Time Crystal
On dressing as a way of maintaining a self
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TIME CRYSTAL
Most days, I dress as if I’m riffing on a recipe.
It’s simple. A pair of pants that either genuinely count as slacks or are slacks-adjacent, never skinny, rarely denim. A shirt with a collar, preferably with buttons. If I’ve buttoned all the buttons, I wear a bolo tie or a necklace in a similar style. If I’ve not buttoned all the buttons, I tie a bandana or a small scarf around my neck. (Occasionally, pussybow blouses are allowed as a way to split the difference.) On days when I feel compelled to be more casual, I wear the same pants but with a tee, a cardigan, and another neckerchief. If I expect to be exceptionally cold in the office, I layer a knit sweater or a vest over the collared shirt, but make sure that the collar is showing. Almost always, I wear a belt and whether its buckle is silver or gold dictates the rest of my jewelry and what shade of shimmery powder I will use to highlight my cheekbones. When I can, I wear sneakers, mostly the type of Vans sneakers that are marketed as “old school,” and when it’s cold or raining I wear Doc Martens.
This is my standard outfit and I pair it with my standard face. The latter always includes black winged eyeliner, big brows and lots of blush. If I am wearing colorful clothes, I try my best to match them with colorful eyeshadow. I cycle through all shades of lipstick, from warm browns to cool pinks and purples. Though I work in an office with tinted windows where I am mostly illuminated by the blue glow of several computer screens, I am painted as if someone will study my face from far away and under the brightest of lights. On Zoom, I look like I might invite you to plunge into an animated journey with me any minute.
Every morning before work I brush my teeth, wash my face, eat my smoothie and put myself together for the day according to this recipe. It’s a recipe for a nonbinary writer who lives in New York, a recipe for a foreign kid who came of age in America, a recipe for a recovering academic scientist, a recipe for someone who doesn’t always feel like they can get out of bed but still does anyway. It’s a recipe for me.
For the most part, my closet is optimized for this standard outfit. There are several cuts of pants that I own in different colors, and if I reach for a hanging item my hands almost always land on a button down shirt. Maintaining my closet in this way is practical - it saves me time and spares me from indecision.
I think of my pantry similarly. A box of pasta, a can of beans, a jar of artichoke hearts, and some capers suggest a pasta salad even when I am not aware that I am craving one. Dried rice, red lentils and spices invite the idea of a hearty soup poured over fragrant grains as soon as I open the cabinet door and spot them. I can’t remember the last time I looked up a recipe for a pasta salad or a lentil soup, but I don’t have to: my muscle memory and the items adorning the shelves whisper it to me. The same is true of the standard outfit recipe: it can emerge from my closet, and quickly, even when I’m not at my best.
Most elements in the standard outfit recipe have an origin story, or I can at least recall the moment that led to their addition. For instance, I remember getting ready to go to a birthday party as a freshman in high school when my mom suggested that I wear an old red bandana she had. I was obsessed with metal music at the time and the closest she could meet me was to think of Axl Rose. Rose wore his red bandana on his head, but I tied mine around my neck. I really don’t know why, but the style stuck with me and became one of my staples.
Much later, I would realize that its mild invocation of certain men’s styles in the 1950s rhymes with my short hair, which is cut in a way that draws inspiration from the same era yet isn’t fully true to it.1 This tentative connection between my hair, the accessory, and a stylized, romanticized image of masculinity now feels affirming of my nonbinary gender, but it is not at all clear that it always served that function. Has my understanding of it changed over the years to accommodate my changing understanding of myself, or was that first moment of knotting it underneath my chin somehow clairvoyant?
The bandana, for me, then has a complicated history of being taken in and out of different contexts, of being a symbol whose meaning and provenance have sometimes gotten mistranslated from one situation to another, ultimately becoming a hybrid of the extremely personal and the fairly generic.
In Small Fires, discussing the repeated performance of a tomato sauce recipe,
writes:“The recipe is a method for responding to things… when I perform the recipe, things become other things in a messier transformation than words in a sentence.”
Later, she underlines a recipe’s inability to stand alone, to be independent, marking it as an entry point “into the chaos of intersubjectivity, of relation.”
Some of the relationships that my outfit recipe invited, invokes and galvanizes are with my influences, and some of them are with past and future versions of myself. When I tie a bandana around my neck in the morning the act becomes not just a matter of routine but of reintegrating all of its past meanings into who I am now. It is a choice to stay connected to who I was the last time I dressed myself in this way, to build who I am right now on the foundation of my own history.
“I am a pragmatic shopper, but I am also sentimental and romantic, and these traits intersect through the idea of imbuing my clothing with layers of memories,” writes
. As those memories pile up and compound, the clothing items that I like the most become so emotionally robust and sturdy as to anchor my sense of self.In physics, repetition gives rise to stable structures, like crystals. If you could move through a perfect crystal you would encounter identical atoms repeating at regular intervals. Having the standard outfit recipe invites outfit and garment repetition, which in turn slowly helps me build a stable sense of self.
Objects that repeat in time have a rigorous physics definition too - in 2012, Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek named them “time crystals.” A year later he told Quanta magazine that publicly sharing this idea, which came to him while teaching a class on ordinary crystals, could embarrass him. This is because the defining feature of a time crystal is that it cycles through the same set of configurations over and over without any energy input, which gives it a repeating temporal structure but also makes it easy to confuse with an impossible perpetual motion machine.
Wilczek, however, mathematically proved that this type of repetition through time could be the equilibrium state of some quantum objects. In 2021, after several years of skepticism and controversies within the theoretical physics community, an experiment with a quantum computer lent lots of empirical credence to his argument. Other experiments followed, cementing time crystals as something that can exist - and be intentionally created. “Time crystals have gone from being a conceptual idea motivated by highly theoretical considerations to something that people are trying to use for technology,” Wilczek told me in 2022 and I have, more recently, reported on several such attempts.
Because I am interested in how my sense of self informs and is informed by what I look like, I compulsively catalogue my looks in photographs, videos2 and on social media. When I scroll through those feeds, I see a pattern of repetition emerging, a buttoned, eyeliner-ed version of a stability that I hope resides within me, a sense of not stagnation but an equilibrium. This is my personal technology for perpetuating the self.
’s Jonah Weiner and Erin Wylie say it more directly:“You know how when you’re watching a movie or TV show and you notice a character repeating the same garment across several time periods / different episodes? Erin and I always appreciate this when we clock it, because Garment Repeating is what Real People as opposed to Fake Characters actually do.”
They predicted that garment repeating would be a major trend among their readership in 2025, but I think I’ve wanted to be a Real Person for quite a while. Weiner and Wylie point to the need, and pressure, to share a new outfit online every day as a culprit for how Real People become Fake Characters. The environmental cost of this is steep. There is an emotional cost too, one that sometimes feels nearly spiritual.
As a Catholic child I also learned to associate repetition with devotion, awe and gratitude, like the repeated recitation of the rosary. Starting most days with shirt buttons slipping through my fingers shares something tactile with this type of prayer.
“Could the body in the act of dressing itself be a talisman?” asks
and though I have not prayed in years, I find myself believing in this kind of magic. In getting dressed so similarly day in and day out, I hope to summon myself into myself, and manifest a me-ness that I may not be able to fully verbalize just yet.
In one of my general education courses in college, I read Dick Hebdige’s “Subculture: the meaning of style.” Because I had moved to the United States only several years prior and was still deeply committed to the idea of being part of what was called “subculture” back home in Croatia and a “scene” in America, I gobbled the book up despite having never heard of Stuart Hall or Roland Barthes or any of Hebidge’s other references.
Though his framework has since been criticized for being so inextricable from his British context, it gave me a new way to understand the way in which I had chosen to construct myself at the time. On the edge of my 20s, I had fallen somewhere between a mid-2000s goth girlfriend from the Internet and a scrawny kid who had big hair and happened to play in a band. In reality, I was neither I just couldn’t decide whether I wanted to wear ripped jeans, Converse and oversized band tees, or black maxi skirts, corsets and lace. From Hebdige, I learned to think about these objects as elements in a collage, of subcultural style as bricolage and as something of a doomed effort to seek out “explosive junction” of meaning through juxtaposing these elements, doomed because they could never be fully divorced from the context in which they were created.
“Subculture” did not persuade me to stop buying sneakers from Nike, the world's largest supplier of athletic shoes and apparel, but it made me ask more questions about both the provenance and role of each clothing item in my collection. Having grown up surrounded by metalheads and punks who wanted to look like the most legible examples of those genres, I always understood style as something of a language. Now, I was also interested in where its opposition to the status quo accidentally upheld it, and whether much the verbiage I had absorbed as contrarian and special was actually toothless. I return to those same questions when it comes to my standard outfit. It is not per se countercultural, but it often does not read as normative, and I know that some of its bones stayed intact as I grew out of looking like a music fan and into looking as someone more complicated.
In the kitchen, I tend to struggle with recipes. I like to read them, but rarely have the discipline to fully follow them. If someone were to confront me about this, I could save face by calling my style of cooking intuitive. Can I claim the same of my outfit recipe? Can I claim that I like it so much because it just emerged from my experiences and what is that but intuition?
Hebidge writes:
“Style in subculture is, then, pregnant with significance. Its transformations go 'against nature', interrupting the process of "normalization”. As such, they are gestures, movements towards a speech which offends the 'silent majority', which challenges the principle of unity and cohesion, which contradicts the myth of consensus.”
When I read the book in college, I underlined “myth” and the fact that “normalization” appeared in quotation marks. I tought that Hebdige was saying that I should be weary of anything that gets advertised as normal, as something that everyone can agree on. I am still weary of that. So, I ask myself how much of my intuition is not mine but an impulse to move towards what the dominant culture tells me is exactly that - normal.
When I recreate the standard outfit again and again, I try to feel for the rough stitch between who I am and who I think I should be. If repeatedly returning to my outfit recipe both reestablishes and reinvents who I am every day, I want to be sure that I understand where my memories and idiosyncrasies stop and where I may be inadvertently stitching the status quo into the fabric of my being. Partly, I know to worry about this because I am not actually an intuitive cook - I just watched my mom and nonnas cook a lot. No matter how much I’ve rejected many of their favorite ingredients, such as meat, my cooking will always rhyme with theirs.
Reluctantly, I remind myself that part of the standard outfit’s history includes a concession. I taught my way through graduate school which put me, and the way I look at the mercy of teaching evaluations. I formulated an early version of the standard outfit recipe once my clothes started to be mentioned in those evaluations more often than my grading policy. I told myself I had to make sure that I was not taking attention away from the physics that I was teaching and adapted a yellow cardigan, my red bandanas, black jeans and a black t-shirt as something of a uniform.
Several older physicists would later advise me to never read teaching evaluations. Almost certainly they were right, yet the uniform also did help with my confidence when faced with the students’ gaze. I liked the sense of stability and constancy. I kept wearing it. I defended my doctoral thesis in that yellow cardigan; it had become that useful in building up, and manifesting, the version of me that could have followed the normal career part and done the normal thing by becoming a physics professor. I still wore it when I was teaching faculty at an early college, even though its stiff and scratchy knit fabric was starting to fall apart.
“A neat, white, knee-length coat is universally recognized as the uniform of the scientist ... Just as we recognize a bishop by his mitre, or a burglar by his mask, we recognize a scientist by his lab coat,”
biologist Frederick Warburton wrote in Science in 1960. He argued that, at that time, most scientists wore their lab coats not as workwear, but more like regalia, like a garment reserved for special occasions when a scientist’s status is being recognized or they simply want to emphasize it. Warburton was direct about it:
“Scientists have momentarily achieved a position of high prestige, but in a democratic society (as in any other) prestige without symbols is but fleeting, while symbols without prestige may endure forever.”
If the lab coat becomes sufficiently lodged in the common imagination as a symbol of skill, wisdom or, more crudely, high class3, then scientists will always benefit from it.
I was trained as a theorist so never had a real need or an excuse to wear a lab coat. If anything, my older colleagues preferred embodying the image of a scientist so consumed by work that they forget to tie their shoes or put on a clean sweater. The symbol of their status was not the lab coat, but the ability to forgo that and many other conventions of respectable dressing.
Precariously positioned somewhere between the two, my thrifted yellow cardigan took on both my desire to conform with other theorists, to be respected by my students, and my rejection of some of the other physicists’ disregard for appearance. It was a little bit like veganizing a Starbucks lemon loaf or a sweetgreen salad - my own, but not necessarily all that rebellious or revolutionary. This too is part of the ancestry of the standard outfit.
And I am certainly influenced by my most literal elders and ancestors, like my mom. Whenever she visits me, she always insists on cooking a meal for us, and I get to see that she too cooks according to only the loosest of recipes. She serves me dishes that I have had many times before, but they are never exact replicas of those past shared meals. At the dinner table, she offers me the present of repetition that retains that crystal-like sense of stability but also invites curiosity about what she has changed and why.
In contrast, my mom is much less of an outfit repeater. Because she often visits New York at the hottest part of the summer when we are bound to spend lots of time outside, she packs a new capsule collection of garments to show off every year. Most years, she goes home with a new pair of shoes or some thrifted gem too. My self-archiving project amuses her, and she is happy to crash an outfit photo or a TikTok video where her looks act as spice for my well-practiced recipe.
Notably, in the one video of us that actually makes it online, I’ve deviated from the recipe and I’m wearing jeans and a crop top, trying to embody what is normally considered to be casual. My mom is in a dress that I’ve never seen before, but she easily makes any garment her own through her pure force of will. Watching us together, with our matching cheekbones and mismatched body language, it is clear to me that her project of dressing is simply one of enjoyment, of showing out because the time is right to do so and because she can. In the language of astrology she is a Leo, in the language of queer culture she is a femme.
In saying this, I am projecting meaning onto her from the standpoints of cultures that I am conversant in, from the standpoint of my non-normative normal. But this doesn’t protect me from being misgendered when we are out together, when men on the street suddenly start to include me in “hey ladies” or when strangers and acquaintances alike say that we could be sisters.
When I do my makeup, my mom ambles into the bathroom and rummages among my old lipsticks, or I offer her swipes of new shimmery eyeshadow palettes. “You need to put this one on the back of your hand first,” I say in the same conspiratorial tone that a one homecook may use to divulge the secret of a perfect pie crust or the most effortless baked mac to another. In 1989 scholar Susan Leonardi called this type of chatter a “prototypical feminine activity,” when it pertains to giving a food recipe a bed of social interactions to embed into.4 Beauty and makeup are often seen similarly, which puts me in something of a bind - I love to be painted, but do not do it for the sake of femininity.
As I write in my forthcoming book,
“As my understanding of my gender evolved over the years, I stopped wearing skirts and dresses, but my makeup routine stuck. It had never been about emulating subtle, or femininity that could be deemed natural so instead of losing role models when I realized that I was not a woman, I could look to androgynous and effeminate men who were becoming more common creators of online makeup tutorials. Makeup is traditionally associated with the gender that was assigned to me at birth, but it ultimately helped me make peace with that assignment having been incorrect.”
A friend put the sentiment in fewer words once, joking that what we are both really striving for is to be “fruity little boys.” We could laugh about it, and we did, because the way we saw each other was already concordant with how each of us saw ourselves. Our clothes and makeup alone would likely leave many people unconvinced that we are more than just two girls with a propensity to chuckle in public. This is a salient point about the limited power of the standard outfit and its recipe. While it may offer me endless comfort and reassurance, its taste is not universally palatable, or recognizable to every palate. My standard face makes me feel affirmed, like I have successfully subverted the aims of the makeup industry, even though it may only be me that sees it that way. Reading Subculture all those years ago warned me about this, yet I hang onto my sense of agency - that too is crucial for how I keep myself my own.
Undoubtedly, right now is a time of crisis in the United States and even the pockets of society where those who believe that some things are perfectly rational, objective and apolitical used to be able to hide are being affected. Laws have been blatantly disregarded or perverted and science has been attacked even when its practitioners espoused political neutrality and a blind belief in meritocracy. It is hard to identify a cultural norm or facet of government that centrist and self-proclaimed reasonable liberals were banking on being upheld that stayed unscathed since January. The notion of culture wars or cultural issues increasingly feels like a meaningless distinction. What kind of culture is implicated when we discuss denials of medical care to trans people, deadly outbreaks of preventable diseases like measles, or being disappeared for exercising free speech as happened to Mahmoud Khalil?
The list of things, and literal words, that can get you embroiled in a culture war is seemingly endless now. The use of the word ‘culture’ has become disingenuous but it was also always meant to demote some issues to seeming less important. So-called culture war issued were to be seen as extras that we only get to argue about when all the presumably more serious crises have been resolved. Some democratic post mortems of the past US presidential election went heavy on this point: we should have talked more about the price of eggs than pronouns. This is a disingenuous argument from a party that didn’t care for or discuss either, but it establishes who and what matters in the eyes of the powerful.
Fashion and cooking have both been relegated to the culture category, even a step below more bombastic “culture war” issues, especially because of their historical framing as women’s interests and the domain of feminized labor. But as everything is now being argued about as a cultural issue. Political campaigns are spreading rumors about immigrants eating dogs, government officials post about making America blonde again, and it’s increasingly becoming clear that this hierarchy of issues has always been useless at best and harmful and fraudulent at worst. As
wrote recently, not only does fascism have a look but that look is an integral part of how it perpetuates itself, the dusty foundations and bad filler are not accidental but rather a crucial part of the point.Where does the recipe by which I put myself together every day fit within this? Though it helps solidify and reaffirm me as me, it also cannot protect me from having to interact with people, whether they’ve clocked me as one of their own, the nightmare scenario where they label me as someone that should not exist, or something that falls messily in the middle. At the end, it’s all just clothes and eyeliner that I bought from companies that I paid money for, that in itself does not stand a high chance of being revolutionary.
But I take a lot of solace in the fact that it is a recipe and not a formula, that it allows me to be steady but flexible, that it does not change off of my horizon. It gives me a scaffolding for how I appear in the world, a basic mechanism of self-perpetuation, but it doesn’t lock me into a state so stagnant that I’d forget the tantalizing and beautiful messiness of humanity as I keep recreating myself. Really, that is what gives me the most hope, that I know who I am, but do not necessarily know who I may still become. The recipe could change, just like I let go off that yellow cardigan. I want that sort of open-endedness for all of us; it feels like a small taste of freedom. And maybe a more rigid prescription would save me from occasional awkwardness that comes with being misread or misunderstood, but I don’t know if you can really expect that from someone who’s never made the same tomato sauce twice.
Best,
Karmela
I have met men who are fully committed to truthfully recreating the shapes and volumes of that time, and immediately understood that I will never have that sort of conviction.
I lost appetite for TikTok after the temporary ban, but have kept my account exactly because it serves as an archive.
The three are certainly not synonymous.
Delightfully, Leonardi indulges the pun of talking about the “bed” in “embed” throughout this essay.
This is such a beautiful piece! Thank you for letting us into your process.
I loved learning more about how you think about clothes, and I love seeing your daily looks!