Journal of Eleanor Price

(notes, after the attire committee debacle)

Today was forty solid minutes of my life I will never get back, all because Edwin Barlow thinks scarves are the difference between history and humiliation.

He presented three “proposals,” each with a title like it belonged on a museum placard. Practical Mariner: boots, trousers, plain jackets. Fine. Ceremonial Scholar: heavy wool coats trimmed in lake blue, with leather satchels worn cross-body “for effect.” Absurd. And then there was Documentary Dignified: waxed jackets, buttoned to the throat, topped with wide-brimmed hats that looked like they had been stolen from a polar expedition gone wrong.

I said what everyone else was thinking: the whole thing would make us look like we had wandered out of a costume drama. He scowled, the chamber laughed, and Charts abstained, muttering that scarves interfere with compasses. Which is classic Charts. He is probably already calculating how the threads in the scarves will distort magnetic fields.

They finally settled on Practical Mariner, with optional scarves in Order colors. I will allow the scarves, but I am still sticking with jeans. Maybe the Pikachu shirt too, just to irritate Barlow. If the documentary is going to beam us into living rooms across the country, I would rather look like myself than like a ferryboat conductor auditioning for Masterpiece Theatre.

And yet, it hit me tonight that for some of them this is not cosplay. I always thought the Edwardian expedition look was a bit of theater, a costume game they played to make themselves feel like grand explorers. But when Alistar straightened his waistcoat before speaking, when Barlow fussed over the scarf folds as if they were sacred geometry, I realized they were not pretending. They meant it. The boots, the scarves, even the absurd waxed jackets are their way of staking a claim to tradition.

I do not share their taste, but I cannot laugh at it anymore either. My T-shirts do the same thing: a kind of flag. They remind me where I come from, who I am, and that I do not need starch and wool to prove I belong. Maybe that is all they are doing too, only with more buttons.

So yes, Practical Mariner with scarves it is. I will play along to a point. But the jeans are staying. And if anyone wants to pry Pikachu off me, they can file a motion with the Etiquette Committee.