I love fashion. I especially love tailored suiting. There’s something special about a suit that’s all your own.

I recently saw these two photos. Notice the tucked tie. Neat! (Credit to The Sartorialist and The Sartorially Inclined.)

So what? Nothing really, except this: My first thought of “too much of a pose” has now turned to “hmm, I might actually like this.”

Fashion is fluid. It changes as you change. I wouldn’t have taken to this look but it’s growing on me. What does that say about me?

My favorite jacket is a toirtoise green, Costume National leather biker jacket. But I didn’t wear it for a full year after I bought it. Why? Because I actually thought it was “too cool” for me. I couldn’t genuinely wear it, so I never did. But I love it now. Its only when I appropriately saw it as something that spoke to me at a real level that I took to it. Like the jacket, the tucked tie is in that early stage.

“Real level?” Sounds like horseshit, right? Fashion is surface. Fashion is superficial. Right?

Something changed in me the moment I put on a suit for the first time in my life. It made me feel powerful. It made me feel important. It made me feel good about myself. But most importantly, it made me feel something. And that something was emotional.

I never knew before then that clothing could do that. That clothing, at a certain level, could create an emotional experience. And if you haven’t had that experience with clothing, it’s hard to see the emotional landscape that exists beneath the surface, and therefore to appreciate it.

But that landscape exists all around us. That shirt you wore when you were 15 that represents all that was true and dramatic the summer you wore it and how it all comes back to you when you put it on again. How choosing what you wear every morning is a form of self-expression. How the handmade dress your mom gave you creates a link back to her past. Or the silk scarf your dad always wore that you wear now–the dad that’s not here in this world anymore.

Yes, yes, you don’t need fashion and clothing and all these things in the way you need air or water or your friends and family. This is true. But as I see it, you are born and then you die, and if you’re lucky, you can say during the time in-between, Hey I felt something that time and it spoke to me. I believe there’s value in human experience, and in that experience alone.

I hope one day to meld my interests in technology and fashion. I’d love to give others the chance to feel those things, too.