Mother and I were having a conversation about my seventeen-year-old sister and her taste for good clothes. Mother mentioned how different Jessie and I are in that respect, and said, “You never gave a shit about what you wore! Well, until Chucks came along…”

This is an almost entirely true sentiment. Almost. The problem is, a lot of people who appear as if they don’t care how they dress might actually care how they dress, but have absolutely no idea how to match desire to execution. I am good at a great many things. I can hard boil eggs with almost surgical perfection. I can type an average of 130 WPM, 150 if I’m feeling particularly nimble. I can say the alphabet backwards as quickly as I can say it forward.[1] But when it comes to putting together clothing and accessory items, I am hopelessly lost.

We hard-headed ladies tend to mask this shortcoming by proudly proclaiming that we like wearing blue jeans and Converses every day, thankyouverymuch. This is my style! My thing! I introduce variety into my wardrobe by purchasing a collection of unique and borderline tasteless t-shirts! This was only true when I was in high school and early college. As I grow older I want to look older, albeit with some youthful flair. But the process by which I typically dress myself usually involves throwing myself into my closet, flailing my arms erratically and grabbing the first two items my hands clamp onto, and then sobbing quietly into the mirror while I slowly put on some variety of jeans/button-up/t-shirt/tie-able shoes. So, you know. I could use some help.

Even though I am generally horrendous at dressing myself, there is a hierarchy of fashion-related ideas that scare me more than others. Presented to you in list form:

1. Shopping. I could (and am actually sort of surprised I haven’t) write an entire post on my fear of shopping for clothes. Successful shopping requires a level of confidence and knowledge that I lack, because I have siphoned all of my confidence reserves into cursing unashamedly in front of my students, and my knowledge into the 1066 Battle of Hastings, in the event that I’m ever asked to film my own Drunk Histories and I have to down a bottle of Jameson and tell the story. Store employees often look at me with a mix of confusion, fear, and pity when I inform them that I am looking for a “sort of like skirty-type thing, but not like a skirt skirt, you know? Just like at my waist, but not like woah hey I’m wearing a neck skirt! And not like super short or anything…I just want a skirt that’s not a skirt. Can you just find me pants? I want some pants. I’m just going to go home.”

2. Matching. Seems simple enough, right? If item A looks like it would go well with item B, put them on. If it in fact does, congrats! You’ve just matched shit up, yo! Well I also think that grammar should come super easily to people, but  I still spend a good chunk of my job explaining to freshmen that adding an apostrophe to a plural word doesn’t make it super plural. Some things just make sense to people, and some things don’t. At least once a week I’m texting a photo of myself in an outfit to my little sister, begging her approval. If the apocalypse was upon us and somehow it was revealed that a fashion instinct would prove more useful to survival than, say, directional instinct or hunting instinct or cooking instinct, I’d be among the first humans culled for the good of the herd. In an ideal world I would hand a pile of money to someone more fashion forward and say “Go forth! Find me clothes!” Which brings me to my next fear…

3. Fashion is expensive. We all have our urges. I often find myself window shopping and drooling over a cute pair of boots, a coat, a purse, or a row of fine artisan cheeses.[2] But it is generally true that when it comes to clothes, you get what you pay for, and I no haz teh moneyz. And as a poor shopper, I adhere strictly to the Rule of Sisneros: The item of clothing you like the most on the rack will also be the most expensive one. For some reason this has manifested a psychological complex in which, upon being complimented on something I’m wearing, I instantly inform the person how cheap it was. “Hey, I like your shirt!” Unsuspecting stranger says to me. “THANKS! I yell awkwardly, I got it at The Goodwill! Four bucks! Found it in between a sweater with three kittens in top hats on it, and a ‘Tap the Rockies’ Coors Light t-shirt with the bottom cut off! But they put it in a Wal-Mart bag for me so, you know, upgrade! Would you like more details about my gross purchase?!”

4. Boyfriend is infinitely better dressed than me. BF is a J.Crew man. And by that I mean, if you walk into the male section of a J.Crew, you’ve walked into his closet, only bigger. He knows how to put a thing with a thing and produce a stylish something. He even buys nice socks. Who the fuck buys nice socks? It is a daily exercise in maintaining some self-esteem equilibrium knowing that he gets featured in magazines for his sense of style, and you get featured in an advertisement for a fake cheese spray product in which you actually spray cheese on your face. He recently told me that he wanted to buy a winter coat that is both “timeless” and “unique” and I almost had an aneurism. History has proven that I tend to be pretty competitive with my significant others (footraces, Jenga, 52 card pick-up[3], the usual), but I come in a pitiful second in this two-person Best Dressed contest, heightening my tendency toward self-deprecation that was already at a fever pitch.

5. Fashion actually requires talent. It’s easy for people to dismiss fashion as a relatively useless endeavor, in the scheme of things. But in the scheme of things, what isn’t? I’m getting a PhD in English for fuckssake, along with which comes a dual Masters degree in Serious Waste of Time and Oh My God You Have No Idea How to Build Anything, Do You. An important marker of an advanced civilization is whether or not its people have the time, means, and capacity to put their minds to “frivolous” things like art, leisure, literature, and yes, fashion. It is an art, like anything you can create with a canvas and paintbrush, in as much as there can be shitty fashion just like there can be a shitty painting. I could attempt to dismiss it all I want, and would probably have a good chunk of the population backing me, but there’s a reason I can’t “do” fashion. I don’t have the talent. There’s an art, or rather a knack to fashion. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at a very ugly world and miss.

–Katie Sisneros