Customising Your Avatar

Written By: Tuso Madiri @tuso.madiri

I’m not going to lie, my childhood weekends were elite. Every other Saturday, I would be at my cousins’ house and we would lose ourselves in the world of whimsical competition that was brought to us via the  Nintendo Wii. Hours were spent going head to head to declare a new champion, before they were  challenged again in the upcoming weeks. Mario Kart, Wii Sports Resort, Mario and Sonic at the Winter  Olympic Games, you just had to be there! And though I loved the competition, my favourite part was  always when I got to customise my Wii avatar, known as a Mii. There wasn’t much you could do to switch up your Mii’s look and yet I found so much satisfaction in changing my Mii’s hairstyle to some-what match  mine. Then our world expanded when we found web games. 

Nothing could have prepared us for the impact that StarDoll and MovieStarPlanet had on us. The whole  premise of these games were shopping, wearing your new clothes, then buying more. Besides feeding us the  message of rampant consumerism, it also fuelled our love for fashion. We would take turns showing each other what we “bought” for our dolls with our virtual tokens. We would craft whole narratives for our dolls  based on their look that day, then award them with a new storyline when we shifted their aesthetic. When we logged off of the games, we kept the same energy going in our real lives. Putting on fashion shows where we took turns being stylists, models and audience members, messing around with the clothes we had and creating fun looks - it was a full production! 

It dawned on me recently that the enjoyment I found in dressing up my avatars in my childhood, did not transfer when it came to dressing myself each day in my adulthood. Why is that? A  hyperfocus on my perception? I have been retracing my steps to see where I lost my way and became obsessed with trying to tick other people’s boxes in order to predict how I would be seen. 

At a young age, I already had an understanding that how you presented yourself mattered as a Black person, because I was raised by my lovely Zimbabwean mother who reminded me that our world is unfair, and that I had to work hard not to affirm anyone’s racist preconceived ideas about me. When it came to clothing, one of the ways that this manifested was by having a clear separation between home clothes and outdoor clothes because what could be seen as dressing for comfort on my white peers, could be seen as  “lazy” on me. This is box number one. 

I was one of the few kids who liked the routine of wearing a uniform to school, so when I started sixth-form, where there wasn’t a uniform, I struggled. Figuring out your sense of style at sixteen years of age was always going to come with trial and error, but I wasn’t expecting trials and tribulations. I quickly began to  notice how certain outfits were met with certain remarks from certain people. Allow me to clarify, traditionally femme outfits were met with harassment from men. This experience is far from unique and  the more it occurred, the more I wanted to change my clothes to protect myself, though it wasn’t my fault.  This would be box number two. 

Just by being a Black woman, my femininity is in question because womanhood has been defined by how close you can get to the white supremist ideal, which is positioned in opposition to anything that is labelled Black, so I knew that when I started to enjoy wearing masculine-leaning outfits, my femininity would be further questioned. On one hand, I quickly found that the verbal sexual harassment quietened, but on the other hand, that was only because I wasn’t even being considered a woman at all. I went from “sassy” to  “aggressive”, from objectified to misgendered. This is box number three. 

Every time I was choosing an outfit, I was considering whether I looked femme enough to be seen as a woman but in a way that wouldn’t lead to harassment, but still be attractive enough to garner respect while meeting the requirements of the white ideal… It's no wonder why I was overwhelmed. I put far too much pressure on myself to manage other people’s expectations, or should I say, what I thought their expectations were. Of course, all of these factors are at play on a large scale, but I have made a great effort to surround myself with people whose love and respect for me isn’t dependent on what my gender expression looks like. In the same way another person doesn’t know what I am thinking, I don’t know what others are thinking about me. To be honest, it is more than likely they are not thinking about me at all but it was more convenient to blame others for my fear than to admit that I had tied myself into knots over social constructs I was trying to unlearn.

Obviously, it would be ignorant for me to suggest that we should all wear whatever we want, whenever we want, wherever we want because we still need to be wise to know which versions of ourselves are welcome where, to ensure our safety. Now that I feel that I have that safety, and I have freed myself from my own mental prison, I am able to see the fun in expression through fashion, and social media helped me! 

There are so many worlds to explore when it comes to fashion, especially with the globalisation that occurs through our access to social media. From “fairy-core” to cosplay, to being in your “Y2k era”, even right down to “UK Black girl aesthetic”, there are so many pockets to enter into. I have been inspired by the people who treat fashion as play just as I did when I was a child with my video games. 

There was a trend on TikTok where fashion and beauty content creators affirmed the connection between gaming avatars and dressing themselves: “choose your fighter”, where the creators would have a theme, then display a range of looks that fit into that theme. From there, I started cooking up Pinterest boards for the different styles I wanted to explore and I have been further inspired by seeing Black women switching up their look from day to day. One day I’ll give you “earthy-bohemian-girl” and the next you’re getting Adam Sandler! 

In any good virtual world, how you dress your avatar doesn’t alter their adventure, but that is not the case in our game of life, but I hope that you are able to find/create spaces where you feel you are able to express the different versions of yourself as much as you’d like, with ease and with joy!