In your wardrobe hang your brains.
Fall has always been a fashion refresh season for me — especially the time I spent in Europe and Iran. Those years shaped my sense of style and filled the pages of my fashion notebooks, which I kept separate from everything else. I would sketch ideas, think about the details, the colors, the shapes — how I wanted to express myself. It was never about what to buy, but about how to layer clothes, shoes, and accessories in a way that reflected who I was and what I represented within a group.
When I reached my twenties, there were many times I couldn’t find what I was searching for. I remember going with my mom to buy fabrics to make my own pieces. She understood my need to style and knew the limits of our family budget — and our access to “real” fashion. I wore my own creations, and over time, that became known as my style.
In Paris, I loved blending old fashion with new. My mom had a beige wool short-cut fall jacket that I used to wear with a flowery long skirt. With my wide-brimmed Parisian hat, I felt as if I had stepped back into the romantic era of Paris — the time when Hemingway, Cézanne, and Picasso sat in the same cafés where my friends and I would meet. I mixed skinny jeans with a bold red top reminiscent of the 1920s and paired them with Audrey Hepburn-style ballerina flats. There was always a story behind what I wore; my outfits revealed what was going on in my mind.
I wished I had been born a hundred years earlier — so I could have hung out with them.
Then I moved to North America, and my style became a reflection of daily life — comfortable, sporty, the busy mom look. There was no time to think about what I was expressing through my clothes. That layer of self-styling shut down for more than ten years. Other than rejecting the idea of being conventional, conservative, or boring, I didn’t think much about my style. Living in Toronto made it even harder — needing different clothes for each month of the year. Between the harsh winters, warm summers, and a few in-between months when you could actually care about how you looked instead of how warm you were, style naturally slipped to the bottom of my priorities.
Through a friend, who is also a medium member and a creative blog-writer, I got introduced to a pod cast from Bella Freud, Fashion Neurosis which is about fashion the way I want to think about it. I listened to most of the episodes. One sticked with me, where in the conversation with Kate Moss they talk about Bella’s dad’s poem about fashion. It finishes with this tag line.
“In your wardrobe, hang your brains.”
Since January 2024, I’ve been writing every day, mostly working on my novel. Writing about my characters made me think about their styles. As I move through different parts of the story and write my weekly blog posts on Medium, the layers of self-styling have started to return — not out of necessity, but as something naturally reborn. I’m thinking more, styling more, with the same belief I had in my youth: style is storytelling. It’s how we, as humans, communicate with each other.
My characters have helped me reshape how I want to carry myself — to become more me. Today, as I was folding laundry on Thanksgiving weekend in Canada, I felt thankful for my characters, Dina and Guido, who have helped me put my brain back into my wardrobe.
