I Like Ugly Things | San Antonio Style Photographer

I remember a time when I truly dressed for me. Not for a job or for the attention of a boy or for my mother or the clique-y PTO moms. My style was my own. It took me a while to get there – I’d say around my senior year of high school. But when I did get there, I really got there.

The one getup that always stands out in my mind was this French vanilla colored t-shirt with a giant black felt giraffe head sprawled across it. I wore it with these cargo Capri pants made of what I can only assume was some sort of imitation shark skin? I don’t know. They were shiny, slick and gray and had lots of black strings hanging from them. And to just make absolutely certain I’d spend my entire first year of college with no dates, I clobbered around in a pair of calf high bubble-toe combat boots.

I eventually wiggled my way into a style that I felt was my own and that also didn’t make me look like a walking pile of just no. But the older I get and the deeper I settle into my role of mom-slash-gym rat, the less risks I take and the less effort I make to express myself through my clothing and that was a thing that I very much enjoyed doing before kids.

Every now and then I buck up and buy a bold piece or two. When it happens, I walk into my house and say to my husband “I bought an ugly thing today. I’m gonna try it on now so you can make all your jokes about it” and then I try it on and he makes no less than 7 jokes about it and we laugh and then we move on. On Monday I bought an ugly thing. Ok, I honestly don’t think it’s ugly. But it does the body zero favors. There was just something about it that made me feel playful and light and since I had a gift card I figured why not.