“You really don’t remember the cow print pants?” My mother questioned me over the phone one night as I got ready for bed. I tugged at the sleeve of my lace-trimmed satin slip, and the cool blue of the fabric felt soft against my skin. Taking a quick glance in the mirror as I twisted my hair up into a bun and pressed the phone further into my shoulder I briefly wondered how on earth fashion had come to mean so much to me. It seemed that the more I embraced my personal style, the more I found myself gravitating towards the styles I always adored and yet feared wearing.

“No, I really don’t.”

“They were these cow print pajama pants you were obsessed with, always pairing them with sequin tops and demanding to wear them out. If anyone tried to reason with you, you’d start an argument.”

“Sounds about right.” I laughed, thankful that my younger self could have been so confident in her style; in herself.

So as I curled up into bed that night, my eye mask matching my slip, I continued to question fashion and its ongoing importance and relevance in my life. How and why was fashion so important to me?

Despite the fashion industry raking in billions each year, with thousands of workers and every minute detail needing to be perfectly in place, those that follow fashion are so easily dismissed as superficial, materialistic, and frivolous. While I’m sure those stereotypes might be apt labels for some, by and far that isn’t the case for the vast majority. Used as a tool for self-expression, fashion can be the perfect way to highlight who you are and who you want to be. We live in a world where- no matter how much we might detest it- books are judged by their covers. For this reason, using how we dress to express our own individuality, rather than simply taking the easy route and choosing to conform, gives freedom now and a legacy later.

Of course, fashion isn’t only about expression. It also highlights art and history. Think about the black dress of Madame X, painted and showcased on canvas by John Singer Sergent. That dress started off a scandal of such gigantic proportions both artist and subject were forced to leave Paris and black dresses became taboo in Parisian society. Art can also have its own impact on fashion as well, something that we’ve seen incredibly recently with creative directors at both Vivienne Westwood and Valentino turning towards old paintings for inspiration.

As a self-proclaimed nerd, my favorite thing about fashion is the role that it’s played in history. For example, the findings of purple textiles wrapped around the human remains at Nimrud allowed archaeologists to know who was part of the royal family before running DNA tests. Or in the portraiture of Anne Boleyn, we see her often choosing to wear a French hood rather than an English one - something that signifies to historians now just how crucial her time at the French court was in shaping her. Fashion is so often confused as something that’s frivolous and superficial, yet it’s been used for centuries to represent political and symbolic meanings.

I learned long ago that I can’t control the world around me, but I can control how I dress. And how you dress is how you present yourself to the world. At funerals growing up, I’d put an effort into choosing the black items in my closet that I could put together and the pearls I could wear for symbolic effect, but even more I’d worry about what my outfit said. When it felt as if my head would fall off from the spinning world, hair scarfs were tied tightly around my head to keep my mind secure. Fashion is important, crucial, and needed, and when we learn how we want the world to perceive us and how to control the narrative through fashion, then Edith Head was right when she stated, “you can have anything you want in life, if you dress for it.”

So if I was the strange preschooler who wandered around in cow print pajama pants and sequin shirts, I can’t say I’m surprised. Nor can I say I hold any shame when seeing pictures of myself in outfits that now make me cringe because at that time I was simply expressing myself and finding who I was.