And now for something completely different! This is equal parts personal whinging, a screed on the importance of hyper-niche internet spaces, a railing against the homogenization of fashion, and like... links to online fashion communities I do think are kind of cool. I suppose I'm still hoping somebody might be like "Oh! Have you looked at [random tiny forum or webring I've never heard of]?", but mostly I'm doing my roughly-annual revisit of my own fashion and thinking about how I can become more creative and more comfortable with what I'm wearing. The Summer heat tends to bring this out in me, and maybe you'll understand why when you see how many goths are on my style inspirations list. :p
Note: Aside from the first link to Ravelry and the link to Mike Grindle's reddit drama linkblog post, most of following links go to web-places I am vaguely to extremely dissatisfied with, so there are a lot of youtube/instagram links and some very web 2.0 blogs that are full of Content™️ and want your Money. Explore at your own risk.
It's honestly kind of an accident that I'm into fashion at all[1]. I certainly wasn't growing up, and most of my friends in high school and college were, at most, interested in clothes as a way to look queer and piss off their parents.
But then crochet & knitting were the first hobbies to put me back in my body, and the radioactive combo of knitwear FO pictures and ambient 2010s tumblr style turned me into somebody with opinions about how I want to look with "not boring" at the very top. While fandom and social justice are still thriving on Tumblr, a lot of the fashion blogs have moved on or "aged out". The tags are dead. Instagram is a video-laden algorithmic hellhole, and Pinterest may contain a wide variety of pictures from all over the fragmented internet, but almost none of it is properly credited to the people putting together the outfits and taking the photos. There's no community, just aggregation.
And I'm not downloading TikTok.
The fashion community on the non-TikTok web is frustratingly fractured, and so I have no idea where to find other people near my particular sartorial intersection. As a nearly-30, still-alternative, professional, half-out dysphoric transmasculine person looking for sustainable clothes in natural fibers who has never met a single box they want to stay in in their life... I end up a little dissatisfied trying to find fashion inspiration & community. When you're looking for such a specific overlap of intersecting modifiers, the smaller platforms just don't cast a wide enough net and the big ones keep getting more hostile.
Hopefully without casting too much shade on spaces that are serving lots of people who aren't me just fine, I want to discuss all the places I've looked and the reasons I didn't find much practical advice or inspiration in any of them. Sometimes I ask myself questions like "why do I hate almost all of my shorts?" or "literally what is there to wear that's fun and temperature-appropriate for the summer that won't make me dysphoric?" or even just "what should I knit next?", and it's helpful to have other people to take inspiration from or pose the questions to directly, and I still haven't found anywhere that totally gets it.
I want to convey how frustrating it's been, in the aggregate, and maybe come towards some fashion subcategory description or fashion-web-space philosophy that helps me decide how to find the people I want to connect with.
Wearable Knits on Ravelry & Blogs
I've been floating around knitting blogs, various crafty podcasts, and Ravelry (the central hub of the knitting internet and a frankly amazing independent archive/forum/sharing site made by and for knitters), for more than a decade. I love them, and there is basically no one on them with my style.
Often, these spaces are highly gendered and skew towards the acceptable-for-middle-aged-women feminine. It's been really cool to see it changing in the last 5 years or so, but mostly in the direction of cis queer men wearing more ostentatiously feminine garments, and occasionally in the direction of boring unisex stuff. Masculine knitting patterns are still often marketed as things people can make for their partners or children, and there's often commisserating in the Ravelry forums about how picky said men are with a lot of binary conventional wisdom about what colors, trims, shapes, etc are allowed in Men's Knitwear (hint: basically nothing fun).
That said, I also don't want to wear dresses, I've gotten less comfortable with really chest-hugging sweaters, and I don't have anything to wear a giant triangular lace shawl with. I feel at home in this community most of the time, and it's so creatively inspiring, but if I'm not careful I will absolutely make trendy stuff that I will literally never wear. Even if I take inspiration from those in the fiber arts community striving to make more wearable stuff, which brings us to...
Sustainable/Slow Fashion
There are a lot of problems with the fashion industry. Underpaid & overworked garment-makers in unacceptable conditions, waste, an ever-increasing, churning trend cycle. It's bad. One of the most cogent responses is the idea that maybe we should start by... buying less. We can start by wearing the clothes we already have, and only buying things that we'll actually wear and that will last. The most extreme manifestation of this is the capsule wardrobe--a set of somewhere-around-30 items of clothing that can all be worn with each other so you don't buy anything that's doomed to be worn once and so you can spend less time deciding what to wear. I can't say the latter goal is actually what I'm after, as someone in this for the art of it, but I also agree with all of the sustainability first principles, so I've read a lot of capsule wardrobe blogs and watched a lot of how-to videos.
Though I've now seen a few extremely recent counter-examples, for most of the time between the 70s and now, "capsule wardrobe" guides were full of prescriptive lists of extremely boring solid-color garments. I want to stress that at one point this was really all you could find about capsule wardrobes. Why do "timeless", "practical", and "everyday" have to mean boring and beige?
This can still be seen on the current top google result for capsule wardrobe, even though the lists of black tees and jeans have been reframed as "suggestions" to "consider". And it still says that you should have 3-7 dresses.
#MeMade
This (mostly instagram) hashtag is the intersection of the hand-knitting/hand-sewing (plus, sometimes, machine knitting) and slow fashion communities. It's full of people who are making stuff at least partly so that they know where their clothes come from and they can make stuff that fits their bodies, suits their tastes, and will last. It's a response to all sorts of criticisms with the fashion movement.
This is also my philosophy, when it comes to making clothes for myself! But, again, it's dominated by the beige minimalists and the vintage dress girlies.
I have found some people whose style I really love through this hashtag (including Montoya Mayo and I believe MimiG, not that I dress remotely like either of them), but again, modern Instagram is inimicable to human life.
Vintage & Historical Dress
Like everyone else on the internet, I love Bernadette Banner, who singlehandedly refined my vague interest in fiber arts history to a working knowledge of historical dress. Before her, I was watching Jessica Kellgren-Folzgard's videos about 50's fashion, which she wears daily.
All that said, I do not now and never really have done any historical cosuming, historybounding, or vintage styling. I have some vintage pieces because my mom passed them down to me or I happened to thrift them, but if I haven't made it clear yet, I do not wear dresses and I do not do well with rules, so the idea of trying to recreate bygone eras of fashion outside of limited event contexts has basically no appeal to me. I'm much more interested in stealing historical techniques to make longer-lasting ostentatious garments in no particular era's style at all. Something like what Angela Clayton is usually doing, except she's a femme and I'm a fiber snob that overheats too easily.
Shout out to these pants, Dandy Wellington's whole wardrobe, Bernadette and Nicole Rudolph's menswear, and the makes of the one specifically transmasc sewist I know of on youtube, Be Queer Make Stuff, all of which I would totally wear (if in different colors). But while I'm not afraid of looking "weird" for dressing out-of-time, I don't actually want to wear a suit every day, and sometimes I need summer clothes[2].
#SewQueer
Again, this Instagram hashtag is similar to #MeMade, but for queer people, and thus with about 2% of the posts. A lot of complicated relationships with gender, a lot of boxy sillhouettes and linen pants and button-ups and coveralls in bright colors. These would be my people, if I was a sewist in more than theory. Where! Are! The Queer! Masc! Knitters![3]
Still, some impeccable styling and not bad inspiration for what to look out for at thrift stores.
Trans Fashion "Advice"
Mostly, my problem is that trans fashion forums are small, and that in non-gender-segregated trans spaces, it's a lot of beautiful transfems wearing dresses I have no interest in donning myself. The transmasc-only menswear spaces are full of truscum and weird passing advice. The fixation on passing at all costs is so loud that the only alternative you hear is basically just "if you are a man, any clothes you wear are men's clothes", which is true but does not actually help me get dressed in the Summer.
Menswear
Menswear blogs and videos and magazines and stores have also been very important to my style, and I've learned a lot, and they are boring and prescriptive and useless when it gets hot.
I love a suit, but the preppy[4] summer casual look is not my vibe: I associate polos and boat shoes and bermuda shorts and any color that Vineyard Vines has ever made a shirt in with my middle school bullies. And the remaining summery menswear is all very restrained, very samey, very comprised of three possible sillhouettes, and often kinda shlubby.
I guess, if I'm looking at what less-golfy cis men are wearing, the answer to how I can stop my summer wardrobe from feeling like it's totally disconnected from the rest of my clothes is to buy basically the same stuff just in linen, or to cut the sleeves off of some cotton jackets & hoodies. But it would be nice to have shorts I actually liked on me. The shorts situation in the men's section is dire.
Anyways, signing up for the GQ newsletter will not fix me. I'm open to hearing about experimental menswear communities online.
Dark Mori & Strega
This is a bit of an oddball in this list, because I've never been in any JFashion communities and I totally missed the boat on Dark Mori/Strega. However, the pictures of it, and in particular of this outfit which I know was originally a last-minute closet cosplay of a Star Wars OC have permanently changed my brain chemistry. The androgyny of swaddling yourself in a dozen differently-textured black fabrics, the peeks of leather, the asymmetry, the combo of sheer & opaque wraps, the tuck of the loose pant into the tall boots, the scrunched-up tight-fitting sleeves with the boxy fit over the torso. The TWO BELTS.
Being as the aforementioned photoset is from a deactivated tumblr account, the only record of it these days is in reblogs and on pinterest. Pinterest recommends pretty much exclusively dark mori/strega fashion coordinates as being related, with the occasional cyberpunk fit. It's a little boho, it's a little postapocalyptic, it's a little bit of a sleeker, gothier take on the ultra-layered, bottom-heavy mixture of textures in most Mori Kei looks.
The original records of pretty much all of these subcultures have been obliterated from the internet, so this seems to be the best record I can still find of the fashion subcultures from the time that's still standing.
With a lot of Japanese fashion trends that make their way over to the English-speaking internet, the fixation in the English-speaking community tends to be on upholding rules so as to not appropriate or show disrespect, so while I love seeing the craft that goes into Lolita styling, I've never really been interested in participating. Dark Mori seems more inspired by than a substyle of the Japanese Mori Kei, though, and Strega even moreso (Strega being defined as the witchy spin-off of Dark Mori without rules). The stuff that's stuck around really appeals to me, and I still mourn the fact that I never got to participate fully in this little niche.
Speaking of missing boats, I've only ever been a temporary visitor to reddit, having made maybe 100 comments ever using my 12-year-old account, but apparently r/malefashionadvice has a lot of really good resources and community while r/malefashion is a(n at least nominally) trans-inclusive place for men to post fit pics that are a little out there[5].
Shame about the Reddit of it all right now. r/malefashionadvice is currently only allowing pictures of 1700s fashion in protest (amazing). I'll probably still go through some of the style inspiration links on their wiki, and I'll keep an eye on it to see whether these communities migrate anywhere in particular.
Oh, Instagram. The most notorious of all algorithmic, data-hungry, trend-churning social media until TikTok came along to be the new joke and cultural behemoth. The nexus of the worst internet culture you can find among my generation. The Facebook-owned copycat site with no identity of its own.
Even in the TikTok era, it still has a stranglehold on professionals in just about every art or craft that isn't seen as very serious. It's where the fashion happens. While I was putting this together and seeing how many of my favorite style icons were still posting #ootd photos pretty often on Instagram, I briefly convinced myself that maybe I should just start poking my head back in whenever I want style inspiration, but I only had to scroll my actual feed for about 10 minutes to be reminded of the death sentence that is pausing for half a second too long on even one video, at which point all of the lovely outfit photos and knitting progress shots from tiny accounts vanished in favor of over-produced attention-grabbing bullshit.
Every time I log onto Instagram, I can feel myself bodily wrestling with the algorithm in real time, trying to shape it into submission. Trying to exert any amount of control over the content being served to me by speaking the feed's native language of attention, which only allows me to respond to things it has already capriciously decided to show me. It does not love me and I have no fondness for it. It's exhausting. I just want a way to go to Instagram and make it show me the most recent style photos from people I follow. I just want the fashion girlies to come back to tumblr.
In a wild twist that I really wasn't expecting to have at the end of this ramble, it turns out that Instagram re-implemented a hidden chronological feed last year. Which I guess is a working solution for now! But goddamn. I still really don't want Facebook to have my soul.
Owlroost and Mike Grindle very kindly recommended pixelfed to me, the federated version of Instagram, but it turns out that there are like 100 posts total on the #ootd tag. I think I could be convinced to host another server instance focused on fashion & diy if I thought there would be sufficient interest (so more than like 10 people?).
Perhaps, though, what I really need to do is change the way that I'm engaging with fashion content to be a little more active so that I get more out of what is there and do more of my own filtering. I started compiling a list of individual creators whose style has inspired me over the years to finish this post off with, and I realized that even just with the ones I can remember by name, it's a pretty hefty list! They're just scattered far and wide across the interwebs and I only borrow small elements from most of them. So I think I'm going to take a leaf out of uuupah's book and have a new page on this website for listing my style inspirations.
And then, if I number it, I can use a random number generator to choose random pairs of people to use for a "draw something you would wear with inspiration from both of these two styles" exercise. Maybe I'll even format the whole thing in a javascript array like the recipes section so I can have a button to randomly serve me up combinations without leaving my own cozy little internet corner.
Point is, I want to get back into doing fashion drawings.
I mean fashion in the sense of using clothing as an expressive art form, acquiring garments and assembling them into outfits that are intentionally-styled and personal, rather than the idea of fashion-as-trend. I'm not specifically vintage, but I'm also just not interested in running on the trend treadmill continually buying new clothes. ↩︎
Fashion history of the most-colonizing countries in Europe has been the most studied and documented, and has the most preserved patterns and reference materials from the time, so even aside from people's individual interests being drawn towards familiar British, German, Dutch, and Italian fashions, the actual making of the garments tends to have a lower barrier to entry than other, hotter climates. If anyone knows what Da Vinci wore in the Italian Summers, please let me know. ↩︎
Some of them seem to be on the yet-again-smaller and less-catchy but still lovely #QueerKnitting, but see again my issues with Instagram. ↩︎
Shout-out to season three of fashion design/history podcast Articles of Interest, which was all about the origins and prevalence and social implications of "preppy" fashion, and has not managed to stop a large part of me from still hissing internally at the idea of The Preps whenever I see a polo shirt. It's super worth a listen. ↩︎
Please don't take this as any particular endorsement of either of these subreddits, since there are some people making pretty mean replies in r/malefashion that have a vague air of transphobia even though I've only seen them under the photos of people who at least pass as cis men and not the people who are more visibly gender non-conforming. And the banner photo of r/malefashionadvice, which has 20 loosely-abstracted drawings of people and has been designed to show off a variety of different styles, skin undertones, & haircuts, notably doesn't include a single plus-sized body, any textured hair, or anybody with a skin tone darker than an early 2000s concealer line. As an outsider, I reserve my judgment on the overall vibes. ↩︎