Model in a baseball cap: Chic, easy-breezy, sporty yet feminine.
Me in a baseball cap: Garth from Wayne’s World.
Model in overalls: Sun-dappled cottagecore beauty, laughing on their bicycle, en route to the farm stand for $17 heirloom tomatoes and eggs laid by chickens named Astrid and Paloma. Keeps bees.
Me in overalls: Supernaturally enormous toddler, knees dirty within five minutes and a band-aid coming unstuck from my scraped elbow. Takes 25 minutes to unbuckle every time I need to pee.
Model in a relaxed-fit “boyfriend shirt”: Elegant half-tuck, all dainty wrists and swan-like neck, delicate, graceful, balletic.
Me in a relaxed-fit “boyfriend shirt”: Head floating atop a rectangular box of a body, which is somehow also wrinkled.
Model with a low ponytail: Sleek, stylish. Owns an art gallery.
Me with a low ponytail: Founding father or soldier in the Revolutionary War. Walks into every room ears-first. Never been frizzier.
Model with a flannel shirt tied around their waist: Effortless normcore cool. Gorgeous on a skateboard.
Me with a flannel shirt tied around my waist: C+ in pre-algebra, parents recently divorced. Got my period during morning assembly and when I stood up everyone saw. The English teacher who made us all call him by his first name and always had his acoustic guitar in the trunk of his car felt bad for me and lent me his shirt and I had to wear it for the rest of the day and then the seventh-grade boys threw tampons at me on the bus.
Model in a silk sheath dress: Unbearably sexy and sophisticated. Commands awe and respect. We can’t start the meeting until they arrive, nails the big presentation, and thereby humiliates the cartoonish misogynist villain of a client while single-handedly saving the company from bankruptcy. They speak four languages, has a chilled glass of their favorite rare vintage waiting for them on a napkin because the hot young bartender is in unrequited love with them.
Me in a silk sheath dress: The sweatiest person the doctor has ever seen.
Model in palazzo pants: Worldly glamour, ingénue, married to a brilliant film director but having a secret affair with a novelist. Currently en route to Portugal from the Greek Islands and only packed a toothbrush and a bikini.
Me in palazzo pants: Your recluse hoarder aunt who lives upstate. Gayle.