Welcome to Lazy Goth

(psst - you're reading this on lazygoth.com, when you could be reading it on the Lazy Goth Substack)

Why does it seem like so many neurodivergent people, women and people who were assigned female at birth in particular, don’t have a good sense of fashion? Well, Merriam-Webster defines fashion as:

• the prevailing style (as in dress) during a particular time
  
• a prevailing custom, usage, or style  
• social standing or prominence especially as signalized by dress or conduct

This means that fashion is something that:

• changes frequently
  
• depends on trends rather than practicality or comfort
• is part of social interaction and involves a social hierarchy

And this can make it difficult for people who are hypersensitive to textures or who struggle to interpret neurotypical social cues.

But just because someone finds mainstream fashion inaccessible doesn’t mean they don’t care about what they wear.

I don’t like going out to eat in restaurants, but I do like food. Similarly, while I don’t like trying to keep up with fashion, I enjoy my clothes. Of course most people would probably look at the way I eat and dress and disagree — no one who enjoys clothing and food would wear and eat the same things all the time.

But I do. A lot of people do.

Rhia of Journey to Neurodiversity writes, “Like a lot of autistics, I like to dress for comfort, rather than for fashion, or to look good. But that doesn't mean I have no interest in fashion or dressing more fashionably. I want to.”

People with tactile sensitivity, which includes many autistic people, have heightened senses when it comes to textures. This means that some types of clothing can be very uncomfortable — if not painful. And many of us had to wear irritating or painful clothing growing up. As a result, we often actively avoid many types of fabric and cuts of clothing as adults with agency over what we wear. It’s great to have that level of control over our bodies, but it can make keeping up with fashion practically impossible.

An alternative to fashion

Alternative fashion (or alt fashion) is what it sounds like. Instead of being fast-moving, it’s typically (or at least, traditionally) either slow-moving or completely stuck in time.* Instead of being widespread, it’s often localized or seen only in certain subcultures. And the entire idea of using clothes as an indicator of social standing is generally turned on its head in alt fashion.

I’m not the only tactily hypersensitive person to have found comfort in alternative clothing (in fact, you can read Alaina Leary’s article on a similar topic on Healthline).

In addition to the reasons I mentioned above, alt fashion also offers another perk: It’s generally more socially acceptable to wear the same type of clothing day in and day out if people believe someone is doing it because of a fashion preference, instead of some innate eccentricity. As a goth, I found I could easily get away with wearing nothing but black gauchos and knee-high boots every single day. Calming, constrictive clothing like corsets, tights, and arm warmers are also way more acceptable when they’re seen as part of an intentional outfit rather than accommodations.

In a way, alternative fashion became an alternative to fashion.

As a tween and teen, before I had a lot of control over my own wardrobe, getting dressed was annoying at best. I’d have to choose something I hadn’t worn recently because, for some reason that was never clear to me, I wasn’t supposed to wear the same thing all the time. I had to make sure what I was wearing matched, not just in color but in style. I also had to make sure it would be suitable for whatever activities I’d be doing that way. And I’d need to make sure it was at least somewhat fashionable, so I wouldn’t be teased too badly.

And after all that, I had to be uncomfortable all day anyway, because few of my hand-me-down and gifted clothes were tactilely tolerable.

At the time, I assumed everyone was doing the same thing, and felt a bit jealous of the girls who were able to go through all that work and look pretty and put-together, when I was barely keeping up at all.

So when I reached my junior year of high school and began to learn more about the world beyond my Christian homeschool group, I immediately identified with the goths. Not only did they seem to be what we would now call “death-positive,” like me, but they wore really cool black clothes all the time. Tights! Arm warmers! Loose band T-shirts and long, wide, airy skirts. And all in the most practical color (and my favorite color to wear) — black.

Fashion in the past-tense

Fashion is all about the present and the future. Alternative fashion is largely about the past. And that means that I don’t have to adjust to seemingly arbitrary changes every year. There are genres, sub-genres, and sub-sub-genres, so it’s easy to find a comfortable niche. I can (and do) wear the exact same cut and style of clothes today in 2022 that I wore in 2002. Yet no one looks at me and thinks I’m wearing “mom clothes.” I’m just garbed in alt fashion.

I’m no expert on the complex global history of alternative fashion, so I won’t pretend to be. But it’s fair to say that alternative fashion tends to appear in a moment (not spontaneously, but still suddenly), and then it stays there, frozen in time. Lolita appeared in the 1970s in Japan, and the style has remained largely unchanged over the following fifty years. Similarly, goth fashion emerged in the 80s, and while it has grown to encompass many sub-varieties, OG Goth fashion has altered very little. If you saw an androgynous someone dressed in a long black skirt or fishnets, wearing heavy black eyeliner and teased-out hair, you’d recognize them as a goth at once.

This kind of temporal bubble lets people enjoy fashion without chasing after trends. And for people who struggle to find clothing they can tolerate, that’s important.

DIY fashion

A lot of alternative fashion was very small-scale starting out. Long before Hot Topic, punks were making their own fashion statements with what they had. They wore their jeans after they wore out, holding torn clothing together with safety pins. Alternative fashion earned its name for sticking it to the mainstream fashion industry (at least, initially).

This is also good news for tactilely sensitive people. Not everyone has the knowledge, time, or money to sew their own clothes, but one of the best ways to make sure the fabric, size, and cut is right is to sew it yourself.

DIY alt fashion doesn’t have to involve buying yards of fabric and stitching it together from scratch. I love buying oversized cotton T-shirts and following Pinterest tutorials on how to cut, pin, tie, wrap, or stitch them into more fashionable designs.

Weird kid, weird clothes — Or not.

Lots of tactilely sensitive people like looking good. We enjoy choosing our clothes with care and wearing things that bring us joy. But, for better or worse, this rarely involves going to Sacks (or even J. C. Penny) and picking something off the shelf.

We need predictability in what we lay against our skin. We often need to be able to wear the same things (or same type of things) over and over. Typically we need clothing that will stay in place, or at least not brush against us unexpectedly. So some of us meet those wants and needs by embracing alternative fashion as an alternative to everyone else’s sense of fashion.

No one wants to be the weird kid who dresses weird too. Alt fashion is often an accessible alternative to fashion, letting us ‘weirdos’ enjoy clothing as much as anyone else — if not more.