Some of our daily activities require aesthetic attention, such as choosing which clothes to wear and putting them on in a certain way. An aesthetic identity does not include only the shape and the color of the cloth, but also its quality, the way it was produced and the way it affects the environment. Mendelson points out;
“cloth is an astonishingly fertile means of expression for our aspirations to beauty, sociability, and individuality in our lives.”
In order to have aesthetic identity, we must have a self to express. The process of identifying a self means finding our personal truth and includes both win and loss. As we lose our vagueness about our self, our values, our life, we lose illusion, as well and we become available to the moment. Aesthetics lies in the moment of encounter; we meet our truth and we meet ourselves; we meet ourselves and we meet our self-expression. So, we arrive at clarity, and clarity creates change; this leads to shifts in taste and perception.
One of the profound signals that something changes. Sometimes we open the closet and we cannot find anything to wear, so we feel detached by our own cloth selections. In fact, we don’t like anything at all.
This happens because we may have clothes that followed a certain fashion path that made us likable to others; we may have bought clothes because we couldn’t find something we really like. We may also have clothes that fit an old picture of ours.
“I don’t need this anymore” we say give our old self clothes to a Charity project. By giving the old and unsuitable, we make way for the new and suitable. A closet stuffed with unrecognizable old clothes does not invite new ones. Also a house overstuffed with old things has no space for the things that truly fit today.
So, we may first need to determine our aesthetic identity and then make clothing statements; this needs time but it sure worth it!