Are we being judged?

My experience in the past week proved again that fashion is very subjective and even judgmental. I posted my daily outfits on two different fashion forums where I participate actively. The members on the two forums have totally different cultural backgrounds: most of the members in the first forum have more conservative or classic taste; the second group of people is adventurous and lots of them are fashion insiders. (Okay, let me tell you, the second forum is http://www.thefashionspot.com/ (tFS).

I posted seven days of outfits on both forums and they are consists of conservative office outfits and bold looks worn on weekends. While the reactions on my office outfits were similar, tFSers were very fond of the more adventurous pieces and the other forum was exactly the opposite. For instance, I recently got this asymmetric red Ann Demeulemeester jacket. The jacket doesn't fit as a traditional jacket with the fabric snagging and draping on different parts of the body. I paired the jacket with a pair of mud color Stella McCartney drain pipes. The entire outfit was just exciting and amazing for the folks on tFS, but it was just wrong for some people on the first forum with one guy even asking me why my jacket was off-center and one girl feeling so bad for me wasting my money. Reading the opposite comments from people with different tastes, especially reading the mean words, I suddenly felt I was being judged.

I am not alone. There are lots of fashionistas on tFS such as the beautiful guys whom I can only see on Dior Homme's runway show or in the fashionable cities such as NYC or Brussels. Are they going to be judged if they live in, say, Boston? Sure they are. Maybe it is the price we have to pay to make different fashion choices.

Ms. Maureen Dowd wrote about how women were judged too much on what we wore in her book "Are Men Necessary? When Sexes Collide", but I found the judgment towards both sexes. Men seem to be judged less because most of them are more afraid of being judged and so they dress more conservatively. Men and women are all judged based on our appearance and our fashion preference.

Luckily, there are still people such as the tFSers who enjoy the coat from Yohji Yamamoto, the jacket from Martin Margiela, and the belt from Ann Demeulemeester despite the potential judgment. TFS is like a cult with the people who enjoy looking at each other's unique outfits and encouraging each other to be even more adventurous. When we are off the internet and face our city or simply a different fashion forum, we are judged, sometimes in a bad way. It's good to know, but it doesn't affect how we dress and express ourselves.