Lost in translation and in wearing When I came across this delightful AskMe earlier today, about how to dress "like a femme Indiana Jones", it got me thinking about the wearing of clothing from different cultures.→[More:]

As I came up with some advice for the asker, I realized something about my own style, how my cold weather "around home" look is something that could be described as "Irish/English/Scottish country". I wear jeans or corduroys with a basic ivory cotton top and a handknit Irish cable or fair isle sweater, a brown leather belt, sturdy brown leather ankle boots or brogues, and if I put any jewelry with that, it's my silver rose on a chain or my beloved Celtic swan ring.

The only "ethnic" wearable items I have are U.K.-inspired: a tartan scarf my parents bought me in Scotland, wool tams I knitted myself, a pair of Celtic knot silver earrings, and the aforementioned fair isle and Irish cable sweaters.

And I suppose this is because I am of English, Irish and Scottish ancestry and I look it, so I feel I have some right to items from those culture and can wear them properly. I find items from other cultures beautiful but never feel like I could successfully and appropriately wear them. A lot of them just don't suit me, of course. The embroidered silk dresses I see in Chinatown are designed for very small, slight Asian women and wouldn't fit me at all. A lot of other items that I've looked at wouldn't go with my figure or colouring or anything else in my closet. Oh, I do have a Shanghai-made embroidered teal velvet silk-lined jacket that I bought at a thrift shop for $2 a dozen years ago. It's simple enough to go with my other clothes and a beautiful item I enjoy wearing and feel comfortable in, but that's it.

Years ago, in the mid-nineties, I read about a Hong Kong trend of wearing jackets with English text on them. The text was actually nonsense (i.e., "happy good taste fun"), but the people who wore them didn't know that and thought the jackets were cool. I worry I will, in my ignorance of other language and cultures, wear something equivalent to that silly jacket, or that I'd look like the North American equivalent of, say, an Indian woman in a sari and a baseball cap, or a Mexican man in a serape and a porkpie hat. One time I bought a thrift shop t-shirt with Chinese characters on it. It was such a cute shirt, and I really liked it, but every time I wore it I'd think wryly that the characters probably read something along the lines of, "This stupid white girl doesn't know what her shirt says."

Well, dressing appropriately in the aesthetic of another culture is difficult. A friend of mine who is a Mennonite says she can tell an ex-Amish from a mile off, because if they grew up entirely immersed in Amish culture they never, ever figure out how to dress in mainstream-style clothing. And look at all the AskMes posted by people who were born into North American culture but still want advice on what would be appropriate for this or that event. There are a lot of nuances in clothing.

What about all of you? What kind of international styles do you like and feel comfortable in and wear? Do you fearlessly mix things up or do you sometimes worry you're doing it wrong?