Let's Get Weird

January is when the kooks come out to play.

A friend and I were talking about our “words” for 2025—ie, the single word or phrase that encapsulates what we most want to manifest in the year ahead (highly-recommend!). She was toying around with “weird” and its various permutations: freak, weirdo, quirk, and anything else that would embody her urge to tap into her uniqueness and one-and-only way of seeing things, and embrace it all as her superpower. She finally settled on something different (but equally fitting), but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the idea of being a big weirdo and letting my own inner freak show out of her cell.

Especially now. It’s January, and there’s an almost jarring stillness—especially coming off the holidays. I love the quiet, if anything because it presents an unoccupied space to do…whatever. It’s dark out; we’re wintering; many of us aren’t drinking. Taking a page from Katherine May’s book, Wintering, this is the time to burrow, to fold up into ourselves and replenish whatever it is our bodies and minds are craving: sleep, nourishment, some good movies or books. (We’re not that different from the flora and fauna when you think about it.) It’s also a moment to acknowledge the selves we’ve become in the last year— like really, really check in and see how the last twelve months have altered us: what we’ve shed and gained, how we’ve evolved, and if we’re ok with these subconscious software updates.

It’s a great opportunity for closet purges, too: visiting with the clothes we already own, like old friends, to see if they still resonate with our current selves. But it’s also the month to let the weirder parts of our personalities and imaginations run wild. Why not transform January’s silent void into stage where we can embrace our madness and make our own noise. Let’s growl, let’s roar, let’s get really fucking weird.

It’s not about making noise for the sake of being loud, nor dressing like a clown for the sake of being seen. It’s about pulling out that part of yourself that you know is different, but you lovingly and self-protectively conceal it because it doesn’t always align with what’s popular. Keeping everything controlled and contained all the time can require a kind of low-grade effort that gets exhausting after too long. Letting your weird out isn’t effortless, but it comes with this feeling of release and relief—a sort of tingly lightness—like a spiritual shimmy-shimmy shake—when you look in the mirror and recognize that part of yourself.

Laurel Pantin wrote about craving the gooey feeling of a little bad taste a few months ago, and I feel similarly. This is my rally cry for radical individualism and self-expression, but also a non, merci to trend-driven tastes dictated by social media and its neverending output of refracted permutations on the same theme. When it all becomes too bland—offensively inoffensive—to critique, what’s the point? The only kind of critic-proof I want to be is too cool and disinterested to care.

On the venn diagram for unleashing one’s hidden weirdo, the ideal cross-section would be where emotional intelligence (ie, having enough awareness and self-possession to not care) and a sense of pure, unadulterated soulfulness (tapping into my inner child) overlap. What that actually looks like matters less than what it feels like.

Tibi

I know I’m sitting comfortably in that zone when I succumb to my infatuation for this look from Tibi. It’s wonky, and the colors are practically confronting each other in a way that doesn’t feel immediately comfortable. But the more I stare at those ridiculously shaggy periwinkle blue shoes and how they seem to be talking to the skirt’s clashing persimmon lace, the more my body pumps up its serotoni production. It’s right in all the wrong-seeming ways. And I want it.

I’ve started to recognize I’m in that same space when I look at images of Chloe King, whose own style couldn’t be more visibly different from mine, and yet there’s this “yeahhhh!” feeling that invariably rumbles up. She’s a ‘spirit misfit,’ in the sense that I don’t want to dress like her, but I yearn to channel that same unselfconscious attitude.

Other spirit misfits: Leandra Medine Cohen, Patricia Field, Rick Owens, young guys who dress like grandpas and old guys who dress like dandies; Kristen Bateman, the late Iris Apfel, these dudes at the Prada menswear show earlier this month, my best friend’s six-year-old daughter…none of whose aesthetics match mine, but I find an inspired and aspirational kinship in them nonetheless.

We have a few days left of January. If you let your own inner kook out to play, what would that look like? And really, what’s the worst that could happen if it stuck around a little?