Frivolity & Flow: On Taking the Weird Path to Good Style and a Full Life

By: Mary Dell Strecker

I heard recently that resiliency is allowing the difficulty you’re experiencing to flow through you instead of letting it get stopped up and stuck like a traffic jam in your life and soul. Although it seems like there could be many definitions of resiliency (a quality inherently hard to pin down and articulate succinctly) this definition made me wonder, what are the processes or tools one could use to actually become resilient in any given situation? There are a lot, I’m sure, and I know my toolbox contains many. Fresh air, exercise, trying new things, and getting good sleep are things I’ve found help me work through the challenges of life. Most of these are generally accepted as healthy habits for any person. But I have more. I also read about fashion, write, run, curate my home with beauty in mind, seek warmth, go camping, read middle grade novels, and always buy the good coffee beans. This might sound like a simple list, but it actually took me a lot of time to recognize how important these things were to my life and soul. And so, we know we need tools to help us flow through difficulty, but we don’t always know how to customize them to who we are as unique individuals. Exercise, but what kind of exercise do I love? Reading, but what kind of reading nourishes my soul? Trying new things, but what kind of new things excite me? And so, if resiliency is the ability to flow through a difficulty, then what turns on the faucet, so to speak?

Over the past four years I’ve dedicated myself to the task of working through my own mental and physical health obstacles. To my surprise,  I have found that giving myself permission to be curious was the crucial element that propelled me on a path of health and possibility. The walls that felt like they were closing in started to recede, and the world felt bigger and more hopeful. What I noticed was that I started to get to know myself when I let myself be curious. Finding things that gave me joy felt like a reality impossible to imagine, let alone grasp, so I had to start with something less charged with emotion. What did I find interesting, instead? Even if what I found interesting was really weird, like reading every book I could get my hands on about Alpaca farming (yes, seriously), I found that giving myself permission to “waste time” on fantasy dream worlds opened my soul to my desires. These in turn allowed creativity to start flowing again. This flow interrupted the perpetuation of guilt, shame, and the feeling that all my hopes and dreams had been bottlenecked by life. The flow felt like hope, but was it actually resiliency? I was like a Maple tree being tapped in the spring time. I didn’t even know what was happening for a while because the change was slow as the coldhardened sap of winter started to warm. But after years of this practice, I now know that I was rebuilding the bridge that had fallen into disrepair between my body and soul, faithfully putting myself back together, piece by weird piece. I somehow made it from Alpacas to fashion in a weird but very traceable way that I laugh about when I think of it. Permission to be a person with my own pursuits separate from rationality, practicality, or purpose, and especially from the roles I filled every moment of every day as wife and mom, meant I could actually start to fill those roles as me, and not as some preconceived idea of the way a woman should be in the world.

This curiosity led me back to a first love as a teen pouring over Teen Vogue, making  scrap books out of favorite looks, and decoupaging a treasure box that now belongs to my second son. One of the difficulties I found myself working through was how to dress for a wildly different climate than the one I had grown accustomed to in my beloved Waco, Texas, our 5-year home during my husband’s PhD years. The sadness and loneliness I was experiencing, as well as being postpartum with our fourth son threw my body into overdrive and I experienced weight gain that wouldn’t budge. I was exhausted. I started on the process of re-learning how to dress myself. I read everything I could get my hands on about colors, bodies, shapes, and how all of these combine in different ways to make each unique person feel great. Now, as a personal stylist, one of my primary aims is to answer the question, “How can I help women feel confident, comfortable, and most importantly, like themselves, each day when they get dressed?” The runway shows, the “it” color of the season, or the styles that are taking culture by storm are very fun, don’t get me wrong. I really love those aspects of style, but they’re the icing, the decoration, the creative explosion that only makes sense when they act as a way of further opening the lines of communication between your body and soul.

I am bewildered by the mystery and magic of it all and how personally finding this connection between body and soul through curiosity brought me to a vocation that can help others do the same. When we think of fashion, we often put it into the categories of frivolous, extraneous or even indulgent pursuits. And that’s the glorious thing about it. When you make space for what doesn’t make sense, but is fun, and sparks joy, that’s when you’ve found something worth keeping. Because behind that silly little spark of frivolity lies one very essential aspect of our nature as humans: the reminder that we are bodies. We are not only spiritual and intellectual, but physical, and as such our bodies sweat, gain weight and lose weight, get strong or get weak, enjoy health and are leveled by sickness. Our bodies laugh and cry and even cry and laugh at the same time. 

This is the point that anchors everything I do with my work styling. The clothes we wear act as a bridge between our bodies and our souls. Clothes can be a powerful communicator between what we feel, know, love, and do. Clothing can get things unstuck.

Sometimes simply wearing a good outfit makes you less nervous about the interview, or the first date, or the 9 hour flight. A serious pair of trousers says, “I am capable.” A floral blouse says, “I am feminine.” And a pair of sneakers says, “I value my comfort and the ability to run away if I need to.” It’s funny, but true! When you put them all together, they tell a story about who you are, what you value, and how you like to show up in the world. I’m sure you can imagine an outfit that feels this way to you. Or perhaps you are thinking of the outfit that makes you feel detached, like you’re wearing someone else’s clothes. This principle of our clothing being a communicator between body and soul works in both directions. Sometimes our clothing tells us to remain stuck. Finding what this means to you is very personal. A pair of leggings might feel like the most powerful uniform in the world. You feel like you can accomplish anything on a Saturday bouncing between the gym, brunch with friends, homework and a movie night. Maybe you don’t wear leggings and you really should, because they would open up something in you that feels stuck, like the ability to embrace leisure or healthy movement. Or maybe you should avoid leggings like you avoid using the communal hand towel during flu season because you can’t peel yourself off the couch in a bad way. The examples of how clothing can make us feel and act are plentiful, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution.

Get curious and start to notice how you feel when you get dressed each day. You’ll start to make these connections for yourself. Whatever comes up for you, try to note it without judgement, much like the practice of dealing with unwanted thoughts during a meditation practice. Begin by scrawling in your notes app or your journal about what you notice. The role of curiosity continues to be essential, as you then ask how it is that you want to feel. How do you want to show up in the world? We are so saturated with the idea that clothing is all external, something that is set by the fashion girlies and everyone else just needs to hop on the train or get left behind. But with the aim of opening a window or two of possibility, I hope it falls with clarity that great style stems from this resilient act of allowing yourself to be curious about who you are and how you want to feel. That’s it! No complicated formulas, no need to wear the trending item if it doesn’t speak to you, and no need to hold yourself back if you love something in the fashion world that feels risky. Both are good and true and honor the creativity within you that we all want to see.

Whether you find fashion boring or thrilling, the assignment is the same. What are you curious about? The more absurd the better; just ask the alpaca books on my dusty shelf.