say NO to buying more clothes 🚫🛍️🫡

On customizing clothing (and my tips for rejuvenating what you already own).

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Like any good gay child, I had one dream when I wanted to grow up: I wanted to be a fashion designer.

This dream shifted over time, as it does for all kids who become adults, reflecting the world and influences around them: I spent some time under the influence of Catholicism, entertaining becoming a priest; I spent years pursuing visual arts, even applying to art schools before a health problem required me to keep close to home; I was eventually captured by film, television, and theater, which ultimately landed me in writing. But for a few key years — at least from six through fourteen, simmering in the background through age seventeen — fashion design was all I had on my mind.

I was so invested in this idea that, one summer, visiting family in New York City between my father’s military assignment to a new city, I begged my parents and grandparents to take me to FIT, which was my dream school of all dream schools. I took home any brochure and literature they would give me, believing that I was going to go to this school and become the next Calvin Klein despite not knowing what that meant other than having a product people could see in stores and put in ads. In fact, this mid-nineties era had me obsessed with Calvin Klein for no reason, to the point that I once asked my parents for a purple velvet (?) CK suit (??) for Christmas in 1994 to saving all my money from acting in Korea to buy CK cargo pants and knock-off tees from the Itaewon and Dongdaemun markets. This all came to a head in high school where, via a traveling scam from a guy named “Dwight Agnor” who promised modeling stardom in a hotel ballroom on a Tuesday night, which I dragged my mother to in early high school to earn “called back” and prove the value of the trip — only for the journey to end when we didn’t have the money (Or stupidity.) to pay him and his team to construct a staircase to a runway. Instead, I joined my local mall's “fashion board” where we wore the season’s latest styles for passersby twice a year.

My bible at this time was the Usborne Guide To Fashion Design, a late 1980s production by the nineties iconic kid’s guides whose book covers influenced what would become the utopian scholastic aesthetic. I have no idea when I was given this book, but I have a feeling it was some time before my FIT obsession (and perhaps even bequeathed said obsession) but it became a little book that I took with me everywhere, using as inspiration for drawing outfit ideas and implanting the idea that I needed Fashion Plates, which we were able to get a partial used set from a friend of a friend, which I used to scribble and mix and match the four plates we had to create what I thought was the most fashionable clothing ever created.

What this era in my first era of life did was expand my worldview to see that something like fashion — like art, like entertainment — as an international language that I could become fluent in and use as an exit from my non-glamourous life. Fashion is a communication tool, a means to express who you are inside and what level of taste you have: I recognized that quite young and longed to carry such a passport. This was all encouraged by multiple aunts in my life — one who worked in Hollywood, one who was an aspiring (but failed) painter, one who was an aspiring (but failed) model — not to mention a very supportive, “Uh huh, sure.” mother, all of whom allowed such dreams to flourish with doses of realism. Did I ever use the sewing machine we had? No. But did I like to look at it longingly? Yes, I did.