Not modernity’s callowness but a question of proper identity.

‘What clothes would you wear, if you wore the clothes most completely suited to you?’

This thought exercise does not require an answer, except the time spent in considering it. If you were to dress in the clothing which most completely declared your nature, what would you be wearing? Cast aside all thought of silliness, in answering this, all worry about men seeing the truth of you or of being strange amidst the world. The point of the exercise is to see yourself truly, and so if ‘silliness’ is a concern, it must be a concern because that priority is a part of your proper nature.

Do not take this question as referring to ‘expressing you’ in modernity’s cant. ‘Your truth’ and ‘express yourself’ and all such callow thought, the idolization of what is and its narcissism, they are a method for ugliness, stagnation, and self-destruction. The self and the nature which I ask after, they are the person whom you ought to be, whom I ought to be- and the answer is different for each of us. I ask you to consider how you would dress, if how you dress were a revelation of what you ought to be, your sanctified self, the man utterly perfected in God.

The essence of this idea is that glory of clothing perceived by Chesterton and Lewis both, in their ways: that clothing can be a revelation of nature, an expression of reality. They need not be merely cultural signifiers or nudity-prevention-measures or mechanically useful equipment, though they are all those three. At its height, clothing is the panoply of a man or a woman, their proper form bursting into a new medium- the pomp of the king, the harness of the knight, the gown of the bride.

I don’t have an answer for myself; I don’t know what I would wear. I can describe a little of it, perhaps, a few affective words without any true picture attached to them, without concreteness. Someday, perhaps, I’ll have a better answer; someday, when I die, I can get started on answering it for real. But the question is worth your time, a way of explaining the need to yourself: what clothing expresses the right and righteous definition of you, exhibiting in garment what God made your essence?

God bless.