Bella M. Lucio’s Hierarchy of Sartorial Needs

If you google “human needs,” the result is a pyramid, and at the bottom, beside breathing, food, water, shelter, and sleep, is clothing. Clothing is a physiological human need. We all get dressed, and even if you claim to “not care” about fashion, the clothing you choose to put on each day means something. What you are wearing is the first (and sometimes the only) perception people have of you. A white t-shirt and jeans or a ballgown, sneakers or stilettos. Even the laziest of outfits mean something: Today, you are lazy. The clothing you own, wish to own, and choose to wear coincides with your sense of self.

I fear that I would trade breathing, food, water, shelter, and sleep to keep clothing; it exists on every level of my needs pyramid. I can’t imagine a single event in my life without imagining what I would be wearing. I fear getting married, because I don’t know how I would ever find the perfect dress for the occasion. If I am invited to dinner, or anywhere, I agree to go only because it is an opportunity to get dressed up. I daydream of dating someone and I imagine what I would wear if I were their girlfriend. I am planning outfits for events that I will never attend. I try on dresses in fitting rooms and think, It doesn’t work now, but this will look amazing on me when I’m pregnant. I wonder what I will request to wear in the casket, my final outfit. I think that I would like to be lowered into the ground in one of my “dream pieces,” something archival. But maybe, in one last hurrah, I should be completely naked. No longer will I have to subscribe to any of the physiological human needs.

Clothes are my most fantastical escape from reality and the priority of my material world. When compiling my full moon manifestations, I always add, “Archival McQueen pieces surround me.” “Nicholas Ghesquiere–era Balenciaga finds me.” These are affirmations as essential as safety and security, love and belonging, and self-esteem. I am in a constant state of insatiable desire for pieces of clothing that I don’t have, hoping to one day wear the perfect outfit, and wishing to present myself to the world the exact way that I want to be seen. I care about fashion, possibly too much. I spend roughly five hours a day thinking about clothing, even on my days off, and I can’t remember a time when I didn’t think about clothing like this. I never made it to my 12th birthday party, because I had a meltdown over which Forever 21 dress I would wear.

Chimerical outfits created in my head are the thoughts that distract my attention from the present. Every time that I attempt to put a tangible version of them on myself, I am left naked in front of the mirror, half an hour late, and questioning if I should even leave the house. Despite building a life and career that revolves around having style, and taste, I don’t regard myself as someone who is well-dressed, not effortlessly at least. I say this at a dinner table, and everyone gasps, but this is not self-deprecation; this belief is the result of sheer quixotic expectations. I can dress other people well, and even with ease, but I have illusory superiority when it comes to dressing myself.

I believe 10 or fewer outfits I have ever worn to be perfect. Black trousers and a black, or white, shirt is the closest thing I have to a consistently perfect outfit, so I wear this more or less every day. I wear this, or one of my 30 little black dresses, when I have just spent two hours on the floor of my closet and now I must leave the house. I am not happy about it, but I am dressed. I accept that my dream outfit doesn’t seem to be an outfit that exists at all.

Being a stylist was never an aspiration of mine, I aspired to being a rock star, or a writer, but like my dream outfit, these careers seemed fleetingly fantastical. I got my first job in fashion when I was 17, for no reason other than needing a job. I liked clothing, and I obviously liked fantasy. I liked smoking cigarettes, being allowed a vivacious personality, and typing emails on my computer. I loved discretion, cold Diet Coke, swiping someone else’s credit card, looking at photos, beautiful people, and freaking out over things that are trivial. I realized quickly that fashion was a suitable fit for me, and my tolerances, and the frivolous standards I had long held myself to.

I admired veteran stylists who arrived on set in black pants and a perfectly fitting T-shirt. We weren’t there to wear extravagant outfits, we were there to dress people well. For 10 to 12 hours a day, I didn’t have to think about what I was going to wear, I got to think about what someone else could wear. In the years since accepting styling as my primary career, I have become distant from my personal hopes of perfection and abundant desires. I am closer every day to ridding myself of the pieces I once aspired to owning, but truthfully won’t ever have the occasion to wear. Gluttony, blind opulence, and self-importance have become grossly unappealing. I thought that being obsessed with your image and fine-tailoring a narrative to fit it was normal, but a constant shift in desires and perspective is natural. What I liked four years ago is not what I like now. The outfit that I loved to wear last year doesn’t feel the same when I put it back on. Rather than thinking of these things as “not on brand,” I recognize them as situated in phase.

The joy in fashion has always partially existed in the insatiable, fluctuating, and unattainable, because nothing is ever as it is in your head, or on a magazine cover, or a Pinterest board, and it won’t have the same effect in six weeks, months, or years. Creativity and the need for individuality sit higher on the human needs pyramid than clothing. What we want and what we can actually attain don’t have to align for the experience of wanting itself to be enjoyed; our dynamic desires are what drive our individual will. I no longer wish to have everything that I have wanted, and I don’t need every outfit that I wear to be extraordinary. When I do buy something that’s perfectly me, or put on clothing that I feel particularly great in, or dress someone else in an ostentatiously beautiful outfit, I luxuriate in it.

I am not ashamed of the euphoria I get from wanting and idealizing, or the frustration I find in something as simple as getting dressed, because that is what makes my relationship with clothing distinctive to me. This is a direct reflection of my sense of self: I am overambitious, and self-determined, and fantastical, and ever-evolving, and eager. Each time my dream outfit doesn’t pan out, I will put on the closest thing I have to a perfect outfit. I will be glad that I made it out of the house and get to go somewhere in the world. I will hope that people see me beneath my black trousers and T-shirt.