Mirror Mirror on the Wall: Part One

I've often thought about mirrors and the tales they tell us. Yes - I say 'tales' because I do believe that is exactly what they do tell us.
In my younger days my mother once accused me of having no dress sense and being a 'bohemian' and one of her friends, present at the table jumped to my defense saying, "she has got great style; tis just that it is extremely obscure" Thanks for that Norma as your comment has always stuck with me.

Mirrors are a peculiar thing and are not part of many cultures yet they seem to dominate western culture in many ways. If we all threw away all of our mirrors I reckon life would undergo some drastic and fundamental changes. So please, for a moment or two or a day or two think about how mirrors influence our lives.
Imagine if you had no idea of how you looked and the only feedback you ever got about your personal appearance was via the comments of family and friends etc?

You have probably noticed too how the people that are important to us so often look good and beautiful because they are important to us. Well; if your vanity is huge and cumbersome it is possible that your ego may have blocked this innate human ability.
When we haven't seen someone for a while also they so often take on a particularly beautiful appearance too.
For some reason or other that quite escapes me vanity has never really been on my personal agenda or landscape and I have little regard for it either.
So what I'd like to argue, or point out here is that beauty is something that is relational; it is a quality that is given and imposed onto us by the strength of our relationships with people important to our wellbeing as opposed to being something we can, or should perhaps try to individually tinker with.

Whilst it is true that all cultures have ceremonies and rituals where dressing up to enhance beauty and certain relationships is/was paramount an important distinction I'd like to make is that your beauty and attractiveness was something endowed upon you by important and significant other people, and not by ourselves. In other words those people important to us dressed us up for important ceremonies and as such we were at our very best and most attractive to those people important to us.
We had no mirror to peer endlessly into from as many angles as possible to make sure they had gotten it right and instead we took their word that we were being presented as our most beautiful, attractive and desirable selves.

Imagine also how much less tortured our lives might be if we had no mirrors to spend hours of our time peering into. Imagine how much time and money you might be able to save too. And best of all; imagine the incredible boost to your self esteem.
It can all get more complicated too by the fact that because so many other peoples' lives are ruled by their mirrors that they develop an expectation that you too display evidence of mirror addiction and compliance.

Imagine what life may be like if we all dressed only for comfort and season and task appropriateness?
Whilst the fashion and allied industries might shrink I do not believe that they would entirely disappear.
I think we would be able to depend upon our friends and members of our families and workplace colleagues to want to make us colorful. There would still be jewelry and 'dressing up' to be had.
We would be comfortable, warm, cool (dressed for climate), attractive and also would be having great fun and security knowing that we were dressed up the best we could be. We'd never again have to agonize or worry about 'what to wear' beyond dressing ourselves entirely for utility and comfort.

Some may think me flippant but the personal, cultural and sociological ramifications of throwing away our mirrors dig real deep and might etch incredible changes. I've just touched upon this subject; keep posted as I will be back onto this topic and it's implications in future articles.