UNIFORM DRESSING

Lifestyle

May 9

Guest Editor: Laura Reilly

UNIFORM DRESSING

There’s a comforting mathematical knowability in a uniform: the opportunity to engage with the world in a binary that it isn’t and never has been. But through the binary’s rigid rules, poems are often written. In the material world, we find our zeroes and ones in cotton and silk, fine tailoring and languid draping, and—most essentially—in black and white.

A crisp white poplin meets a grand black blazer, and the colorless shades perform their mysterious synergy. Later, a pitch black column skirt and Oxford shirt conspire for a while, until the formula shifts to introduce a shock of white (or its cousin, at least): a creamy beige trench has enveloped the lot.

Even black and white photos were taken amid fields of color. But a wardrobe of black and white warps towards timelessness that takes you from right here and now, to never and always. To the imagined place behind those photos, to a limitless plane like math.