaki trousers, golf shirts, a shop for men, only men working there, men’s clothes everywhere - it’s triggering at best.
She hones in on the rack of colourful patterned silk ties and weaves her fingers through them: paisley print, stripes, diamonds, and funny ones with golf clubs printed on them. I shove more candy pop rocks into my mouth then open my mouth wide to hear it crackle and pop behind my teeth. The noise doesn’t phase my mother as she’s consumed by a ritual that she needs to get right so she doesn’t pay for it later. “AhhhhhhHHHhhhhh” I say with my tongue out. I enjoy the fizz as a minor distraction before it’s cut off by my eyes clocking the scabby scratch marks on my mother’s wrist, down to her flakey dry knuckles, her brittle nails attached to shaky skeletal fingers, and her wedding band bouncing up and down between joints, hanging on for dear life.
“What do you think?”. She turns and motions to me to help her decide on a couple options, desperate to include me in the mission (rather the non-negotiable demand) to curate her husband's wardrobe. In one swift move, my mother picks out two different ties and holds them up to the suit she's holding in the other hand. She licks the corners of her dry mouth then tilts her head to examine which tie matches best. I get a glimpse of dried up tears crusted in the corner of her eyes, a minor swell under her right eye and a red mark on her neck.
I clear my throat full of gooey blue candy liquid and worry. “Uhmmmm, that one”, I said as I pointed to a third tie that she hadn’t picked out. A navy blue silk tie with an iridescent sheen to it with snail shells printed on it, and ribbons of lavender and yellow dancing in between them.
“That one?”, she asks. She’s not convinced. With pursed lips, she lifts the tie up off the rack and holds it up high as if she’s inspecting a rare artefact. She holds the tie up to the suit and lets out a small sigh. She puts the entire ensemble on the clothes rack to closely inspect the 3 out of 4 pieces she picked out. The navy blazer: she dusts off the shoulders and squeezes the shoulder pads and holds each of the shoulders out to figure out if it looks square enough. The trousers: slender at the base, nice deep pockets and she unzips the trousers to check that the zipper works right. The tan belt: a glistening buckle that she grazes her fingers over, she takes the belt and bends it in her hands - sturdy, lightweight, it has a good snap to it. She then pinches the snail tie between her thumb and middle finger: strokes the fabric, flips it to look at its underbelly, and ogles at the shiny fabric.
She dramatically takes three steps back from the suit and sways her body from right to left, examining the ensemble horizontally. Then standing upright she shoves her hands into the front pockets of her jeans and stares at it square on - it feels confrontational. In three steady strides she walks up to the suit and looks at it from head to toe and vice versa, she bites her lower lip, opens her eyes dramatically wide, clenches her fists, cocks her chin up—----”mom?”, I utter.
The book Radical Fashion Exercises: A Workbook of Modes and Methods by Laura Gardner and Daphne Mohajer va Pesaran, is a collection of fashion practice prompts, suggested by global fashion practitioners, with the intention of getting readers to challenge fast fashion structures and to encourage style experimentation using DIY and introspective activities.
Early on in the book, I got hooked on the activity ‘Getting To Know Your Enemy’, which falls under the section ‘Imagining and Dreaming’ on page 26. The page provides analytical exercises that have you decode your enemy’s emotions memories and motivations through their clothes with a series of reflective exercises. It is suggested that to really get to know your enemy, you need to dress like them. Embodying their aesthetic means that you can better understand their motivations, feelings and personal history. The reader is encouraged to take on a somatic-style approach by observing their enemy’s posture, their gestures, their walk, their facial expressions to really get a sense of how these clothes would move, or complement, in a specific environment.
As a queer person, my own relationship with self expression, particularly when wearing suits and ties, is sometimes entangled with dressing like my enemy.
Share how you feel in your enemy’s look
Dressing up in a suit and tie is a very queer coded thing to do and it has been an integral staple in my own expression. I enjoy making DIY ties : embellishing them with piercing jewelry, patches and badges, safety pins and scrap materials - radical, weird statement pieces that turn formal wear on its head. When I first came out as non-binary in 2017, a two piece suit and some shiny pointy toe shoes were my go-to attire, and were especially important for asserting myself in a rigorous academic environment (I was doing my Masters at the time). At the beginning of last year, I co-ran a series of workshops and curated online resources focusing on DIY ties and suits as an act of subversion, power and resistance. So suits and ties have been an integral part of my life for a long time.
I feel a cognitive distance with this style choice in particular, because the very act of dressing in a suit and tie is in a way liberatory for me, but it also is the very same attire that my enemy used to assert his power.
My enemy is my father.
Describe the bodies and physiognomy of your enemies…what emotions, memories, references do they evoke?
The popular depictions of a wife beater has always been the drunk belligerent smelly man with a big belly wearing a ribbed vest with a drinking problem. But the one that I grew up with was a slender 5”2 effeminate man, who was well groomed, always wearing a suit and tie with polished shoes and a crisp shirt. He had a huge selection of belts in every colour which was a staple fashion accessory, and a practical one because it doubled as a weapon. Next to that collection, he also owned a lifetime supply of ties in all shapes, colours and patterns. The heels of his loafers were preserved because he never put them on without a shoe horn. He had a pair of matching socks for every suit he wore, and never forgot his gold chains and rings to accompany his look. His grooming routine had him in the bathroom for hours, combing his moustache down and brushing his widow's peak back until the ‘V’ shape bounced into a perfect coiffe.
When he happened to be doing yard or building works, which wasn’t often, I would watch from the kitchen window as he pushed the lawn mower across the yard in a pair of slim fit joggers, a pair of loafers and an unbuttoned dress shirt. He didn’t like to stray too much from wearing a suit because the suit was used to wield power - both at home and at work.
Help each other create the perfect enemy look.
You don’t have to dress like your enemy to know them. In fact, sometimes the clothes associated with the enemy are not even the ones they chose. My mother was in charge of shopping for my dad’s clothes, and was put under pressure to select outfits that she thought encapsulated his essence. My mother needed to know her enemy exceptionally well to be able to fulfill this order. My mother’s understanding of my dads aesthetic was through the somatic engagement she had with them.
The suit kept intact during an argument meant that no outbreak of physical harm, at least in the moment, was likely. The suit in its full form is restrictive; it’s difficult to move the shoulders and swing your arms when you are locked into the material. The blazer coming off and the tie being loosened meant war: more unpredictable quick movements were likely. It usually was the cue to run to your room. From the bedroom sometimes you could hear the unbuckling of a belt and that's when you knew you were in big trouble. The slow taps of loafers across the wooden floor meant that you were about to be confronted with a question, a statement, a demand, a provocation waiting in the doorway of your bedroom door frame.
When my mother was shopping for my dads suits, she inevitably had to factor in her future relationship to the clothes - or her fate rather. Was the material of this suit flexible enough for wide range hand movements? Did the trousers hold enough slack for standing up quickly from the kitchen table chair to throw the table upside down? Was the tie flashy enough to distract from her black eye at a family dinner? Would he even like what she picked out? Or would that be another invitation for violence too?
I consider how my mother developed an intimate, strategic knowledge of my father by curating his appearance. Within a power imbalance, a silent knowing and aesthetic control allowed my mother to survive in the face of her enemy. She didn't need to perform his masculinity or inhabit his style to "know" him.
As a queer person, I find myself drawn to, and simultaneously wary of, the same symbols of masculinity that once signified fear. But in wearing a suit and tie, I have the opportunity to reclaim this aesthetic and giving it a new story than the one I grew up with; dislocating the symbols of his dominance from their original context.
My mother’s way of knowing her enemy was quiet, visual, and shaped by survival. Mine is expressive, disruptive, and shaped by reclamation. In both cases, our relationship to the suit and tie as a tool for survival and/or liberation, became a language through which power is read, reshaped, and resisted - where possible.
I’m at Moore’s as a teenager. I’m snapping my mother out of her trance that she’s in as she is in her own imaginary face off with the suit on the clothes hanger. She slowly looks over her right shoulder at me when she hears me call her, lowers her gaze for a moment as she contends with the fact that the face off has to end, grabs the suit in one quick motion and heads off to the cashier. “Lets go,” she urges me.
In the car ride home, my mother looks over at me at a red light and smiles, “I love that tie you picked out - you did a good job, he’s going to like that”, she says as she pats me on the knee before switching into gear to drive forward. I look over at her, the dried up tears crusted in the corner of her eyes, a minor swell under her right eye, the red battle scars on her neck.
Deep down I know that the encouragement from her is a nod to the fact that, I too, know my enemy.
To be continued…
Sources
Laura Gardner & Daphne Mohajer va Pesaran. Radical Fashion Excersies: A Workbook of Modes and Methods (2018)