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recognizes these subcultures now, but in the mid-1980s, adopting the lookwith the dedication I did—black lipstick, hair teased to the point of total destruction—outside the East Village or Camden Row was enough to get you killed. Okay, beat up. I hid in the bathroom or in empty classrooms during lunchtime, and I didn’t talk about it at home. My mother would never have understood—she thought I looked crazy, too, and seemed to have more sympathy for the people moved to violence by my appearance than she did for me. After all, I could just dress normal and everyone would leave me alone. But I
couldn’t
dress normal. That was the thing.
    Though such violent disapproval of one’s clothing selections could send many people back to the closet in search of something softer, my instinct was to fight back. I knew that there was nothing wrong with wearing, say, a black lace slip as a dress, with a pair of black Doc Martens. That the sight of me in such a getup could inspire a person to shout horrible, unprintable names at me on the street seemed a bit of an overreaction. Capitulating to the bad vibes the world was aiming at me felt like giving in to bullying, and it would have been.
    Getting beat up for the way you look as a teenager is going to force you to make some hard and fast decisions about not just your life, but
life
. It will turn you into a little philosopher, which, by the way, goes very nicely with a high-necked black lace dress and a prim patent-leather purse. Whatever dent to my self-esteem the harassment may have given me, submitting to such meanness seemed far more dangerous. I didn’t just like how I looked—I loved it. No amount of negative reactions could convince me that I didn’t look totally awesome with my haircrawling off my scalp like a blue-black tarantula, that the oversize crucifix intended to be hung on a wall didn’t actually make a fantastic statement necklace. The joy I felt in discovering new looks, in exploring and feeding my burgeoning vanity, outweighed the stress of feeling vulnerable to attack.
    I was young, and not so worldly, but somehow I understood that my style triggered not so much a punk hatred as a general xenophobia that included gay people, people of color, and homeless people. Anyone different from my straight, white, mostly male attackers earned their wrath. A larger understanding of oppression began to grow and, hardly knowing a gay person, a homeless person, or a person of color, I aligned myself with them in the world. And in this way my fashion both cast me out of the prevailing culture and signaled to the world my disdain of it. I hadn’t started my fashion career angry at the world, but after years of having soda cans flung at your head, you sort of end up there.
    My point, and I do hope I’ve made it, is that I’m a fashion person, down to my bones. As much as I hate when people redeem the needless suffering life has heaped upon them by saying it “made me who I am today,” I suppose I could admit the same about the decade or so I spent weathering the punishment our culture sometimes metes out to the differently dressed. Sure, as a sensitive person with strong empathy, I probably would have been drawn to social justice causes no matter what I looked like, but experiencing repressive violence firsthand at such a formative age gave me a political consciousness that has shaped much of my life. It taught me a rugged compassion, and it gave me alonging to take some of the fight I have in me and offer it to those who could use some.
    There was one dark fashion era, around age twenty-one, when my interest in social justice actually accomplished what so much bullying had failed to do—it broke my fashion spirit. I became obsessed with second-wave radical lesbian feminism
and
fiercely dedicated to animal rights, which prompted me to shave my head and wear nothing but oversize jeans held to my bony vegan hips with a hemp