escort diary® of Jolie: On getting dressed
Fashion is art.
I don't mean this in the way that marketing departments mean it when they're trying to justify a four-thousand-dollar handbag, I mean it in the way that painting is art and architecture is art and poetry is art... it is a discipline in which human beings take raw materials and organise them into something that communicates meaning without words.
A dress is a sentence, a pair of shoes is a punctuation mark, an outfit is a paragraph, and like all good paragraphs, it either says something worth reading or it wastes your time, and most people are wasting your time because they have been taught to get dressed by an industry that has a financial interest in them never developing a point of view.
Not bad fashion, bad fashion is fine, bad fashion is honest, bad fashion is a person who doesn't care about clothes putting on whatever is clean and getting on with their life, and I respect this completely.
What kills me is mediocre fashion.
The careful, curated, trend-adjacent, algorithmically informed version of getting dressed that looks like a person has made choices but actually looks like a person has avoided making choices. The outfit that could belong to anyone. The shoe that was selected not because it was loved but because it was safe, because everyone is buying it, because it's the new thing that will end in the landfill in a week. The entire aesthetic of a human being who has outsourced their self-expression to whatever a fast fashion brand decided was this season's personality.
We are not a season.
We are people, people who should get to know themselves before being sold a personality from a cookie-cutter.
I was born and grew up in France, which means I grew up in a country that treats getting dressed as a daily act of philosophy, whether it admits this or not.
French women are famous for their style and the world has spent decades trying to decode it, and the answer is so simple that the fashion industry will never say it out loud because it would put them out of business: French women wear what they actually like, within the rules of looking elegant and put together. Not what is trending, not what the magazine said, not what the algorithm surfaced.
What they like, what they reached for because their hand knew before their brain did, what they put on and looked at in the mirror and thought yes, this is me today, not this is acceptable today.
The difference is everything.
It is the difference between a person who walks into a room wearing something and a person who walks into a room being something: the first one is dressed, the second one is expressed.
And you can feel the difference from across the room because clothes that were chosen with genuine desire have a different quality than clothes that were chosen with competence.
Competence is invisible.
Desire is magnetic.
Caring about how you present yourself to the world is not vanity: it is communication.
It is the most immediate, most visible, most democratic form of self-expression available to a human being. Before you speak, before you act, before anyone knows your name or your job or your opinions, they see what you're wearing, and what you're wearing has already said something.
The question is not whether you're communicating.
The question is whether you're communicating on purpose.
I dress on purpose, every time I can (don't judge me if you see me in baggy clothes. That's on purpose too, and the purpose is to be a little relaxed).
Not because I am vain, although I am not going to pretend I don't enjoy being put together, because I do, and the false modesty of women pretending they don't notice their own beauty is a performance I refuse to participate in. I dress on purpose because the act of choosing what to put on my body is the first creative decision of my day, and I take it as seriously as I take the first sentence of anything I write.
It sets the tone, it establishes the register, it tells me - before it tells anyone else - who I am planning to be today.
Some days I am sharp: structured, a shirt that means business, a heel that means I know exactly where I'm going.
Some days I am soft: a dress that moves and that allows for me to make less decisions about what I'm wearing, a flat shoe, the kind of outfit that says I'm either very relaxed or straight out of a pastoral dream.
Some days I am French in the most cliché and unapologetic sense: simple colours, the messy hair, the red lip, the energy of a woman who looks like she got dressed in four minutes and actually spent thirty because looking like you got dressed in four minutes is its own art form and the French have been perfecting it for generations.
Every version is me, that is the point.
Fashion is not a mask: good fashion, honest fashion, the fashion of someone who has spent years developing a relationship with their own taste is a translation, the first introduction of who you are to anyone in front of you. It takes the internal and makes it visible, it takes the private and makes it public, it takes who you are on a given morning and puts it on your body so the world can see it before you've said a word.
I have never treated it as lesser than my interest in philosophy or psychology or poetry. It is the same impulse expressed through a different medium: the impulse to make something beautiful, something intentional, something that communicates meaning to anyone paying enough attention to receive it.
And if you're not paying attention to what people are wearing, you're missing half the conversation.
Look down.
Start with the shoes.
The rest will follow.
(PS: if any of you wants to buy the Justine basket bag from Sézane for me, it is terrible missing from my outfit).
