Someone once said—the Internet is indecisive on who said it first—that true character is who you are when no one is watching. It’s one of those clichéd sayings that people turn into posters with hip fonts and photographs of mountains. It has not yet, to my knowledge, appeared on a Hallmark card, but only because I’m not sure it’s appropriate for any occasion I can think of, even though it does belong to that general family of phrases.
It’s also a phrase that I’ve always bristled at, though I’ve never been quite sure why. I first heard it from a gregarious great aunt, whom I love very much and who amuses me very much. Over the course of a family weekend, she kept repeating a story—not without a hint of righteousness—that she had found herself in the wee hours of one morning, alone in the house, polishing her silver and china, for no reason whatsoever. Of course, in each retelling, her punch line was that you really find out who you are when no one is looking.
I remember thinking, uncomprehending of the viciousness I felt, that doesn’t make you a good person. And I feel no less bothered, still, every time I hear such sentiments. Ultimately, I feel it’s judgmental and invasive. It invites, into those moments when we are alone, into our most private moments, a policing eye that sits in the corner and wonders aloud if you’re really a good person after all. I don’t think we need that in our lives—the world, unfortunately, is judgmental enough; why should we invite that to be with us when we are alone?
Behind my preaching here is, of course, the fact that my impulse never has been and probably will never be to polish the china for no reason when I am all alone. When no one is watching, I’m not sure I always like myself. I sit there, guilty of sloth, guilty of gluttony—guilty probably of all the sins. I say to myself, over and over: this is your character, this is who you really are, and it doesn’t matter what you present to the world, because here and now is the truth—you’re no good, you’re no good at all.
But it does matter very much what we present to the world, who we are with other people, who we are when everyone is watching and there’s nowhere to hide. I think, actually, that matters more. Or it’s worth more, to me anyway.
We have our darkest, ugliest hours alone, when no one is watching—and those hours are no truer, no more indicative of who we really are, than when we get up and get dressed and go into the world. There’s no such thing, for me, as who we really are. There’s no essential and secret identity lurking beneath the surface, sneaking out in the dark. We have the power—we must—to be who we say we are, to be who we want to be, to be who we present to the world. What this has to do with personal style and self-fashioning is everything—although I’m not sure I can adequately express why. But it’s something like this: self-presentation is as important, if not more important, than who we are “inside.” Personal style can be freeing from the idea that we are who we are when no one is watching and there’s nothing we can do about it. We’re not stuck with the self we find when we are alone, that’s not the truth—there is no truth. We’re all pretending, we have the pleasure and the freedom to make it up. And while I am not sure style alone can really silence voices of judgment and eliminate the moralizing forces that police us, from within and without, it can laugh at them and give them the finger. Somehow, this sums it up: Isabella Blow wore a silver lamé dress to her suicide. I’ll leave it at that.