The Fine Line Between Making the Most of Yourself and Looking Like an Egg

Tarting it up. Preening and Primming. Getting out the big guns. Whatever you want to call it, we all (especially us ladies) do it on a daily basis. It’s that little bit of perfume sprinkled on your jacket, that extra nice pair of earrings you don’t always wear, even that checking that your clothes are stain-free before they meet the public eye (well, hopefully, anyway). It’s called sprucing yourself up, and with a multi-billion dollar beauty industry booming, it seems we’re just that little bit into it.

Lookin' Pretty at the Gym: The Duck Brigade

There’s nothing wrong with a bit of a touch-up now and then. I guess the question here is when it gets out of hand. This whole debate is of course contextual. Working out at the gym is a low-key spruce scenario - your hair can be matted, skin smelly, looks ugly (although this one is a bit of a paradox, as you are indeed going there to improve your looks anyway). But then there’s a few tricky ones. Class. Client meetings. A cheeky one in the pub. Aimless wandering around the streets pretending to do work you should be doing. Do you have to look polished for these activities? Do you look like a dork if you do?

I’m not sure exactly who wrote ‘the rules’, but I gather they certainly do exist. There’s that linger on the person in the room who definitely overstepped the boundaries when it came to personal presentation. There’s that instant shuffling with the person who looks completely out of context. The question is: why do we care? I’m not going to be insulting and say it’s because you believe that what a person looks like actually reflects what they are like inside, let alone their dress. But then they do, in a way. A fashion choice in the wardrobe goes through several key stages: the magical moment, the money, and the modeling. If you can like something enough to be bothered to go through these stages, then in some way the pieces that you wear reflect what you feel like or how you would like to be seen. So to what extent does a dressy missy or hard-out hunk personally resemble the way they dress?

A demonstration of how to naturally finish your set

Besides the fact that I have used the term ‘egg’ in the title as connoting a type of person, there is one other aspect that makes this column unmistakably Kiwi. It is that it assumes there is something wrong with being a ‘hard-out’. Our tall-poppy syndrome can be rather hindering in this sense. We can be successful and elegant, friendly and fun, but there’s always going to be some bitter biatch in the corner that can’t take it. In the matter of people that overdress or dress actually how they would like to (e.g. not in a jeans, t-shirt, hoodie/ Kathmandu jacket plus chucks kind of way), are we as a society just being a bigger, bitterer biatch? What is it to us whether someone likes to wear heels to the football or studs in the workplace? Is it because secretly we think they look fabulous and can't bear to express it? Because we would, underneath, love to rock out some crazy form of hippy gear but don’t have the confidence they have to take it from the closet to the street? Readers, please. There’s enough guys trying to naturally finish their sets without having to comment on someone else’s.

To leave you with a less bitter taste in your mouth: be happy for those who dare to dress up or dress crazy. Secretly, we all know, there’s a part of us like that too. Think about what your dress fantasy is. Pocahontas? The Grudge? Yourself? For the meantime, though, go back to your fearful black cardigans and I-clearly-don’t-care-but-pay-a-lot-of-money-to-not-care Kathmandus. Your peers will thank you for it.