As part of cleaning up my “hot mess”, I have followed through and just completed 3 out of my five overdue doctors appointments. I have been very lucky with finding some wonderful women primary care docs but they always seem to move up to the suburbs to be closer to their homes and children’s schools once their career is established in the city. During my last yearly exam my doctor was expecting her second child and so I predicted the “moving on” letter would soon be forthcoming. I was right and so this week I got to meet my new doctor and am happy to report my good luck continues.
So what does this have to do with fashion? Well after the warming up period, hearing about my DNA (family history), that I am a professor, my assessment she stays current and reads her literature, my new doctor tells me that she likes to challenge herself by guessing what her patients do for a living. I asked her what she thought I did. She said by the way I was dressed (and I was wearing what I am wearing in the above photo) she thought I was either an architect or someone in fashion. In situations like these when someone asks my employment I generally say professor so when she said that, I told her, I guess, yeah, I am someone in fashion.
I have been struggling to identify what I do in the world of Accidental Icon or to answer the question, “what do I do” in fashion. Most of the world (except my most engaged followers) sees me as an “influencer”. For me that does not quite describe what I do though I know I have been able to inspire and influence others about a number of topics, like inclusion, which are important in that it will hopefully change culture. I also know that there have been creative ways I work with brands, am paid for it, and I have also been able to raise money for non-profits through that kind of work at the same time. However when my doctor told me she thought I was an architect it gave me an absolute thrill.
Now for the DNA part. I am probably more like my maternal grandparents than any other blood relatives I have. My grandfather was an architect and my grandmother was a cellist, a performing artist and as you already know, quite a fashionable and stylish woman. Credit where credit is due my rebellious nature probably comes from my Irish paternal grandparents. So I think that in the doing of this I am being influenced by my DNA just as everyday I take a low dose aspirin to reduce my genetic risk of stroke.
In some ways because of my notoriously performative relationship to my clothes I am like my grandmother, a sort of performance artist. When I think of the website I have built as my “virtual home” I am being an architect like my grandfather. In disrupting the notion of social categories I am like my Irish rebel relatives. Somehow these descriptors feel more real to me than “influencer”.
As my DNA interacts with new experiences, I perform my identity. It elaborates. It builds more rooms in my house. When my grandmother came to visit me she always brought me a book, a garment, a cultural object from her travels and a wonderful story. I will try to fill the rooms of this “house” with more of those things as I discover them and invite you to share your discoveries too. And of course it goes without saying I will always be rebellious in the doing of it.
What’s your DNA and fashion story?
Scroll down the “home” page of my blog to LUXURE to see what I brought to the “House” this week.
I have my grandmither’s live if red lipstick and beautiful clothes. She would send me money for my birthday and say spend it on something frivolous and fun……I miss her but she lives in my choices every day!
What a lovely way to express it! I have actually felt my grandmother quite close to me these days.
Thank you for a lovely read! I am Swedish and an aspiring accessory designer myself. The wonderful thing about your question about DNA and fashion stories is that each of my designs is accompanied by a written story based on the stories of my ancestors, the Norse legends. I take particular pride in reviving the forgotten heroines – these women were too strong, too independent and too brave to be forgotten. History belongs to all of us and the stories told by my foremothers, over one thousand years ago, were much more inclusive than many modern day stories.
Please share a link to your accessories and the stories when you are able. I for one would want to read about those woman and see the link you make to your design.
Amo esta ropa, impresionante
❤️
Maternal grandmother – check! She had a very good sense of style and brought carefully chosen, beautiful things into her life. Definitely an influence. I didn’t know the paternal side grandparents as well, but I believe a nerdy, scientific bent dwells there, and some of that was passed on too, making me an odd mix of the artist and the careful observer.
Love the way you frame the way you’ve cobbled together your DNA influences in the 5th & 6th paragraphs above. I’d have to give it more thought before I could do that. I tend to think of myself as outside of the DNA strands, having made a life so different from my parents and grandparents, but as you have shown, the influence continues in ways that are necessarily obvious.
I have been so busy getting my school year started that I am just catching up with blog posts from the past few weeks. I always love to read what you have to say–and that leads me to my first point: I have not thought of you as an "influencer" so much as I think of you as a scholar/philosopher of fashion, who has the amazing power to make us think about clothing and our own choices of what we wear and how we wear it, how and where it is made, etc.
My "fashion DNA": clothing is very much in my blood–specifically, the making of clothing. My Great Grandma Belle (the only great-grandparent who was alive long enough for me to remember) was known as someone who could walk into Saks 5th Avenue, see a garment she loved, try it on–then go home and recreate it beautifully for herself. She, like all of my grandparents or their parents, was an Eastern European Jew. My other maternal-line great-grandmother, Rebecca, came from a family of tailors. On my father’s side, my Grandma Anne always had knitting or crocheting in her hands–something that inspired me directly to take up those arts as a young person; and I have used them to not only make clothing, but to design original pieces of apparel and also accessories to suit myself. Anne’s mother, Minnie, was an embroiderer. . . and I am too. In the last year, I have gone back to my high school habit of embellishing denim with embroidery, and am having so much fun with that. I am currently doing local cactus blossoms on a pair of jeans. . .
My paternal grandparents raised me, so I’d always watch grandma as she “put on her face”. One day it be daring red lips, the next petal soft mauve, or glorious Godiva gold. As a woman I pull off all those shades, like her. Damn I miss her holiday & birthday cards filled with confetti. She would do the same w my daughter till her death…even tho we lived w her lol…miss u grandmama!