An Outfit Defines the Person

Recall the last time you saw a smartly dressed man or woman gracing down the sidewalk in fabrics so finely made, they caused you a double-take. Chances are good that within your double-take, in that calculation and appreciation for such exceptional threads, you formed an idea about the person behind those clothes. With the outfit as your leaping off point, you arrived at a description of its wearer.

Just as my fellow Philosophy students and I did in ontology class, you briefly pondered what made that person who he or she was and arrived at a rough sketch. I'll argue here that one's style of dress plays a heavy role in determining that. Start with me as an example. Sometimes my idea of dressing up means pulling on a clean baseball hat. If my socks match and my pants don't show visible stains, I'm ready for a night on the town.

This fashion, or noted lack thereof, goes with my personality. I'm the type who focuses on the practical necessities in life, leaving any luxurious pining to be the fluff that I might occasionally daydream about on airplanes while flipping through magazines. I dwell in the realm of simple and basic. It never occurs to me to tailor a T-shirt for a better fit or that a hair barrette might actually MATCH my outfit. Maybe this will change, but for now it's who I am. Meanwhile, I often give lots of thought to why other people dress the way they do.

An outfit I have often pondered is the Western riding outfit. Assuming I would never in my English riding career wear such a thing unless for a Halloween party, I have frequently stared at cowgirls in their fringe-laden, blingy get-ups and wondered how practical any of that could be.

Then, I decided to enter a Western Dressage show and found myself needing to don just such an outfit. That is where the transformation began, where this new outfit began to define a new me.

First off, getting dresses required two helpers. Probably not since Fourth grade had someone else helped me put on pants, but I found the chaps too tricky to master myself. All that dangling fringe kept catching in the zipper. So, finally I let two bystanders help cram me into my clothes. One zipped the chaps on while the other shoved me underneath a cowboy hat. With a long-sleeved sparkly shirt and a pair of jangly spurs, I was ready for the arena... and very hot.

By Sacramento, CA standards it was an average summer day-- nearing 100 degrees. Inside that Western gear felt like an incubator. I peered from under the hat's enormous brim-- no easy task- and walked slowly over to where my horse stood wilting in the heat. Sleeved in glittery Lycra, my arms began to sweat. Meandering to the warm-up pen, I started to understand why Western riders often seem to be moving so slowly compared to us English folks. Normally, I would have launched into an array of high-energy warm-ups moves with my steed. Instead, we slowly limbered up and found our groove. Melting under my big stiff hat, it occurred to me why Western riders never seemed as frenetically paced as us.

Not only do they need to conserve energy lest they suffer heat exhaustion, but after investing so much time shimmying into an outfit that includes both fringe and sparkle, why not enjoy it? At shows, we English riders change back into street clothes as soon as our class finishes. We hurry out of the jackets and collars and tall boots that make most of us look like newspaper boys from the 1800's. Now that I was wearing this Lady Gaga-style Western outfit, I felt no urge to hurry back and take it off, despite sweating at a rate that guaranteed dehydration.

Long puzzling concepts began to make sense, namely the reason that things happen slowly in the Western world, and I'm not not talking about the riding. For one thing, the dialect has always struck me as exaggeratedly unrushed. Western folks use the same time to deliver their mono-syllabic equivalents of our English multi-word phrases. For instance, Western show announcers take the same time to drawl through "pen" as it takes a dressage steward to blurt out "show arena." The same amount of time for one syllable versus four. We English trainers hurry through telling our students to "apply your inside leg" in the same time a Western coach relaxes through suggesting a student "bump" her horse.

Without realizing it, by wiggling into this borrowed costume, I was sampling a world that long intrigued me. My steed and I moved at a markedly slower pace than normal. And maybe because of that, or because of the blissed out costumed feel-good of his rider, my horse offered up more relaxation and submission than he often does. Our movements were quiet and graceful. We went smoothly through our paces with our fringe and bling catching the attention, I hoped, of anyone watching. I pondered the unhurried conversations I've overheard among cowboys, their "we've-got-all-the-time-in-the-world" interactions with their horses. For this brief moment, I got a taste of that. And I'll admit that, in my snug sparkly shirt and eggplant colored chaps, I felt pretty darn cool. For one wonderful hour, I was my own John Wayne style hero-- full of smooth moves, good swagger, and long pauses.

That is what initiated this reflection about a person's fashion defining her to some extent. It might be hyperbolic to say that an outfit can change a person, but it sure helps create a mindset. In my case, it helped me leap across the Great Divide of equestrian sports: English vs. Western. Had I always viewed that other discipline while clad in my tight breeches and polo shirt, I would have continued to see it as, well, a bit funny. By adopting the look and feel of it for a day, though, I experienced it genuinely. Having done so, I experienced that I long suspected: that we each have tons to learn from each other if we can be open-minded.

It's not that I want to close the chasm between us so that we share one world. Rather, I actually like the separation because it allows riders to fit in wherever they feel most comfortable. I would just like us all to be open and accepting of each other in different disciplines. Plus, I want the opportunity to cross-dress my way through each one. Er, I mean cross-train.

The Kiss

I tend to think that all of us in the horse world are pretty similar even if we participate in different disciplines. Surely, we're birds of a feather and all that, regardless of the fact I ride English but you might ride Western, right?

Well, sometimes this rosy picture of oneness crumbles apart as I realize that there are indeed vast differences that accompany individuals from other disciplines. Last week, I bumped into this realization yet again while schooling a dressage horse in our arena while a Western lesson took place. The Western rider and I stayed out of each other's way no problem. But I couldn't help being distracted by her trainer's instructions for schooling her horse. To be polite, they sounded far too simple. Almost easy, in fact.

You see, in the dressage world, giving your horse a cue to do something (which happens at minimum every half-second), nearly requires a Graduate degree in Physics. For instance, a dressage trainer would tell you to make your horse canter like this:

"Half-halt-on-your-outside-rein-and-then-step lightly-into-your-inside stirrup-and-lift-your-ribcage-on-that-side-and-now-deepen-your-outside-sitting bone-and-draw-your-hips-forward-and-count 1,2,1,2-and-and give a squeeze-with-outside-leg-at-2."

Whew.

It's no wonder dressage riders carry around the stereotype of being too serious and slightly uptight. Constantly wrestling with that much data input and output would be enough to give someone an anxiety disorder. Interestingly, though, after a while we all get used to it. Until I observed the Western lesson, that is.

The Western trainer told her student to get her horse to pick up the canter by making a kissing noise. If you've ever hung around Western trainers, you'll notice quickly that they use a kissing sound for pretty much everything. Want your horse to step over a pole? Kiss to him. Want your horse to turn through a gait? Kiss. Pick up a right lead canter? Kiss. Left lead canter? Ditto.

Admittedly, when I first encountered this Kiss phenomenon a few years back, I struck an uppity high-brow dressage attitude. Where were the nuances of training and riding? I asked. How was a horse supposed to tell from one slurpy wet kiss whether he was supposed to a.)canter, b.)go backwards, or c.) get in a horse trailer? Where was the micro-managing and hair-splitting of signals that we dressage riders had perfected? Surely, no horse could rightly perform without this impressive library of cues such as when, where, and how often the rider should contract her right inner thigh. And yet there were all those Western horses doing all kinds of things with just the prompting of their riders' lips pressed together.

Huh?

I won't hide that my uppity attitude towards this Western riding came from a big dose of envy. Yes, my belief that the myriad of dressage cues ranked superior to Western training came from the simple fact that I had tried the Kiss... and failed miserably.

Several years ago, I was helping my lovable cowboy friend Mark compete some of his horses. I was doing very well with them except for one large problem: I couldn't make them canter. Despite my years and years of training and instruction all over the world, I could not make his horses canter even one stride. I used the most sophisticated signals that my butt and legs could muster and still nothing happened. Embarrassed, I asked Mark for help.

His horses only responded to a Kiss, he explained. A what? Were we talking about training horses here? Mark got a good chuckle that I'd not only never heard of such a thing but likely could not pull it off. A quick note: Mark's perception of New Englanders like myself is that we are, in his words, "frosty." That's his polite way of saying we're tight-lipped and rigid. I prefer to think we're simply reserved and cautious, but Mark had his own ideas, thus dubbing me the "Ice Princess," which I guess for a dressage trainer is pretty suitable.

After demonstrating several rounds of an appropriate Kiss, Mark told me to ride off on his handsome stallion and give it a try myself. Already deeply humbled that I, the well-heeled dressage trainer, was taking advice from someone with a Texas drawl in blue jeans, I was determined to nail this thing. I launched into a big ground-covering trot with his Arabian stallion, aimed for the corner where I wanted to canter, and then squeezed my lips together. And made a sound like spitting out a cherry pit. I tried again quickly and this time sounded like I was sucking food from my teeth. The horse kept trotting. I pursed, blew spit. We never cantered.

Mark told me if I were ever going to nail that Kiss, I'd need to be a whole lot less "frosty." That meant, of course, I needed to act like less of a dressage rider. Like not sitting stone-faced with a broomstick stuck down my jacket. Like not trying to cue his horses with one-hundred fidgety nuances of cues at once. Just relax a little... and Kiss. And don't Kiss with that tight-lipped uptight look on your face, he said in his slow drawl. Maybe practice at home with a mirror like a teenager, he smirked, or read some romantic novels.

Of course, I'm reticent to admit this, but I did go home and practice. And I just never got any better than that sour cherry pit noise. I never managed any well-articulated slurpy sounds that even remotely resembled what I heard in Western arenas. Damn! Maybe what I previously thought was the world's easiest riding cue would be forever elusive to me. I, however, prefer to think that my tight-lipped failure at the Kiss simply means I belong in a dressage saddle giving mind-boggling cues to my horses. So, nowadays whenever a Western trainer asks me to ride his or her horse, I politely decline because I'm still at home practicing that Kiss with a mirror.