clothes i

this post would benefit from pictures but i don’t feel like adding them

expect part ii in like a year or however long it takes me to get better at thinking about clothes

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(prologue, april 2024)
Q: vincent you need to stop wearing free t-shirts and basketball shorts every day you look like garbage
V: oh
V: so how do i buy clothes i’ve never done it before
B: you go to. a clothes store.
L: all my clothes come from the uniqlo across the bridge lol
T: i asked my guy friend, here’s his advice - only buy in-person. only walk into a store with a decision tree of what you're going to get and under what conditions. make sure the shirt doesn't highlight belly bulge + that the shoulder seam is at the edge of the shoulder blade where the delts start. get slim pants and classic cut pants. must know his true waist measurement and leg length beforehand (easy to measure at home with a string+ruler or soft measuring tape). also go to a shoe store. each store trip should take about 30 minutes irl
V: ok sorry i’m going to ignore all of this and just walk around stores with no plan tomorrow

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(at a store)
V: ok i went to a clothes store for the first time in my life and then i walked in circles for an hour because there were too many options and i wasn’t sure what to do
V: why do stores sell so many ugly shirts? most of the patterns are cringe and the interesting art print shirts have giant captions which kind of ruins it for me. the only shirts i actually liked were the monochromatic ones, mostly pastel colors

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(at the office)
V: i will be trying out new clothes for at least the next week. please give me feedback however you see fit. you are welcome to insult my appearance as liberally as you wish (and you might not get this opportunity again so be sure to make use of it now 🙂)
F: you look worse than last week. these clothes make you seem even thinner than you already are

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(at W’s house)
W: i spent $2000 on a fashion consultant. he had me make a pinterest board of things that i thought looked good, and then he picked out a bunch of clothes and bought them for me
V: ok congrats
W: you could do this too. if you don’t want to spend $2000 i heard some guy on twitter is offering to find people clothes for free

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(at a store)
V: i’ve decided i like patterns. except they have to be aperiodic (ie. not stripes) and nonrepresentational (ie. not flowers). with colors i like obviously. and i think the feature size has to be somewhat narrow because large patterns don’t look good with my other clothes
V: maybe i should try leopard prints

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(at the office)
V: so what are some things i should think about re patterns
F: oh i usually stay away from patterns. they’re really hard to reason about especially if you’re new to clothes
V: aw why
F: well it’s like, you already have colors and texture and fit and other things to think about and patterns just make all of these things more complicated by introducing multiple colors and new textures and shapes
V: hm i see. so what do you do instead
F: this is an oversimplification of course, but i roughly map out men’s fashion in stem/tech circles as a spectrum with straight white male and kpop star as the two extremes
V: yeah well unfortunately i hate both of these
F: what do you have against kpop?
V: well i don’t hate it but i definitely don’t identify with it. there was this conversation i had with a friend a long time ago — 

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(at W’s house)
V: yeah i saw that tweet too but i am not interested lol
W: why not
V: i mean, i have friends who think a lot about clothes and i could just ask them if i really wanted to
W: but you haven’t, right?
V: yeah well for one i think they would want me to figure it out on my own

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(at a store)
V: i regret leopard prints
V: this is so hard i keep finding clothes and then learning/discovering new things that make me not like the clothes a few weeks later
V: maybe this means i should take a break from thinking about clothes and wait for my preferences to stabilize?

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(january 2022)
U: you ever think about how so many asian men follow kpop fashion aesthetics?
V: uh not really, i don’t pay much attention to these things
U: well let me try explaining it. you know how most asian males are bad at satisfying traditional american standards for male attractiveness?
V: yeah sure
U: the kpop aesthetic is part of an attempt to subvert mainstream conventions for male attractiveness. some people actually like it but i’m pretty sure most guys who follow it don’t find it appealing, they’re just trying to run away from this other thing that they’re intimidated by
V: ok, why are you saying this like it’s a problem though
U: a lot of asian guys are hyperaware of being asian and unattractive and unsuccessful at dating. this is part of why they’re disproportionately likely to become incels. these trends are self-reinforcing and i don’t think escaping to a new fashion paradigm which you don’t truly believe in actually helps in the long run
V: oh i see, that makes sense

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(at W’s house)
V: but the main reason i haven’t asked my friends for help is that i realized i don’t actually care much about looking better right now?
W: wasn’t that the whole point of getting new clothes
V: it was originally but i changed my mind
V: did you see that socratica tweet about why you should make things? hold on let me find it - “one of the reasons to make things is to experience the world in more detail. paint once, and you pick up on how shadows lay. CAD something, you'll notice the filleting on your devices. life gets richer, and even more so if you get to share it with friends.”
W: yeah the socratica people are good at twitter
V: that’s sort of how i feel about clothes right now. i want to experience the world in more detail by developing a better sense of visual aesthetics. i already think about colors and sunlight a lot but still have a long way to go
V: eg. one thing i noticed when i was in lsc was that other people in the club had a much better understanding of shot composition than me
W: like how all the shots and outfits in dune part two are very deliberately designed and 90% of moviegoers didn’t notice at all
V: anyway i think reasoning about clothes on my own is probably going to help a lot more than wearing clothes that other people think look good, even though it means i will take longer to get new clothes

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(at a store)
V: i did not realize how oblivious i am to gender until today
V: i keep wandering into womens’ clothing sections without noticing and several times the staff got confused and asked if i needed help or directions
V: which idk is kind of rude of them but oh well
V: i am getting a bit bored at mens’ sections though
V: i’ve also realized something important
V: there are way too many clothes in the world
V: and as a consequence you should never buy anything that doesn’t actively speak out to you. you should (almost) never buy something just because you need a new shirt or because it’s discounted. this is wasteful and you have extremely limited wardrobe size and will almost surely find something else that you like more

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(at the office)
F: i think it’s cool that you invited all your coworkers to give you feedback on clothes. i would be too scared to do that
V: other team members keep telling me this but i really don’t agree?
V: people judging me and not telling me is a lot scarier than people judging me and telling me exactly what they think
V: and also, explicitly acknowledging that i am trying out new clothes gives me space to fail
V: i feel like i sent that slack message because i was a coward, not because i was particularly bold? but maybe in some scenarios cowardice and boldness actually end up looking the same from the outside
V: all this is just another form of subversion
V: (though of course the feedback was helpful too)

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(at W’s house)
V: admittedly i am confused about how taste develops, in the sense that it feels very opaque and emergent
V: right now i only have a strong sense of what i dislike. i can and will keep refining that sense, but i think that is insufficient for taste
W: this is where it’s actually very helpful to emulate someone
V: yeah, i had a similar experience with writing - it was easy to learn how a bad sentence sounds and what a bad essay looks like, and once you develop that sense you can craft sentences that read more naturally and essays that are more structurally balanced, and you can continue noticing and developing more and more rules for things to avoid and how to fix them, but i don’t think that actually gets you to good writing? which is very much a thing i still struggle with. skill helps you avoid mistakes but doesn’t actually tell you what to do
W: you can’t just train a bunch of discriminatory classifiers and rejection-sample your way into good outputs. this is why we need reward models and reinforcement learning - to bias models towards better generations and overcome the inefficiencies of rejection sampling
V: what