Something’s happening in my head and I’m not entirely sure what it is. It has something to do with gender and privilege…and dresses. I’ll try to give this some structure:
Part I: Dresses
I’m a person who – since I started having influence over my clothing choice – almost never wears dresses. I have a couple of them because apparently I like the idea…but they usually just hang in my closet, unworn…for decades.
Why? I’ve just never felt comfortable in a dress. I was born and still have female reproductive organs; but to me, wearing a dress always feels awkward, like cross-dressing, like I’m putting on a costume and playing a role; not really being myself…or perhaps ignoring a part of myself.
Growing up in childhood #1, I think I learned from my father that to be feminine was to be weak, and powerless, and to not get to have an opinion, and to be dependent on someone else (a man) to take care of you. I also learned from my mother that no matter how hard I try – putting lipstick on a pig doesn’t change the fact that it’s (I’m) still a pig…which I’ve since realised was her own insecurity, and not mine. But at the same time, it was also desirable to be feminine, both for society and to be able to fit into the image of what my parents wanted as a daughter.
Because I could never do it “right”, I think I just gave up and went the other way. I went for practicality instead of beauty – pants with pockets that you could actually put things in, baggy clothing that would hide my imperfect figure and that I could actually move in, interests where I got my hands dirty – no point in having painted nails – and the strength that came with perceiving myself as tough, powerful, opinionated, and independent because I wasn’t being girly.
During All You Can Art last summer, I ended up making a wearable dress by following my intuition – I really did surprise myself with that one. and when AYCA was over, after running away from my ‘home’ of Childhood #4, I ended up making a miniature version of my papercut prom dress to remember the vibe from the summer (and convince myself that everything was going to be okay).
Fast forward to childhood #5, growing up (again) as an art kid in Curaçao…the fascination with dresses has returned, and it’s tied in with so much more than a rejection of my previous idea of femininity.
Part II: Gender (identity)
If I had to choose a label, I think it’d be “gay boy”. I’ve thought this for about a decade now…and somehow, me standing in our studio, gluing flower petals one by one onto this island kid prom dress let me play pretend for a second.
And I’m not saying that because only gay men are fashion designers, holed up in their rooms pretending to be into football while they’re learning to sew under the covers. And I’m not saying that women don’t design dresses – because they do. But in my head, while making the dress, I was a gay boy at art school with a the freedom away from the judgement of society, in a safe space, playing with my dress. And that version of “playing pretend’ felt so good.
But I also don’t feel enough gender dysphoria to pursue surgery…and I feel that the labels I use would only be for others’ comfort, so I let them use whatever pronouns they want for me (it’s interesting to see which pronouns people choose for me in any given situation) and go with “non-binary” if people ask how I identify to keep things simple. It is certainly a privilege that I can do this – on many levels – and that was just the start of my thinking about my privilege.
Part III: Privilege
I was dealt a pretty good hand in life: I was born in Canada, one of the richest and socially supportive/open countries in the world. My birth parents are wealthy and I grew up learning about how to manage finances and live from a position of opportunity and abundance. I‘ve been blessed with a good dose of intelligence: not enough for it to be severely debilitating, and just enough that I can learn most new skills with ease. My skin tone is light enough that I don’t experience (much) prejudice because of it; yet coloured enough to tick all the diversity boxes when it comes to being hired.
Yes, I also got the “seeing-impaired” card and the “narcissistic parents” card; and given the choice, I probably would have traded all my material wealth for parents who actually loved me…but I could have gotten all those bad cards without the good ones beside them and life would have been differently challenging.
Because of my combination of starting cards, I’ve had a lot of complicated feelings towards my privilege and my ability to gain material wealth. I’ve always felt that it was fair that I had money because I also had shitty parents – the two balance each other out. It was fair that I was intelligent because I needed the intelligence to cope with my poor eyesight and the false belief that no one would ever hire me because I’m “less than” someone without a disability.
And then I walked away from my life of luxury, busted my ass to pay for life and work through my emotional trauma, was gifted with a bonus papa in childhood #3, watched him die and got stronger through working through the grief of it all, learned to be a successful entrepreneur in childhood #4, used my grief skills from childhood #3 and bullshit detection skills from childhood #1 to run away from ‘home’…and then landed, again, in a very privileged childhood #5 – and this time with loving ‘parents’ and a happy home life.
In childhood #5, I have it all, and it makes me feel uncomfortable. When I look around me, at how most of the people on the island live, and compare it to my current standard of living and what I have to do to maintain it, I feel the weight of the inequalities of the world: I get the sense that others work twice as hard as I do in order to reap half of the benefits I reap. It’s not that I think “I have it and I don’t deserve it” – it’s that I think “others deserve it just as much as I do, but don’t have it.” But after childhood #2, I also know that it’s not my responsibility to bear the weight of the world, to solve other people’s problems.
So I guess this childhood is about allowing myself to play and learning to own my privilege and do something constructive with it. And I’ve chosen to express all of this in my Island Kid Prom Dress.
Part IV: Het maakproces
The first thing I noticed when I got to the IBB were these pink flowers everywhere. I later learned that they’re an invasive species that, once they grow somewhere, are very, very difficult to get rid of. But they were so pretty!! And available! And free! I had to do something with them! So I just started collecting them and drying them, not really knowing what I would do with them.
While walking around, I collected more flowers in different colours, but ended up with a few of these bright pink (and already dried) petals, thinking about how well they would go with the coralita flowers. I tried looking for more around the IBB, but couldn’t find any, and eventually asked the students where I could get more.
“Oh – just walk in any rich neighbourhood and you’ll see them growing in front of people’s houses” was what I was told. On the drive home, I realised how many houses in my neighbourhood had these bright pink bougainvillea plants…and that’s when all this thinking about privilege went into full swing.
I walked out one morning to collect more of these flowers.
“What do you need these flowers for?” asked mama, “If I had known, I could have clipped some for you – we have plenty in the garden at the house in Bandabou…”
“I’m not sure – i think I need them for an art project…but I can get what I need on the street. Do you think the neighbours would mind?”
“Nah, the neighbours won’t mind…but watch out for the dogs!”
She wasn’t kidding. There’s a very active dog community in our neighbourhood, I think about one dog per property, on average – and they didn’t sound particularly happy about my morning stroll:
and while I walked, I thought about the storyline of this childhood. About how I ended up at IBB and what kind of artist I wanted to be and what, exactly, I was trying to do with these flowers.
Maybe I’ll make one prom dress per childhood – yeah, that feels right. But in Curaçao, there is no prom, only Carnaval, which is coming up soon and would be the perfect inspiration for this dress. Growing up on Curaçao, I would have probably been the odd kid out at school – being a gay boy in a female body and all that. I probably wouldn’t have been allowed to drop out of school – that’s just not something we do – and I probably would have come to the IBB with the goal of getting out of my bubble, building a portfolio, and give the “art thing” a trial run before committing to a 4-year program.
Some things about me don’t really change across childhoods. If I wanted to do this “art thing”, I’d probably want to get a job, fund the venture myself, buy my own materials, and pay my own school fees. I’d want ownership of this adventure; I’d want to prove to myself that I could make it on my own, without my parents’ money (while also keeping the safety of living at home)
All the art supplies I’d need could be rummaged from my childhood bedroom, from years of after-school hobbying and trying out different media. I’d still be thrifty, and care about sustainability, and want to use found objects, so the flowers would make sense. And I’d be tangled between two worlds – my world of childhood luxury and my passionate but pauper IBB world. I decided that, aside from glue gun glue, I’d try to make everything out of organic materials.
I found a dried up palm leaf near the entrance of Capriles, and began making a skeleton, first entirely out of palm leaf…but it didn’t flow the way I wanted it to, so I played a bit with mango leaves and eventually settled on a combination of the two:
and then it was time to start with the petals – one by one with a glue gun:
At a certain point, I got a little stuck with the design…but luckily, there are a couple students here who are really into (life-sized) dress-making. In our consult, they mentioned that the side that II saw as the front would make for a good back, and that I could perhaps think about making sleeves that wrapped around the shoulders. For the bodice, we agreed that a fish-scale type corset with pressed coralita petals would suit the bougainvillea skirt.
A couple days later, I had my dress – it was everything I would never have considered wearing for real…except after this entire process, my mind has changed. I’ve learned to accept bits of myself that I had previously rejected; and maybe one day, I’ll even be caught alive prancing about in a life-sized pink flower-petal dress.
