I didn’t have a name for it until last year.
That slight click out of sync, the sense that my inner tempo didn’t quite match the room. Not sad, not shy. Just… different. When I finally said it: "I'm feeling weird", something shifted. Naming it didn’t fix it; it freed it. It gave me a way to say: something is happening inside me, even when I can’t file it neatly under happy / anxious / bored.
This entry is about that weirdness, how I meet it now, and how I let it shape what I wear. Because for me, dressing is an instrument, sometimes a costume. It’s how I tune myself before I walk into the day.
Weird is a compass, not a flaw
If you’ve ever felt a micro-disconnect at a party, a lecture, a gallery opening in Amsterdam, like you’re both present and watching from the outside, you know what I mean. For years I tried to smooth that edge by “going with the flow.” I adapted fast, said yes often, and wore what wouldn’t get questions. It looked like ease. It felt like absence.
Last year I tried something else: I treated weirdness like data. When I feel it, I ask:
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What here doesn’t fit my rhythm?
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What am I drawn to that the room isn’t? Should I leave?
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What can I express, subtly or loudly, to come back into alignment?
Sometimes the answer is visual, sometimes conductual, sometimes there is no answer. A single change is often enough to pull me from observer to participant.
Dressing as expression (not compliance)
In Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, there’s a core idea that lands differently every time I revisit it: beauty standards can operate like a feedback loop that disciplines women, rewarding compliance, punishing deviation, and keeping us busy policing ourselves. You don’t have to agree with every page to feel the mechanism in daily life: the way “effortless” is demanded yet scrutinized, the way a body or face becomes a public site of commentary.
My response isn’t to reject beauty, but to relocate the authority. To move the locus of meaning from the gaze to the wearer. In practice, that means I dress to regulate my interior, not to satisfy a trend brief. If luxury is attention, then wearing luxury is attention to self.
This is also why I’m drawn to curated vintage and upcycled design. They carry memory and irregularity, two things algorithms can’t smooth. In a city that loves minimalism, a piece with history can be the easiest way to be different.
Weirdness as method (for those who hate sameness)
A lot of us in our 20s and 30s are allergic to the copy-paste feed. We want ahead-of-trend energy without looking like we tried to exit the same showroom. Weirdness helps, because it pushes you from adaptation to authorship.
Measure by sensation, not approval.
A successful look is the one that stabilizes your breath and lengthens your stride, not the one that harvests comments. If you’re an early adopter, that feeling usually arrives months before the trend does.
A note on “taste”
People often say, I want good taste. I think taste is just attention over time. Reading spines in second-hand bookshops. Touching fabrics you don’t intend to buy. Watching how a stranger hems their trousers. Listening to records that make you slightly uncomfortable. Taste accumulates in layers. Weirdness tells you where to dig.
Try this this week (gentle experiments)
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Wear the piece you keep postponing, to the supermarket. Let it be “too much” at 11 a.m.
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Swap one default for one desire: cargos for a skirt, or vice versa.
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Sing on your commute, softly or loudly, under your scarf. Feel your posture change.
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Write a line in your notes app: “Today I felt weird when…” Finish the sentence and get to know yourself.
None of this is about rebellion for its own sake. It’s about re-centering the self in a world that tries to outsource your style decisions to a For You page.
Closing
If The Beauty Myth critiqued how images can be used against women, then our job is to use images for ourselves, images we author, outfits that regulate and reveal, silhouettes that carry our lived mood. Weirdness is the hinge. It opens the door between who we are and how we’re seen.
So here’s to wearing the off-beat choice on an ordinary morning.
To the early adopters who look like themselves first.
To Amsterdam in motion, and to a personal style that can keep up.
YEYEY
