My Fashion Asperger's

That photo is of me at seventeen dressed like a goth gypsy detective at a wedding rehearsal dinner for my boyfriend's brother. See how everyone else is dressed. Then see how I'm dressed.

I've suffered from Fashion Asperger's for as long as I can remember.

I wore the same two pair of pants all through first grade. My talented (and very stylish) mother sewed me lovely things with lace and Holly Hobbie on them. I loved my Holly Hobbie doll but I refused to wear her or her clothes. I would only wear pants boys would wear.

In junior high, I moved on to clothes that girls would wear if they were wearing boys’ clothes. In sixth grade, I begged my mother to buy me a pair of tan Dickies trousers so I could look like the gorgeous tough girls at my school. She wouldn’t take me to the men’s workwear section to buy my clothes but she compromised on a pair of baggy tan pants. They weren’t the same but I loved them. In my mind when I wore those pants I was an arched eyebrow, black-haired, big-hooped earring girl who could fight you. In the mirror, I was the same Irish white, baby-faced, flat-haired girl as always. I wasn’t fighting anybody. At least not on purpose.

In high school I loved the Mod girls and boys who had short spiked hair and drew crosses with black eyeliner outside of their eyes. They went to clubs in Berkeley and danced like David Gahan of Depeche Mode. They brooded around and looked foxy and were having all the fun with their clove cigarettes and black boots. So I cut my hair short and wore mismatched cross earrings I made myself out of super glue and the tabs from soda cans. The problem there was that my dad wouldn’t let me wear black because he thought it would mean I was depressed. So there are lots of photos of me in the eighties wearing asymmetrical hair and bad jewelry looking incongruent and frustrated in various pink dresses.

By the time I actually got to a Depeche Mode concert in Berkeley, I was dressed as if for a prayer meeting in a pink flowing skirt and a white eyelet blouse. At least I wasn’t depressed.

My fashion icon in college was Ione Skye. Not Ione Skye as Diane Court in Say Anything who wore feminine pink skirts and white blouses and an orchid behind her ear. No, I loved Ione Skye as the gnarly angry girl she played in The River’s Edge. I loved her red buffalo plaid shirts, long messy hair and jeans that were made for a boy.

Therein lies the disconnect that is my Fashion Asperger’s. I say Asperger’s instead of Autism because I’m not entirely out of step with my surroundings. I’ve never had to be pulled aside at work, for example, and told to dress more appropriately for the job. Yet throughout my entire life I have often failed to comprehend the finer fashion cues and have ended up looking. . . . silly.

I have extremely stylish friends. They tolerate my missed connections, but just barely. When going out to dinner with my friend Laura who is so stylish she has her own fashion blog, I pulled on the man’s blue flannel shirt that I had bought from the thrift store just for that occasion.

“No,” she said. “Not another flannel shirt.”

So I changed into something marginally better from my bag. My Army-like tote bag. She eyed it sadly.

My friend Vanessa is an author who last year appeared in the pages of Glamour magazine. She tools around the globe on book tours and speaking engagements in feminine shift dresses and outstanding high heeled shoes. In an unguarded moment she once confessed to me, “I don’t know why you dress that way.”

I don’t know why I dress this way either. Maybe it’s because of my sensitive skin. That could be why I prefer clothes pre-worn for a few years by somebody else. Right now I’m wearing thrift store jeans four sizes too big, a t-shirt I got at a yard sale and a sweatshirt handed down from my teenage daughter. Everything is very soft and non-irritating.

I only like wearing dresses if I’m also wearing pants. It bugs me to wear something that would hinder me in the event of a catastrophe. Every time I’ve been in a catastrophe I’ve been wearing a skirt or dress and no pants and I was cold and my knees got skinned. So maybe I can blame it on post traumatic stress.

My favorite outfit right now is a mid-calf black dress and black pants with a long black scarf. All in one size too big. I feel flowy but also ready in case of emergency. I look like someone who has to dress this way for her religion.

It's in the gap between thought and reality that I get lost. I want to change my fashion ways but I fear I'm a hard case. I mistakenly wore all white to school a couple of weeks ago. That morning when getting dressed I thought I looked like a breezy lady on safari. Catching myself in a reflection later I realized I looked much more like fat Elvis attending a Nigerian funeral. One student remarked that even my feet were white. Everyone stood up to see and nodded. Yes. Through my sandals, even my feet were white.

"Don't clown Mrs. Wanket," one of my sophomores said. Defending me. So we forgot about my outfit and got down to the business of learning.

I would love to end it there with the realization that it's the business of life that matters, not how you dress while you're at it, but I don't believe that. I believe that fashion is art and self-expression and a source of joy. It is very important.

I subscribe to Vogue. I admire the beautiful clothes on those wispy people within the pages and feel grateful to them for being stylish so that I don’t have to be. They are filling the bill so beautifully.

There is a dress with pants combo on page 283 of the April Vogue that I love. The girl wearing it thinks she’s a bohemian faerie princess in a commune on the prairie.

That's exactly what she looks like too.