POSTURE is the exclusive syllabus on identity, aesthetic reinforcement, and the self-fulfilling nature of style.
I. Orientation
You used to dress like yourself.
You could see yourself, right there, gazing back at you from behind the glass.
But somewhere along the line, something else appeared.
It didn’t arrive all at once; it was created quietly out of a thousand minor adjustments, half-swallowed hesitations.
One day, the reflection looking back stopped resembling you. It began observing you, instead.
It angles your shoulders, smooth your shirt, scans you up and down and follows you out the door to make sure you look good enough. You tell yourself its an angel on your shoulder, an alter-ego keeping you perfectly preserved, safe from the watchful, judgemental eyes of the world.
It’s harmless, helpful, even.
You feel productive: You’re curating, optimizing, refining. Your reflection becomes your external editor, catching everything you miss, a heartbeat away from a unfashionable nightmare. The longer you listen, the more its critiques weigh, the glare holding more and more weight, until your harmless editor has turned into The Director.
Your outfit is no longer chosen for you, its chosen for how it reads, how it photographs, how it could be perceived. What once was blissful self-expression has escalated into full-scale surveillance. You cant tell the difference between looking like you, and being you.
It looks like you, talks like you, walks like you, but its not you. Its your imposter.
It’s a parasite, feeding off your insecurities and giving you new ones to consume. Its created a life of its own from the one they’re stealing from you, and each time you do as it says, a little more of yourself is sapped. Reporting from the outside in, The Director performs the person you believe will be most loved, most praised. Youre safe, coddled in the arms of a distorted reality who stripped away everything that colored outside the lines of perfection. You’ve become a perfect little nobody, safe and sound.