These insidious shopping trips were short-lived, because my dad lost his job when I was 16. My extended family carried the weight of that loss for a year — my cousin most of all. For my birthday, she decked me out in Jane’s Army jeans: a brand that is no longer with us and might not have been all that popular even then, but to me, reeked of upward mobility. One pair looked as though they’d been put on sideways — a butt pocket where a front pocket should be, the button fly resting on my hipbone. I was obsessed. I’d been attempting to collect the look of money for years — and only rich people invest in statement jeans, right?

Those sideways jeans changed my perception of what Monied Up looked like, and I spent my paychecks accordingly. I bought a pair of tire-fire orange Miss Sixty pants that were covered in inky black dots — what might happen if you washed the laundry without removing a pen from your pocket. And the teensiest Coach bag, watermelon green and pink, barely big enough to hold a wallet. Also, a pair of blue-and-red Nike Air Max 95s, the colors criss-crossing into purple ‘til they looked like the universe. I spent 60% of a check on a half-suede, half-mesh, yellow-and-turquoise Von Dutch hat. If it was a brand’s biggest mistake, I bought it.

What I never 2 + 2ed is that the clothing I was drawn to — the eccentric, the patterned, the peacockian — didn’t attract me because of how nouveau riche, unique, and zany it was. It attracted me because it was more affordable than the normal-looking clothes by the same brand. My entire wardrobe was an agglomeration of what I could beg, borrow, or steal — and when it blurred together, I came off bold, like a risk-taker, someone who’d wear patent-leather, baby blue Reeboks and be like, What, bitch?

A few years back, my mom ran into an old classmate of mine. This classmate was (is) beautiful and stylish; she dressed like a drone had scooped her up from a SoHo boutique and dropped her into my lunch period. And you know what she told my mother? “I always admired Steph. She had her own style. I wish I’d been more like that.” When mom told me this, my first thought was, !!!!, and then, Wait, what?

I recalled this girl once complimenting me on an awful pair of Candie’s sneakers I owned (they were yellow, red, and orange; I wore them with the Miss Sixty pants). I thought she was being cruel. But it occurred to me that in being broke, cheap, or both, I had found a sort of freedom that wasn’t forced on girls who had the bankroll to dress “normal.” My classmate and I had both used whatever resources we had to fit in, our images shaped by the choices we were able to make. And my choices — made with the goal of disappearing — had made me stand out, instead. I wouldn’t have loved knowing that in high school, but hearing it years later, from someone I’d envied, made me proud. I felt like I hadn’t been wearing clothes, but the entirety of my upbringing — and that wasn’t a bad thing.

My style was never a conscious decision. I’d actually call it a capitalist-nightmare accident. But appreciating the funky things, the bright things — it wouldn’t have happened if I’d been able to dress like everyone else. It was born out of years of begging, of second-besting, of looking at price tags and labels before sizes or design. It’s not just a style, it’s a lifestyle; one that, for better or worse, I wear on my sleeve. Ten years later, I still gravitate towards the sales rack, to whatever sticks out or doesn’t belong. Only now, I don’t do it with shame. I do it while thinking about the admiration of my classmate or the way my mom managed to shine despite a label-free existence. I do it thinking maybe I’d be the first one to jump off the bridge: a blaze of orange and teal in my wake, Mom yelling down, “Those sneakers don’t even match anything!” And me responding, “Exactly!”