Fluidity

Directed by Jane Houseal, Fashion Editorial Assistant, Gabrielle Gronewold, Editor in Chief, Emily Fleming, PR & Outreach Director and Ella Cunz, Fashion Staff Member

Photographed by Hannah Huber, Staff Photographer, and Jami Balicki, Staff Photographer Filmed by Madelyn Vilker, Videography Director, and Elizabeth Kallies, Staff Videographer Makeup by Riley August, Makeup Director Modeled and written by Dia Ferrara

Unraveling my Identity

Allowing the freedom of fluidity into my life has left me feeling like a knot, unraveling. At first, it felt impossible for me to know where to start picking apart the years of disorientation that defined my identity.

When I was young, I was defined by others as a “tomboy.” All I wore were athletic shorts and tees. The boys didn’t let me play with them because I was a girl, although I grew up playing with the boys in my neighborhood and I was better at sports than half of them. The only girls the boys wanted to be friendly to were the ones who dressed like, well, girls. One day, I went home and decided I would go back to school as a girl. I found the only pink shirt I had and begged my parents to buy me skinny jeans. As soon as I let the world define me as a girl, I felt like I couldn’t go back. From then on I had to watch girls closely in order to understand how they worked. I shaved my legs because girls shaved their legs. I learned how to put my hair in a perfect pony instead of letting it hang, as my mom would say, in a “rat's nest.” It took me years of trying and failing to prove myself as a girl. Years of hiding my messy room, of holding my tongue when a boy said something rude to me, of being quiet and obedient because apparently, that's how girls were “supposed” to be. I had too much of what boys were supposed to have, and not enough of what girls were. It was all so much, feeling like I had to prove myself as something that I wasn’t. The knot inside grew tighter and tighter the longer I had to try and show girls and women that I belonged. Women were neat, clean, elegant ... at least that’s what I thought, what I saw.

I only began unraveling the knot a couple of years ago. When I realized that I can be everything that I am, I can be me and be a woman. I can feel the “boy” inside me who wants to run around, get dirty, wear baggy clothes and boxers, and I want to let him live. That doesn’t change at all that I am a woman. I like to show off my curves, wear makeup, and accessorize. Most of all, I like to bring these identities together as one.

Through it all, clothes have been by my side and fashion has been there to lift me up. I very much have my own sense of style, something that is mine, that I created. My clothes let me explore the infinite possibilities within my identity, because, the truth is, I don’t know where I stand. One day I am something, and I am sure of it. The next day, I am entirely something else. It’s a part of my dynamic human experience. Clothes are the best way for me to flow from one part of myself to another, sometimes multiple times in one day. How I feel is how I dress, how I dress is who I want to be.

At the end of the day, I hope for this issue to inspire everyone to open up to fluidity in gender expression. I know there are women and girls out there like me. I know there are boys and men out there like me too. I know there are a hell of a lot of people inbetween and outside the terms we coined for gender in America. Together, we have to work on untying these knots society has embedded within us. It still feels like it will take a lifetime to unravel my own. Nonetheless, the knot feels looser than it's ever been, closer to freedom from itself than ever before. So long as we keep unraveling …

Enjoy! Dia Ferrara

Strangers

Why is it when I am not confined within the walls of my own home, or should I say my own head, when I feel the most free?

Or does it make perfect sense; one can only truly see once they have fled home, once they have left the confines of the mind or otherwise the nest.

That is when our eyes will be or have been opened to the world of the strangers, one so seemingly foreign yet possibly closer to the heart than the family may be, with their preconceived emotions about who we are, how we act, what we may or may not be inside the confines of their own homes.

Let me be freed from the minds of those who think they know my home, let the strangers see me for who I am however that may be, for they may see what my home has blinded from me.

My heart the cobra

My heart sheds layers like a newborn snake's skin. Cracking and breaking and being reborn with rapid, forced, painful growth occurring beneath.

By now, my heart has grown into a cobra. Do not mess with my heart, for she will strike with the strength of the thousands of skins she has shed.