MCAA

My parents were not comfortable with me going out and interviewing people, so I interviewed my mom. We talked about when she was in her 20s and she had four piercings on one ear.

I first asked her why she wanted to have that many piercings, and what about it appealed to her. She told me that she liked it for two reasons: first, because she thought that it was artistic and creative, and second because she thought it showed that she was different. Along that line, I asked her how she felt when she saw other people with the same style, and she said it made her want to get more piercings to show that she didn't belong to their group either. I asked her if that couldn't become a bit of a slippery slope, a self-destructive cycle. She said it probably would have been, but she had her family and her career to consider.

The one main thing that I do like that is wear clothes along the lines of Japanese fashion. It's definitely not to fit in and probably not to please people, seeing as the type of people who I would be fitting in with or pleasing are on the other side of the world if not entirely fictional. Japanese fashion in general tends not to just be about the clothes or the company, it usually has to do with identifying with a certain type of character (see lolita fashion-- fans of the style do indeed like frills, but are mostly interested in capturing a sense of leisure and whimsy often identified with Rococo era nobles), and this is something that I definitely partake in.

I (sometimes) base my outfits on what I see in anime and manga, but I don't want to please the characters, I want to be them. After at least 10 years of buying bellbottoms I now wear skinny jeans, not because they're 'in' but because they have a similar fit to the pants from a Japanese schoolboy uniform. It's not because I want to look like my favorite characters, it's because I want to feel like them-- my friends may notice I've got much more of a "go get 'em" attitude in skinnies (not a word) than bellbottoms, because the one in bellbottoms is always the gentlest character. I adopt the manerisms of anyone I like, and if I see myself as that person it helps even more.