St. Augustine in Spandex

In a previous missive I wrote that I was ambivalent about the pleasures of looking abject and feeling powerful about it. I want to talk more about that particular phenomenon: basically, the experience of putting on a fit, looking in the mirror and being like, “I look dumb as hell,” and instead of feeling awful (and perhaps deciding to change your outfit, or at least feeling small and uncomfortable if there are reasons you can’t avoid dressing that way), you say, “hell yeah.” This is less about dressing bad as a flex, or as a form of in-group signaling, although those might be elements of it. It’s also not about female empowerment through not letting men make you feel small, although this is also a way that (often ugly, one might even cheekily say, man-repelling) clothes can make you feel expansive. Nor is it about my least-favourite nonbinary fashion aesthetic, which I have termed the “funky potato,” and which others might gesture at through the overused lens of “queer joy,” although that might also be a part of it. In short, it’s not experiencing as beautiful things that are typically seen as déclassé and trying to assert your own judgment or shift collective judgment. Rather, it’s finding a certain perverse joy in transgressing your own aesthetic judgments, the fashion equivalent of St. Augustine stealing the pears. 

I think this is interesting because it is something people absolutely do (consider: the return of the waxed, twirly hipster moustache; the strange vogue for skullets in the Montreal punk scene last summer), it has a distinct affective flavour, and I would argue has the structure of an aesthetic judgment (I would also go so far as to argue it operates as a kind of minor aesthetic category, in the Sianne Ngai sense, with its own affective structure, but I haven’t landed on a catchy name for it yet), but also nobody really seems to talk about it directly in these terms. Rather, it gets discussed from the outside, typically from people who identify the look in question as something they don’t like, or from people who reduce it to the elements of social status, where it gets framed as a subgenre of anti-aesthetic flex. 

Instead, I want to start with the experience. Potentially relevant background information: I care deeply about fashion and self-presentation as a form of self-construction (to the extent that we might refer to authenticity, I don’t consider this an inauthentic activity) and as a way to perform attention and care as everyday practices. I don’t see fashion as a rule-bound practice: when I say I take fashion seriously this doesn’t mean that it is a project without joy, but there are things I tend to put together, things I tend not to, and things I absolutely wouldn’t dream of. I have also recently been getting into biking. 

Depending on how you approach it, you don’t necessarily need to go all-in on bike gear, although the nature of the activity imposes certain limits: no big, billowy pants (those can get caught in the gears/chain); shoes that won’t fall off easily; a helmet (unless you’re very brave and/or foolhardy); and finally, a bag that closes fully and fits close to the body. My uniform this summer (frankly, most summers) consists in extremely voluminous linen pants, slip skirts, a slouchy open bag, and conceptually daring shoes. I have, unsurprisingly, been put off from biking before by the clothing requirements. But if I don’t exercise I quickly find myself in the throes of agitation, pacing like a caged animal, thrashing about in my large comfortable bed at 3 am, gnawing at my psyche like a wolf chewing off its own paw – self-destruction is romantic if you’re young but I am 36 and know its banality inside-out by now. I can do better (so I tell myself). 

So anyways, I’m standing in front of the mirror wearing what, after several attempts, is my most tolerable bike fit: oversized men’s OCBD, left mostly unbuttoned; yoga top, black spandex shorts, silver runners, leopard print nylon crossbody bag. Not so bad, perhaps. At the awkward midway point between plateau post-hipster and aging clean girl just trying to add a splash of fun to things – in other words, I’m feeling pretty grotesque. Add a pair of bug-eyed Jackie O prescription sunglasses and an almost perfectly spherical powder-blue helmet emblazoned with the tagline “I love my brain” and a small picture of an alien (don’t ask) and I am glad I moved to a neighbourhood where nobody knows me. Anyways, this fit is not something I’d wear under normal circumstances at all. Wearing it, even in the privacy of my room, fills me with a bilious, extremely physical, sense of shame. My extremities tingle as if they have lost circulation, my stomach contracts agonizingly, my nose scrunches, I avert my gaze. 

I need to decide what I’m going to wear; I need to get out and go on my ride before it gets too hot out, but I’m paralyzed before my reflection. I stand there, pushing past the advantages of my early wake up, wordlessly miserable: I can’t go out looking like this. I have nothing else to wear. The tension stretches out, strung thin between the minutes, and I can already feel a new source of shame in the interminable morning passed glumly in front of my mirror, the ruined afternoon of a beautiful summer day spent entirely indoors, the evening I will waste watching stupid television and blowing past my appointed bedtime because time isn’t real and I need to punish myself. Finally, a thought cuts through my spiral: “fuck it.” I turn on my heel and leave my apartment without a moment’s hesitation. 

Now, when I say, “fuck it,” I mean this in a very specific way. I don’t mean, “fuck it, it’s Tuesday at 10.23 AM and nobody I know is going to see me in this getup”; I also don’t mean, “fuck it, I don’t care how I’m dressed, I have more serious priorities.” I mean: I had the specific experience of looking at myself, judging that my fit was horrendous, and embracing this: “fuck yeah, I look dumb as hell.” Finding myself ridiculous and being into it: suppose I do run into someone. I DARE them to judge me. This is an expression of my freedom. I can wear whatever I want, and I want to wear this. The thrill of violating a cherished taboo. What a rush!* 

*Footnote: This is a slightly different rush than taking a fashion risk or getting out of your comfort zone or experimenting, although I think they bear some relationship.

So we have the inversion of the traditional aesthetic judgment, per Kant (here consider the structure of judging something beautiful): normally, I make the judgment that something is beautiful when I like it, and upon reflection, judge that other people ought to also feel the same way. While my pre-existing exemplars of beauty, and my cultivated understanding of what principles should be beautiful (symmetry, elegance of line, harmonious colours, etc) play some role in shaping my judgment, they do not determine it. I am not trying to subsume the object I deem beautiful under a pre-existing concept, but rather the example refines and develops our understanding of the category. There is an aspect of novelty to it, alongside which comes a sense of pleasure or satisfaction. Similarly, while I can show the object to others and attempt to persuade them that it is beautiful, such persuasion cannot force others to see it as I do, as much as I want it. “I see what you’re saying, I understand the piece better, but it’s just not working for me.”

In this case, I’m taking a kind of aesthetic pleasure from a judgment I take to be distinctly bad. Internally, this has less of the comfort of satisfaction and more the headiness of an adrenaline rush: I’m getting away with something really naughty! In this case, I feel liberated from the responsibility to my own commitments, the burden of my own good taste, the thing that I have built up as a defining aspect of my selfhood. To ironically paraphrase Arendt, I’m liberated from my own idiosyncrasy (but this has a self-annihilating undercurrent, rather than its usual positive sense of membership within a community of judgment). To speak seriously: even though I am not committed to the slick, stretchy uniform of the urban biker and full membership in that perverse collectivity, underneath all of this I feel the heady promise of escape from the self, if only in whispers, if only for a moment.

Anyways, thusly clad without shame or self-consciousness, I went out on my ride, felt the wind in my hair (at least what I could through the small bowling ball holes in my helmet) and the sun on my back, and I greeted the legions of grim men mashing their pedals in performance spandex as my brothers, with joy on my lips.