Then came Paris Hilton, and everything changed. Seeing all the clichéd mantrap clothes on her suddenly slapped me back to reality. All those items that were dear and short in my wardrobe suddenly became the bane of my existence. I could hear Rod Stewart’s Do Ya Think I’m Sexy playing in the background, capturing my desperation to be noticed and hopefully desired. I thought of all the times during my devil-may-care whore phase wearing tube tops as skirts – I wasn’t kidding when I first said it, I thought I was being creative then – to proper dinner parties with polite society and meetings with advertisers that I was just being comfortable in my own skin. Die. It proved to be the contrary. I was like a junior plastic in Mean Girls. Now that I’m older than 18 (press age), I have defected to clear nail polish and knee-length dresses.
I know that being a lady takes more than a Marc Jacobs frock and flat Pucci shoes. However, looking it takes you halfway there. Say a green joke while wearing a Tocca dress, and you’ll come off as naughty and interesting, flirtatious even, given the right sly but shy delivery. Wear a junior plastic outfit and you might come off as scary.
Don’t get me wrong. There are certain gregarious chicks who can get away with it. Take Karla Alindahao, who is well loved in the fashion scene, and who is known well for her upwardly mobile skirts and shorts. Ironically, she works for the prim-and-proper publication Tatler. The girl wears a bib on her leg, a modern fig leaf if you will, and yet she comes off as sexy, confident, and even Lolita-esque. Then there are wannabe socialites, trophy wives and fashion It-girls ("It girl" being a passé term for, well, wannabe It-girls, if you dare catch my drift) that wear them for the stare factor. And between these two mini-skirted species, you can certainly see the difference. It’s the difference as distinct as that between low-fat cheesecake and New York cheesecake.
Desperation and the real thing are not that hard to sniff out. The exception would be perhaps designer impostor perfume. I can never really tell, try as I might, with those cunning knockoffs. They all stink to me. Good perfume is so obscure that it’s not deemed worthy of the mass production of aerosol knockoffs.
But back to the mini skirts.
We all know that women really dress up for women. The well- dressed ones, at least. When you start dressing for a man in the hopes of piquing his libido, well, you risk looking like a blowup sex doll. Men like that skin-and-heels combo, and we all know that more often than not straight men are not celebrated for their sense of style. Gay men, on the other hand, will think your Marni sweater is genius. The straight man in your life will see it as you letting go of yourself. A gay man will puke his lunch for the week if you were caught wearing a sundress bought from the softer side of Sears, while a straight man will immediately have fantasies about ’80s issues of Playboy where a bunny sunning in a meadow in a see-through sundress was a common theme.
Yes, it’s a sad truth. Real great dresses for women are not exactly what warms the loins of the common man. Those esoteric webs of fabric that we consider fabulous look like glorified sacks to many macho men.
They like low riders and halter knit tops, the Paracetamol of the fashionably complacent. They want adventure in movies, not in their fiancée’s wardrobe.
They like seeing flashes of lace peeking out of their jeans. I’m thinking of Cro-Magnon chauvinistic Pinoy men thinking of lust. For love, in their very warped definition of it, they want to see their beloved in super-corny clothes so as to squash any mojo left in their girlfriends.
So, being fight perhaps is a very female/gay thing. A woman is certainly not wearing her thousand-dollar Balenciaga hat for her husband. She’s wearing it either for her ultimate frenemy or her favorite fag.
The fashionable life, indeed, is gay.