Complex Numbers

Costumerism

Me? Invited to a party? Obviously this prompt is purely hypothetical.

PROMPT November 12th

Imagine you are invited to a party celebrating your favorite book. The dress code asks you to dress up as your favorite character. Who or what do you dress up as?

First of all, I'm not sure I have a favorite book. My tastes have changed over time, like most people -- though I still consider the director's cut of Blade Runner to be my favorite movie -- and with the internet being what it is, I don't read as much as I used to.

Second, and this is the most important part: I'm utterly incapable of "dressing up" as anything. I have absolutely no talent for fashion, and more, I completely lack the ability to look at clothes on a rack and go, "that looks like something Harry Dresden [for example] would wear." I guess it's kind of like face-blindness. So when I go to F/SF cons (or did, in the Before Time), I'm usually dressed up as Me. These days, that's: Birkenstocks, black jeans, a t-shirt with a brewery logo on it, a Hawaiian shirt, and maybe a hat.

I can appreciate others' costumes, but I can never, ever recreate them.

The problem is even worse if you consider literary characters instead of ones from movies. I possess a slight resemblance to a younger Jeff Bridges, so when the local theater had a Big Lebowski movie party, I fit right in -- even though I couldn't go to a clothing store and re-create any of his outfits from the film. But at least that's a visual medium, so I could, if I really concentrated, probably find a bathrobe or something that would work. Instead, I went as me, long hair and goatee having to suffice to present myself as something vaguely resembling The Dude.

While I don't have a favorite book that stands for all time, the closest I come at the moment is A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny. It's set in Victorian England, and the characters in that book are variations on horror/suspense archetypes: a witch, a Russian mystic, Dr. Frankenstein, Dracula, a werewolf, etc. A vampire would be easy for most people to dress as, but not me. I'd fuck something up, and pretty much have to get a set of fake fangs to demonstrate "vampire." Anyway, one of the main characters in the book is a man named Jack, strongly suggested to be Jack the Ripper. Yes, he's one of the protagonists.

Jack's outfit, as depicted on the cover art anyway, is high-fashion Victorian -- I think. I don't know. I seriously can't pay attention to these things. I know a lot of literature devotes pages and pages to the description of what an individual character is wearing; honestly, my eyes just automatically skip over that stuff as if it were an advertisement on a website or in a newspaper.

So Jack would be my first choice, only a) no one else would recognize it, because even people who have read the book would probably just see "Victorian-era clothes," which could easily be "vampire" or any number of other archetypes, and b) I don't have the slightest clue where to find or how to craft such clothing. Also, c) I have blonde hair, blue eyes and a goatee, which kind of detracts from the "tall dark, handsome, and murderous" look.

Consequently, I wouldn't bother going to the party if I had to "dress up." Unless the theme is The Big Lebowski, of course. Or, you know, if you want a Hawaiian-shirt-wearing dude to provide comic relief.