Day-to-night Fashion

Lifestyle magazines attempt to alleviate the stress of transitions by offering simple solutions. In repetitive, predictable copy, these magazines insist that a sartorial shift into night-mode involves tweaking one aspect of your daytime look—swapping flats for heels, a nude lipstick for a bold one, incorporating a statement piece to abruptly transform.

But what they fail to address is the greater complexity of our lives. The basic cultural premise that work and play are a dichotomy has almost completely disintegrated, and with so much technological reliance—are day and night even the clear polarity they once were? Work is play, day is night, the city never sleeps, and despite all this, we have to dress ourselves.

The term moonlighting refers to a secondary job, done in the relative secrecy granted by the light of the moon. Under the cover of night, we can become entirely different people, returning to our "ordinary" selves when the sun rises again. There is an implication that we must act a certain way during the day—more professional, conservative, “normal”—but during the night-time, we can unleash the beast. Like light and dark, we are made up of internal dualities, a Jekyll and Hyde in all of us, with the shift between identities hinging on even the most minor disguise.

Consider Clark Kent, who removes or returns his glasses to his face to transform into Superman and back again. The shift from day-mode to night-mode involves an element of costume, a quick and easy change in a phone booth or a bathroom stall on the way from the office to the club. Allow the shadows to make room for expression, evolve into your most flamboyant form. Exercise your drudgery demons on the streets of your city, transform into your own superhero, donning a pair of after-dark sunglasses, a fluffy tulle dress a chic stand-in for a cape.

If you are young and living in an urban center, chances are you divide your time in two ways: by day you work to pay the bills, by night you party to balance the scale. And transition time between the two modes can be smaller than the single window in your railroad apartment. When work involves hip bar-hopping, the distinction is barely-there. Will nude nylons and stealthily orthopedic pumps cut it at cocktail hour? If day and night, labor and leisure, all blend together into one long-ass day—what does it even mean to dress for the hour?

What the dissolution of dichotomy provides us is the opportunity to do away with our own dualities. If the breakdown allows for one big amalgam of time and activity, it also grants a fluidity of identity. Dress for night by day, work till dawn, sleep until sunset. Business casual at the nightclub, a silk slip at your Monday meeting. The freedom from structure is the ability to be fluid, to be super-human.