The girl I was with in my late twenties, she used to joke that there were two aesthetics to me, rockabilly in the summer and hillbilly in the winter. As close to accurate as this was, there was a third aesthetic; work. Work consisted of a long sleeve shirt and slacks. Blue, dark blue, grey, and red trim. There was a simplicity in its cycles of repetition, year on year. But eventually it all passed away and I had to build something new.
In this new life, instead of the same customers day after day, it was a swirl of new and returning ones. Instead of representing a company far larger than myself, I was representing a very early iteration of what we now call an internet brand. I spent an inordinate amount of time wondering who I'd see and what they'd last seen me in. I still cared back then. I decided I wanted to stop caring, and I ran the idea of a life uniform by the man who sheltered me in his family's basement while I built this new life. With outside approval, it was time to design.
By city ordinance, I needed a collared shirt and closed toe shoes. I could wear shorts, but I don't wear shorts. Ordinance didn't matter too much though. I'm the grandson of an Annapolis graduate and was JROTC freshman year of high school. I know what a gig line is, and I know the importance of presenting oneself to the world with a certain standard. It needed to be versatile, allow me to blend or fit into a wide array of events and venues. It had to be adaptable to the seasons, be layerable. It needed as few labels as possible, my body isn't a billboard, and it had to express an honest aesthetic. One half hillbilly and one half punk, to quote The Cramps, but it also had to fit within an urban environment.
What started as pragmatic has matured into a practice. Layers of meaning have been added to it over the years. The largest part is how much less I consume because of it. The consumption reduction appears on all levels of homemaking. Reduction of consumption is a political act, one I firmly stand behind. It's a statement of irony, that someone as colorful as me would always be dressed so darkly. It lends itself nicely to developing habits of care, routines around maintenance. It's simple, and it provides the discipline of forced discomfort during the summer.
When she was about three, maybe four, my daughter began asking why I "look the same as every day." One afternoon after another, she'd be on my bed doing somersaults while I folded laundry, "Why do you look the same as every day?" I'd always answer, "Because it's easy." Eventually, she began to say that she too wanted to look the same as every day. She repeated this for a while, and when the time came for preschool we designed her wardrobe together. Her's is much more of a capsule to my uniform. We reassess twice a year, as she grows and the seasons change, but it retains all the efficiency and anti-consumerist properties. It's always been a source of joy for me to see three of us juxtaposed to each other. He and I in all black and white, her in all the colors of the rainbow.