Cross Dressing Canvas - Part 2

Dear friends, I had no intention of writing a whole 2-part big deal here, but I seemed to have accidentally struck a bit of a thought gusher, and it seems to have splashed onto your monitor. Bear with me. I should be able to tidy things up today. Part 1 of this rambling epistle is nestled directly beneath this post. Scroll down and take a read if you like. Of course, the epically lazy amongst you may simply prefer to click here.

To net out the prior post, I will say that I have come to a grudging and late belief that the people who imagine, design, build and market the clothes that we wear are involved in an artistic, or at least creative endeavour. There. Everyone caught up? Good. Now, proceeding. What about all the rest of us who dress? And particularly those of us who cross dress.

This line of thinking started for me in earnest the other day when I received a nice couple of comments about my description of a recent dressing up experience. One of the notes came from a dedicated fashionista, a genetic female who said more or less “ …makes me wish I had an occasion to don my finery right now!...”

I pondered that a bit. All of us dress each day in something. There is a certain amount of routine about it, and routines lose their ability to capture your attention. Dressing becomes very functional, and not attached to any particular magic. But even at the most routine level, choices are being made that reflect something you want to show to the world. At some level, our ad hoc selections are acts of creative expression. We paint and present ourselves to the world each day, and some days with a little more consideration and pride than other days.

But for the periodic cross dresser, and for anyone, anywhere in between the opposite ends of the gender expression continuum, well, dressing is special. I believe, from my thinking and reading and corresponding with a handful of friends made here online that most M2F cross dressers are exploring that sense of gender. I sense as well that all of us to some degree are expressing a creative drive too. For me, I am beginning to see the creative side of this life as more central to my dressing than any sense of uncertainty or unresolved curiosity about my own gender identity. I enjoy being a guy. I do guy stuff pretty competently. Life is simple and I like simple.

O, but what a platform for creative expression cross dressing is. And what an array of media we get to work in.

Our bodies are clay. The under-layers that obscure some shapes, and build curves where there normally are none. The smoothing and cinching that happens here and there that molds the body into new shapes. This careful process, this first stage of my dressing ritual is surprising each time, and breathtaking too. From noticeably male to attractively female in shape, and there in the mirror. We are sculptors and models all at once.

Our clay is a form. And forms want adornment. The array of finishes from hosiery, to skirts, blouses, shoes, dresses, a much more endless array of drapery meant to display our form attractively, functionally, and perhaps even comfortably. The realms of choice multiply massively from the simple sets we work from in our more typical day-to-day lives. Some tragic choices are made, but as we get more skilled, and as our adornment better fits us and our images, the better the feelings. The clay beneath the drapery takes on a new life, our movement changes, postures smarten, and with each step, stretch and touch we are aware of our choices.

Our forms want finishing. The painting that changes and smoothes complexions, that adds definition to cheek lines, that amplifies the colors of our eyes, that makes our lips look and taste sweet and desirable. This transformation is perhaps the most heightened, and most demanding work of art we can labor at. Again, fraught with failure, but with practice or with help, done well, you become to yourself a familiar stranger, a newly possible self. Again, it can take a moment to get back to breathing again. But still, the next mirror will be sure to see you.

Our nearly finished selves are tapestries too. Final adornments, the hair, the belts, the bracelets, the nails, the scarves, the bags, these new things, taboo to guy-mode life, are a completely new and endlessly variable matrix of options that express us, and finally conceals the clay within. These elements compel new and changed ranges of motion, keeping your mouth clear of hair, handling keys and car doors, being sure to not derange everything that we have worked to create takes constant consideration.

Our finished, and feminized selves are now dancers, expressing with a new physicality. We must now perform, and to move like a man, to sit like one, to hold a glass as we normally do would spoil the illusion. So many of these reflexes require thought and response, and always moment to moment. Movement becomes with time more natural, but there is always a frontier of physical presence, for me at least, that requires attention, craft and consideration. These are complex and satisfying moments of learning and of performance.

And performance in public, is definitionally a creative art. I spent a good amount of my earlier years on stages. The nerves before the curtain went up never got slack. And the satisfaction, right in the moment, of realizing that the performance was being bought into, and perhaps appreciated was for me the primary reason to be there. The nerves and the curtain calls could not be separated. So it is when the door opens and we take on the world en femme. There are critics of course, and performances that fall flat, but the moments when our characters effectively occupy the space we are in, believably, plausibly, these moments are the curtain calls of this cross dressers life. We are sometimes extras lost on a huge set, and sometimes get speaking parts in smaller and more intimate theaters of sociability, but always performing. We are actors, and this too is an ancient and demanding art.

All of this together is a pretty deep immersion in a highly creative, expressive, artistic life. Few people get to be so deeply involved in such a life.

It surprises me to put all of these thoughts together and to realize that I am, and many of you are, unconsciously to some degree, really quite accomplished artists. You might see in your day to day life, like me, less of an outlet for these capabilities than cross dressing provides. I suppose that without really being aware of it myself, that much of the satisfaction, and elation I derive from being Petra comes from the truth that this taps into a pretty deep pool of creativity. Petra brings out a bit an artist. And that art satisfies a special part of my humanity, a humanity we all have at some level or other.

Regardless of what compels us to explore this part of ourselves, forces we cannot often fully understand, confronting those forces, exploring them, personalizing them, is a form of art. Each day is an opportunity for donning our finery after all. Lots of clay and canvas and performance spaces all around us.

Thanks for reading through this. I wish you artful lives. I hope you enjoy your art. Whatever medium you work in, for whatever audience you work and play for.

Cross Dressing Canvas - Part 1

Clothing is pretty central to cross dressing surely. It takes clothes to dress after all. Link # 1 established elegantly in a mere 15 words. Well done. Now for the bits thats are somewhat of a stretch, complete with a warning up front for you:

Much of what follows is about clothing in general, style to a degree, and at the outer edges, fashion. Not so much of it has to do with cross dressing per se. There you are, duly warned.

This essay is an attempt at better understanding the role that fashion plays in my life. It might be a bit of reach my dear friends, on a Monday morning with only a tiny flicker of light on this matter ‘tween my ears just now. But I am going to take a swing at it.

For the 95% of my time spent either buck naked for sleep, or drabbed up for the usual undertakings of my not secret life, I dress with a couple of thresholds in mind. Comfort yes, correct for the elements, warm, cold or wet. Of course some thought or reflex goes into not appearing oddly dressed, underdressed or overdressed for whatever business or social doings are being done, and for mere pride, cleanly. Absence of food stains, ink smudges and undue wrinkling subtly informs the near universe that you are not a total madman and perhaps deserving of a respectful hearing.

Every now and then, an occasion for a little more splendor, formality or effort will present. A wedding, a party, a funeral, or a bigger-than-normal business engagement that will require shinier shoes, a well considered shirt and tie match and, at the high end, the selection of a dapper pair of cuff links. On these increasingly rare occasions, functional dressing gets raised to a level of expression of pointedly, proud personal style.

We don’t dress up much these days, business-casual being the more or less global rule. Technology is so central to our work and lives, that it seems that the style ethos of the technology vendors sets the bar, and for us fellows at least, khakis and a smart shirt passes muster. Clothes do not make the man so much as they once did, and not so long ago either.

In my 20’s I was well creased, dark suited and smartly strangled at the neck 5 days a week. Clothing took a bigger bite of my wallet then, and of the wallets of workmates. In those times there was more room and a bigger demand for thought about personal style. I was proud and peacocky in my wardrobe and appearance in general. I aimed to be unique, unique enough to be noticed but not so much as to appear over-interested. I was suspicious about everything and everyone just over that fine line. Beyond style I felt was an odd world of fashion.

My social circle at that time were active in the arts, theater people, lots of TV types (television that is), PR and advertising folk, and most of them were style conscious, and au courant to a healthy degree. I periodically then rubbed elbows with people very much in the fashion business and very avante garde, and they struck me as having a screw or two slightly loose or mis-threaded. They took it all so seriously. They seemed to be possessed of an encyclopeadic knowing about what I thought to be a frothy merangue of not much. In conversation, they assumed that their passions were shared. I could nod and grin only as long as my glass was not emptied, which was never too long in hindsight.

I believed then that the fashion-obsessed had fallen into a trap and were being victimized by a malevolent industry optimized to prey on insecurities and machined to create demand for things with high prices and with low, and not long lived value.

One happy random night at a party somewhere in the 80’s, a woman tottered by me in a pair of what looked like bright red Converse hi-top laced-up basketball shoes glued somehow to a 4 or 5” stiletto heel. Caught my eye surely, and to a friend beside me, I opined:

“Fredericks of Hollywood has an athletic line now it seems”

Too loudly it seems. In this woman’s odd wake a male proto-fashionista glided by and, with a stereotypical hiss, bit back at me:

“ They’re Norma Kamali bitch*. Do you know anything?”

Truly a beautiful moment. I laughed aloud. I had been told clearly that I was not in the know, and not qualified to know either. This I took great comfort in. I really did not want to know. The ceaseless labor and worry I associated with being fashionable was just not in my suite of cares. I was alert to the traps and secure enough be free of them. Pity the fashionable I thought, for they have been bought.

The tide in my mind is turning now on the issue. I have started to find more and more merit in the world of fashion. The more seriously I investigate my cross dressing, the more I have come to understand how much my transformations into a different self is an inherently creative, even artistic undertaking.

Life is inherently artistic. Our bodies are the only canvas we have with us, always. Link # 2 in another 15 efficient words.

Our clothes are paints of a type. Some of us are driven to go beyond painting by the numbers, within the lines, and from a palette of primaries. Many of us who cross dress are surely driven to dress by some difference we have or feel with regard to gender and how we express it, but also I suspect that we are driven by some kernel of art within us that kindles our fires. Our acts of dressing are acts of creative expression, and moments spent nurturing, refining and satisfying an artistic muse within.

And as for the high priests and priestesses of the fashion worlds, perhaps they, at their very best, are not so different from painters, sculptors, poets and the like, posing to themselves a challenge against conventions and boundaries. Asking how to take what has influenced them in the past, make it new for the present, and perhaps leave something of interest to the future.

Perhaps, therefore, fashion is not all fluff, trick lighting and deception.

I will attempt in Part 2 to make more sense of this for me, and for the undoubtedly few of you who have made it this far, who perhaps share my muse on the matter.

Happy dressing - Petra

* this was the mid-late 80's. Norma was not on the shelves at Wal-Mart then.

photo credit - Jonathan Saunders Spring 2009 - Thanks Carrie!