Getting dressed is more than just putting on clothes—it’s an act of self-expression, a form of storytelling, and sometimes, a quiet rebellion. From childhood games of choosing outfits in magazines to decades of experimenting with different identities through fashion, this piece explores the deep connection between what we wear and who we are.
Every morning, when I wake up and take the short walk from my bed to the bathroom, I pass a mirror on my right. Sometimes, I stop and look at myself. Even when I don’t, I know it’s looking at me. And not a day goes by when my reflection doesn’t ask me—and I don’t ask myself: Who do you want to be today?
It’s probably a mental conditioning that everyone in my generation suffers from—innocent kids who, at some point, had to dress like Vermont lumberjacks, cowgirls in lace stockings, or preppy tennis players from a Hamptons club. If you grew up in the eighties, you know that getting dressed is always, in some way, dressing up as someone who isn’t exactly you.
Trying on personalities
When I was little, I had a game I played with my mother: sitting beside her, I would flip through one of her magazines, point to the outfits in the photos, and ask, Do you prefer this or that? I would imagine the life of each woman in the picture, starting with the dress she wore. And even before my mother answered, I had already made my own choice. That was my early education in taste—but also in that lifelong question: Who do you want to be today?
I understood early on that getting dressed is like reading a book or watching a movie—an escape to somewhere else, except in this case, you are the protagonist of that somewhere else.
Once, in a shop in Catania, where I had wandered in to kill time before my flight home, I overheard perhaps the best piece of fashion advice ever. A sales assistant, speaking to a young woman surrounded by a pile of discarded clothes, said: “You have to dress with intention.”
Dressing with intention is beautiful because it speaks of choice, of exploration, of courage.
Like everyone, I have bought clothes that I wore only once and never again. Clothes I later looked at, wondering what I was thinking when I picked them out and paid for them. But I know exactly what I was thinking: I thought I wasn’t me, that I could try on a new disguise. It doesn’t always work.
Throughout my life, I have dressed up and disguised myself as many things: a paninara, an existentialist in a black turtleneck, a minimalist ’90s wannabe Kate Moss, an angsty traveler in an old Gabriele Salvatores film. Sometimes a chic traveler in Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky, a sailor, someone escaping to Stromboli, a journalist on assignment in a remote corner of the world, a pregnant woman in overalls, a mother, a mother—but also, damn it, a woman, so of course, with heels. Always heels. Ten-centimeter heels for 12, 14 hours a day, with zero sore feet—such was the intention, and perhaps, let’s be honest, also youth.
I wore high heels with jeans and dresses for twenty years of my life, and I think that was my most successful disguise of all, so successful that if you asked me what I was disguised as, I wouldn’t have any answer other than: myself.
There were also days when I didn’t want to dress up as anything. Literally nothing—invisible, transparent. Days of exhaustion, sadness, and fear. Who do you want to be today? Just someone who makes it to tomorrow.
And I did make it to tomorrow. And I realized I was getting better because I could feel the intention stirring within me again.
Dressing up during lockdown
During the pandemic, every night in lockdown, I changed for dinner and put on heels. I even wrote an article about it on Medium—the only one I ever wrote—titled Heels and Thermometers, about that absurd act of resistance.
Spending my life chasing and interpreting different versions of myself, I believe, has been as effective as years of psychoanalysis. I had to question my desires, trust my body and my bank account, lose them both, and accept the changes.
We are used to thinking of disguise as deception, camouflage, pretense. But I prefer to think of it the way children do—who become ghosts simply by placing a sheet over their heads.
We contain multitudes, and I have only tried to find an outfit for every single one of them.
This article was originally published by Silvia Nucini on the Marie Claire Italy website
