Turning 27 Forced Me To Change My Entire Wardrobe
I turn 27 in a week, which is tragic. Well, not really. To be honest I gave up caring about getting older after I hit the quarter-century mark (which temporarily destroyed me), because I realized that as you age, you gain more than just some cellulite. You gain some positive things, too. For example: knowledge; confidence; the ability to tell what clothes and hairstyles actually suit you; Facebook friends; the will to work more and be a drunken slob less; success; the confidence to weed-out the shitty people in your life and surround yourself with people who actually care about you and act as a positive influence, be that friends, lovers or even family members (cheesy but true); and ultimately, you just gain the ability to think for yourself. Or, at least this is how aging should affect us. Sometimes it doesn’t work out this way, which is when getting older becomes #tragic and depressing. Thankfully, I think I’m doing reasonably well at most of the things I listed above, although now that I’m officially entering my LATE TWENTIES (aka almost 30 aka old) there are a few things I want to change about my life. First, I’ll tell you a story:
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of interviewing one of my idols, the 91 year old style icon, Iris Apfel. As expected she was extremely nice, smart and funny, but there was one thing in particular that she said that really stuck with me. She said, “Darling, you really are a beautiful girl, but you could do with dressing a bit more more conservatively. You’d look a lot better. You really could be smashing, but you way you dress is, well… let’s put it this way: it’s not elegant.” This, as you can imagine, put me into a state of mild panic. I am not elegant?! I thought. I guess I’d never really thought about it, as I was always less concerned with looking elegant and more concerned with looking, like, “hot”. My response to her was, “But I like wearing tight clothes. It makes me feel sexy.” (I should probably mention that I was not even wearing my trashiest attire. I was dressed in a way I thought appropriate for a professional interview with a 91 year old woman, in a red leather shirt and turtleneck crop-top, which revealed about an inch, or slightly less, of my midriff.) To this Iris responded, “You can wear tight clothes, and you can be sexy, but being sexy is not about being trashy, because that comes across as desperate. I think a little mystery is sexy, and that dressing too revealing reveals something bad about a person.” At this moment, I had an epiphany: I don’t want to come across like a desperate, Kim Kardashian ho who’s constantly dying to be railed. I want to be an elegant person whose overall appearance says, “Hey or whatever, I don’t need your attention because I’m casually aloof about my natural sex appeal. And p.s. you could never sleep with me in a million years.” I’m almost 30, for fuck’s sake.
So… following this moment of revelation I immediately went home and manically threw out all of the trashiest clothes in my closet. This included all of my see-through tops (i.e. 50% of my wardrobe) and things like plastic stripper heels and the $19 mini-dresses made of neon pink mock-lace that I wore almost every day this past summer. I then went to Beacons Closet and bought a variety of sweaters and modest blouses, as well as a pair of boots with a sensible, 2.5 inch heel.. Then, still in my state of ‘needing to feel elegant’ panic, I cut five inches off my hair with a pair of those giant Ikea scissors with the red handle, feeling like a shoulder-length bob somehow better exuded elegance than whatever Brigitte-Bardot-copied haircut I had before. The following day, when I asked my friend Ally what she thought of my new hair, she cocked her head sideways and said, “Well, before you had, like, sexy hair, but this is sort of, well… it’s like… I guess you could call it post-sexy?” And I was like, “Damn gurl, I like the sound of that!” Post-sexy: it’s more than just a hairstyle, it’s a way of life.
But moving on, there are some other things about my life that need improving. For one, I want an actual bed frame that stands up off the ground. I’m done with sleeping on the floor like a peasant. I want to sleep risen into the air like the superior being that I am. Also, I want to get a dresser so that I can store my clothes in a drawer, rather than in a giant trash pile next to my floor bed. And lastly, I think I want to start eating meat again, because I swear to god all the tofu I eat is making me fat. I feel like I’ve been deceived into thinking that tofu and soy milk are lean forms of protein, but recently all I hear is people talking about how overly processed and unnatural tofu is, as well as these horror stories about how tofu suppresses thyroid function and turns people into fat fucks. GOD. And what even is tofu anyway? No one knows. It looks like it’s from space. Well, listen up, I’m not a Scientologist and I don’t want want any of your space tofu, thanks. And why did I even decide to become vegetarian in the first place? I literally hate animals. The only thing I like about being veggie is that in restaurants and at dinner parties I get to say things like, “Excuse me, is this vegetarian?” and “Oh no, I won’t have that hamburger, I don’t eat meat,” which immediately makes everyone around you understand that you’re better than them. Which is, clearly, the sole point of existing.