I've always been riddled with nervous passion, pushing the edges of my psyche for actualization. Like most people, I crave an outlet—a way to tell the world who I am without the inefficiency of conversation. Conversation, after all, is always so unreliable, so ripe for misinterpretation. So I lean into my appearance: the way I choose to present myself to the world without speaking a word. Appearance is its own dialect, a language forged from fabric and thread, blending fact and fiction into a seamless narrative, a perpetual cue of self.
Fashion is a buffer, a signal, a convenient fiction for the things that resist articulation—the things that hum beneath the skin, quiet but insistent. Barthes called this veil a system of words between object and user: my clothing is the object, but I, too, am the object to the world’s user. Words move through fabric, through me, through the people who see me, a closed circuit of meaning, half-legible and ever-shifting. What a loop. What a trick. And yet, at what point in this equation do I hold the reins? This sartorial self, a mere extension of the private whole, is a social game I continuously falter at. Because, really, what self am I presenting? A self I believe in or a self I am trying on? Do I dress as an extension of who I am or as an argument for who I could be? Can I confine myself to a singular idea? Yes, no, maybe. Depends on the day. Depends on the brand. (“HAPPY VICTIMS, YOU ARE WHAT YOU BUY.”)
But the words—! The words that scaffold this whole concept of being seen, of existing within a matrix of value and visual cues—those are what truly interests me. Words keep this brittle system propped up. And I want to know them. I want to know the language that claims to define me, even as I struggle to pin myself down.
(And how I look in the clothes… but that’s not today’s focus. Not entirely, at least.)
At Miu Miu’s first show in 1994, Miuccia Prada described the brand as "…the bad girls. It’s innocent young girls pretending to be elegant and not making it. Not having a concept of what is right—to me, that is very sexy." Miu Miu has always carried this air: a self-conscious innocence that both defies and flirts with sophistication. It’s the “unruly niece of Prada”, the half-baked sketch of femininity that’s somehow more compelling for its rough edges. There's an honesty in failing to meet the ideal, in rejecting the standardized blueprints of womanhood. Miu Miu isn’t about presenting a polished archetype; it’s about cataloging the messiness of existence. Prada suggests we don't just acknowledge the multitude of women inside us, but welcome them in, let them stay awhile. Make companions of our contradictions, rather than strangers. Embrace every self we've tucked away in corners. Embody them all, never dilute.
(“This regard for nuance is how I know, when I wear her clothes, that a woman designed them”)
For someone who finds self-definition nearly unbearable, this idea of embodiment—shifting, conditional, malleable—is a balm. There is no singular self. No definitive version. Only the constant flux of moments, of contexts, of how we wish to be seen and how we are seen. Each manifestation different, but the constant thread is always me. The fixed point, however tenuous, is always me—whoever that may be on any given day, whatever words I’ve chosen to drape myself in. Everything else is up for grabs.
And words, after all, are where it begins. Prada begins each season not with sketches, but with language. Words shape the season’s narrative, the collective memory she wants to invoke. She is a communicator first, an artist second (though I’d argue the two are inseparable). Her collections are translations: words spun into fabric, emotions into silhouettes. What the word conjures in the mind, the collection renders on the body. What is spoken becomes what is worn, what is felt is stitched into the seams. Whether we like the feeling is another matter altogether.
But if Miu Miu exists “on the edge of womanhood,” what shifts with each season’s descriptors? What happens to “girl” as time passes, if she is never quite permitted into the full womanhood of Prada? Is there something inherently tragic in that, or is it a refusal of the very notion that we must graduate from one category to another? Can a woman remain a girl indefinitely, perpetually unformed? If we’re all in continuous transition, then we’re closer to the paradoxes of philosophy than we’d like to admit—unchanged in essence, yet never still. We are everything we have been and everything we will be, all at once
Baudrillard, taking cues from structural linguistics, viewed fashion as a language—a system where reality is reflected, obscured, and invented simultaneously. It is signification without message, a system where meaning is always in play, but never fixed. Fashion becomes an engine of ambiguity, a space where truth and artifice blur. In this structure, fashion writing doesn’t just assign value; it constructs it. Words slip between object and wearer, reinforcing the invisible fault lines of belonging. The ones who know, know. The quiet nods, the coded reviews—fashion as password, as threshold, as invitation. It isn’t simply about understanding the clothes. It’s about grasping what the clothes imply, what they signal beyond their fabric and form.
Still, my fixation with Miu Miu isn’t about acquisition (though, yes, I occasionally falter). It’s about refusing the rigidity of a single definition of girl or woman. The real luxury is in contradiction, in making space for all the selves we’ve silenced. The luxury is in the refusal to define. Fashion is both a hiding place and an exclamation. A way out or a way in, depending on the day. Some days, it’s armor. Others, it’s surrender. Always, it’s a language—spoken fluently or not at all. A dialect of choice, of expression, of metamorphosis.
In Agua Viva, Clarice Lispector writes, “…sensations that transform into ideas because I must use words.” The words are what shape, what bind, what gives us a sense of ourselves and our place. They are the framework of our reality, the only way we can pin down what we feel, what we are. But they are as ephemeral as chiffon, as transient as trend. Just like fashion, just like identity. Just like who we are. Lispector, a woman known for her glamour, for a meticulously crafted exterior that belied a tempestuous mind, understood that the world demands words to define us, to hem us in. But words are never enough. They are always incomplete. Always slipping away, just as we are slipping away from what we think we know.
(”I do know—but cautiously because I’m a hair’s breadth from not knowing”)
In an age ruled by algorithms, the instinctual self is what we must lean on if we want to express ourselves at all. Trust the body before the numbers, the feeling before the formula. If we fixate only on the words that describe objects, we risk losing the undefinable. Who are you, and what do you like to wear? Hint: it’s not a single aesthetic or something ending in “-core.” Fashion is a cipher, but maybe it’s not meant to be cracked. Sometimes it just needs to be worn.
So, I’ll wear what feels true, what feels like me, and let the quiet language of that choice speak its own truth. The world will interpret as it pleases.
(TLDR: WEAR WHAT YOU WANT AND THINK ABOUT THE WORDS!)