For Auburn Kelton, fashion is a means of self-expression and exploration — a way to express herself as a graphic designer and a way to explore gender presentation. Fashion, to her, is also intrinsically linked to mental health.
About a year ago, Kelton, senior in graphic design, and her friends decided to throw a Halloween party with a theme. They decided on “monochrome,” and everyone came to the party dressed in one solid color.
Kelton started thinking about all of her clothes and began creating piles of clothes sorted by color. When she realized she had so many, she decided to make an entire personal project out of it.
Every Monday, she would post a photo on her Instagram of that week’s outfit. White linen pants paired with a white top, pearls and a white flower crown posed in front of a white wall in downtown Auburn. Full light-washed denim garb complete with jeans, button down, jacket and hat posed in front of the light blue doors that once led into Freewheeler Bicycle Shop.
“It was just something that was a fun challenge for me, I guess,” Kelton said. “But to make it even more challenging, the real challenge was to find matching backgrounds.”
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During her freshman year at Auburn, the school she’s named after, Kelton said she gravitated toward almost exclusively black and gray clothes, and she found that it had a profound effect on her mood.
“For the first time, because I was on my own, I was realizing just how badly I was depressed and dealing with anxiety,” Kelton said.
After recognizing the state of her mental health, the road to dealing with it encompassed a lot of things, but her appearance and her fashion were certainly factors.
In May 2017, she was still sporting long brown wavy hair that she said she usually threw into a ponytail or under a hat.
“When I cut my hair off, that really gave me the freedom to just go for it because when my hair was long I felt like I had to — even on the days when I would be wearing a flannel and jeans — I felt like I was still immediately read as feminine all the time.”
Now, Kelton has a pixie cut; her hair is short, and sometimes she lets it drape over her forehead naturally and sometimes she wears it spiked.
“There’s a difference between gender identity and gender presentation,” she said. “So, at the core of it, I’m a girl. I’m a [cisgender] woman, but there are days I wake up feeling masculine, and there are days I wake up feeling feminine.”
Cutting her hair allowed her freedom of self-expression and gave her the room to dress how she wanted, and that, she said, drastically helped her mental well-being.
“I’ve become more of myself,” Kelton said. “To do a whole project (Monochrome Mondays) around wearing as much color as you can, living the most vibrant life that you can, going out and doing photoshoots in spaces that people are going to see you … I just felt so much myself doing that.”
Kelton said the project not only changed her relationship with her mental health, it also allowed her to explore different aspects of her personal style.
She said her pink monochrome outfit is a lace dress, but it’s still true to her because she wore a motorcycle jacket and her hair is spiked.
And while pink and lace are so naturally linked to femininity, there are other outfits in the series in which she wore slim-fit men’s trousers and a button down.
“I’m working on breaking down what society has told me I need to be and making my own definition of what it is to be a woman,” Kelton said.
For Kelton, Monochrome Monday outfits were just the beginning of living and presenting herself as authentically as possible.
“I think dressing well makes you feel good,” she said. “When you put care into how you’re expressing yourself, you feel better.”
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