An Education

In responding to my outfits, you guys give me an education that is extremely valuable.  You candidly and compassionately point out my successes and failures, and often offer suggestions that hadn't occurred to me before.  My understanding of style is growing quickly under your tutelage.  Also, sometimes you explain things to me that I didn't consciously know but had hidden in the back of my mind. 

For example, have you ever liked something but not known why?

I put together an outfit recently and it appeals to me a lot.  (It's the one with the ruffled skirt.)  That outfit reaches deep inside me but, until one of you commented on it, I didn't know why.  Now I do.

The outfit, because of the short ruffled skirt, resembles a girl's dance-costume.  Way back in my childhood, I had an intense desire for colorful dance-costumes.  I wanted to be one of the girls who got to wear such pretty clothes.  Of course, I never could.

I didn't make any connection between that long-held desire and my outfit last week until Freeda pointed it out -- and she couldn't have been more right.  It is precisely because of the resemblance to a girl's dance-costume that the adult-outfit appeals to me so strongly.  And now that the resemblance is known, I can't believe how obvious it is and how strange that I didn't recognize it before.

Before making this connection, I took the pictures shown below.  This new outfit is even more obvious than the last one in tracing the source of its appeal.  It's funny how I didn't see that before.

Thank you for helping me sort through the many associations we have with clothing and the sometimes-hidden meaning clothes often have for us.