Hello, Confident Creatives, and happy Monday! I hope you’re really well. I’m bringing you something a little bit different this week. I LOVED
’s piece about uniforms and ’s, about having a complicated relationship with dresses - and I wanted to share the essay below. This hasn’t been published before - it was part of a book proposal that has evolved and become a very different project.A note of caution - I’m writing about my history of disordered eating, and my complicated relationship with my body. If that’s a sensitive subject for you, and you’re concerned about what this might bring up for you, I’d advise treating yourself with the utmost kindness, and reading very carefully, or avoiding this for now. And if you’re finding it difficult to live in your body, at the moment, I send so much love. It’s really, really hard. I’ve struggled with those feelings, I’ve allowed myself to feel them, and the most painful ones have become much easier to bear. I hope this is true for you, too.
Love
Daisy X
“When a woman says, 'I have nothing to wear!', what she really means is, 'There's nothing here for who I'm supposed to be today.” Caitlin Moran
I have spent hours of my life, and more money than I can bear to contemplate, buying costumes for a play that will never be performed. It’s called ‘The Woman Who Everyone Approved Of’. It’s about a woman who manages to be beautiful, desirable, always understated and yet unignorable. This woman has never fluffed a job interview. She has never been rejected after a first date. She’s confident but relaxed in the office, at the gym, and at home on her sofa. She manages to look sexy but comfortable on Boxing Day, and never has to change into pyjama bottoms because her trousers hurt. Most importantly, TWWEAO never, ever spills.
Clothes are complicated. I can say that, having been on a lifelong search for the one outfit that might make everything feel easy. I couldn’t stop shopping, even though it was making me miserable. However, it took me a long time to address the issue because I was so ashamed of my habit and my feelings. Shopping was not a real problem, I told myself. It was a hobby, and that my internalised misogyny was the source of my shame. If I were a man, spending my spare cash on golf clubs and green fees, there would be no judgement from anyone.
I did not want to think too much about my excessive shopping, and what it meant, because I feared what I might discover. However, when I was forced to start addressing it, I realised it had its roots in most of my other problems. A trail of dresses joined the dots between poor body image, low self-esteem, money worries and generalised anxiety. The more anxious I felt, the more I wanted to buy clothes I didn’t need, and the worse my anxiety became.
In my twenties, I struggled with creeping credit card debt. Most of my take home pay went on rent and travelling to work. Anything left over went on paying off as much of my credit card as possible. I’d end up buying my supermarket shopping with the credit card, which made me feel stuck, scared and miserable. Debt interfered with my ability to hope, plan and dream. I did part time, casual work outside office hours. I applied for jobs with better salaries. And I felt tired, fed up and desperate, and thought ‘I’m going to be trapped and in debt forever, what difference does another £20 in Primark make?’ I labelled myself ‘bad with money’, and sometimes just a ‘bad person’.
I believed new clothes would cheer me up. I worked for a magazine with a fashion section, in an office with colleagues who cared about clothes. I cared about clothes. We bonded in Topshop at lunchtime. We tried on our ASOS purchases in the back boardroom, on quiet afternoons. Together, we went to product launches and parties after work, and dressing up was tacitly encouraged. I was desperately insecure, totally broke and terrified that anyone else at the Sugababes album launch would look me up and down and see me exactly as I was. I believed the right outfit would convince everyone else that I was one of them. Who looks more secure than a woman who has got herself into yet more debt to wear New Look’s cut price copy of Sienna Miller’s Met Gala Dress? Well, absolutely everyone. But I didn’t know that then.
I was able to get out of debt by the time I was thirty. Still, my shopping habits were ingrained. I had a little more disposable income, and a lot more insecurity. The gap between the woman I was, and the woman I thought I should be was getting wider and wider. As was I. The shape of my body was changing, because I was binge eating and binge drinking. I did not like the way I looked in any of the clothes I already owned. I believed I could solve most of my problems with some new ones. Shopping didn’t feel fun, anymore. I didn’t enjoy it. But I was constantly online, searching for my solution as my heartbeat got faster and my chest felt tighter. I knew my bank card number off by heart, and I felt sick, scared and ashamed every time I tapped it in.
Often, the clothes would arrive, and they wouldn’t fit. Or I’d hate the way I looked in them. I’d send them straight back. I’m not quite sure how much money I wasted, because I was trapped in a loop of retail, return, refund. My drug of choice was a sale. If an item was full price, I could usually take it or leave it. But I could not resist anything with a designer label and a 70 per cent discount. After all, that was the perfect manifestation of how I felt about myself. From a distance, I could pass for desirable. Up close, I was clearly the reject nobody wanted.
I hoarded cut price occasion wear. I think I was waiting for a fairy godmother to turn up and change my life – but I was so scared she wouldn’t arrive that I kept buying my own ball dresses, just in case. My addiction made me feel anxious and vulnerable. I justified it by telling myself that I wasn’t using a credit card, this time. I could afford it. I was too scared to start to unpick my habit and look at what was lying behind it. The clothes were suffocating me. I started to hide my new purchases in bags and suitcases under the bed. I was too frightened and ashamed to look at them.
The first person that I hid clothes from was my mother.
Now, I realise that she was trying to teach me values that were deeply important to her. She believed in frugality, and she felt there was something sinful about extravagance and vanity. She’d been a teenager in the 1970s, during the Winter of Discontent. She was the eldest daughter in a big family, and there simply hadn’t been much money for clothes. She was also anxious about my adolescent sexuality, and the messages my clothes might convey. She did not want her eldest child – me – to wear the fashionable garments of the early aughts because most of them were not designed to fully cover one’s ass crack.
Back then, I thought my Mum was a slut-shaming Scrooge, a control freak who didn’t want me to look nice or have fun. She did not understand that I had a right to splurge any birthday or babysitting money that came my way on whatever skimpy, flammable nonsense I could get my hands on. Most importantly, she could dress in her boring M&S jeans and charity shop jumpers because she looked good in everything. She was thin. She had never been trapped in the Miss Selfridge communal changing room with Melissa Adler and Maddy Maxted, and been the only one who had to try the black flares in a size 14. (And I still couldn’t get them past my knees.)
Mum wouldn’t let me wear tight tops, or low-cut tops, because I’d get ‘too much attention’. I’d been getting ‘attention’ about the way I looked for as long as I could remember, and none of it was good. I couldn’t understand why she thought it was something I’d invite, or something I could control. The attention she was trying to protect me from sounded much more interesting than the sort I’d got on the playground - which focused on the size of my body. I was too big, and that was something to be ashamed of. I’d already started secretly dieting and restricting food, and I still looked wrong in all clothes. What was I going to do?
My mother ate what she wanted, and her body stayed the same. She could never understand how miserable my body made me. Sometimes men started talking to me, or following me in the street, and that made me feel self-conscious and scared. I was still haunted by years of violent school bullying. If anyone ever started speaking to me, I assumed they were going to say something about how fat I was. When it didn’t happen, I thought they were probably just being polite, while silently thinking about how fat I was.
I’d been starving myself, methodically and obsessively, to make myself as thin as Maddy and Melissa. I thought about food constantly. I threw my lunch away every day. I lived on carrot sticks and watered down Ready Brek. Months after struggling to zip up a size 14, I became, at last, an 8. I’d taken literal pains to be able to wear anything I wanted. Mum wouldn’t and couldn’t understand. So I’d ditch my crackling carrier bags and receipts at the train station, and my size 8 treasure would be smuggled upstairs, under my jumper. I might have been the only teen to do this who wasn’t shoplifting.
Clothes were proof of my value. If I could wear thin clothes, and pass as a thin person, I would be safe. I would have escaped my old self, the fat little girl who wasn’t worth anything. I didn’t understand there was another way to be. I was baffled when my sister wore the same purple jumper to every single school non-uniform day just because it was her favourite. ‘Aren’t you embarrassed?’ I asked, cruelly. ‘What if people think you have no other clothes?’ To be honest, I was embarrassed for her. I thought people would see her and judge me. She just shrugged. ‘So what? I really like this jumper.’
If I had listened, and learned from my wise little sister, I would have saved hours of time, tears and thousands of pounds.
Clothes hold a lot of hopes and fears for all of us. I have invested so much energy in them, hoping to find the magic outfit that proved my worth because I was so scared the world would think me worthless. For those of us who have any issues with eating, body image and dysmorphia, clothes can trip us up, triggering good days and bad days. If you’re secure, relaxed and don’t care about labels, a clothes shop that has inconsistent sizing is simply irritating. If you’ve ever been bullied about your body, it can bring up the most painful feelings.
I often think about what clothes mean to my trans friends. Most of us know what it’s like to panic in a changing room, miserably comparing the vision in our heads to the one staring back at us in the mirror. I can only try to imagine what that’s like when you’ve grown up feeling forced to choose from the wrong section of the shop. When you must fight for the freedom to wear what truly suits you, where do you begin? How do you start to construct yourself from the outside, in?
My shopping addiction grew out of an attempt to fix my fears. I was scared of myself, scared of what other people thought of me, scared of money, and scared of what might happen if I didn’t look perfect. Eventually, my addiction became more frightening than the problems it was supposed to solve. I didn’t enjoy shopping, but I was worried about who I might be without it – or rather, how I might fail. Without the right clothes, I’d be bullied again. I’d be the fat girl who had no control over anything. I would be looked up and down and told I wasn’t good enough, I wasn’t coming in.
Towards the end of 2018 my friend, the writer Lauren Bravo, told me she was frightened too.
I have known Lauren for a long time, and we have a lot in common. And like almost every woman we know, she has a complicated relationship with food, eating habits and her body image. When we met, we bonded over a shared history of ASOS returns and panic attacks on Oxford Street.
But Lauren’s greatest fear was environmental. ‘I keep thinking about sustainability, landfill and waste,’ she told me. ‘And about the women – almost always women – making fast fashion, working in unsafe conditions, not being paid properly. I can’t justify my shopping anymore.’
I know, I know, I thought. But I don’t want to know. I don’t want to think about it.
‘So next year, I’m going to quit fast fashion. I have so much. I don’t need more. There are so many great second hand, preloved pieces out there. If I need anything new, I’ll just buy new-to-me.’
‘A not new year,’ I said, reflexively. Damn! I’ve christened it. Now it’s real.
I’m ashamed to admit that the idea of going for a whole month without a new dress terrified me. How could I cope with an entire year? Like Lauren, I owned a lot of clothes. At the time, I was starting to address my issues with binge eating and binge drinking, and some of my old favourites were starting to fit me again. The space under my bed was full of relatively new clothes, most were barely worn.
But what would I do when I felt anxious or unhappy? How would I comfort myself when something went wrong? And what was the point of addressing my eating and drinking problem unless I could shop to celebrate being thinner?
I thought about the plastic. Even if I sent back 50 per cent of the stuff I bought, there was still so much wasted plastic. So much petrol being swallowed up and belched out by the vans and lorries, orbiting the earth. Endless Western waste loops, caused by indecisive, spoiled people like me, poisoning the planet slowly.
I felt so ashamed. Interesting, said my brain. Your reaction to ‘shame’ appears to be ‘I don’t like this feeling. Maybe I should run out and buy something’.
I thought about the people. Lauren was – is – right. In 2013, the collapse of the Rana Plaza building killed 1132 people, mostly women and girls working in garment factories. A report into modern slavery in the UK found that some garment workers were being paid less than half the minimum wage.
My friend Rebecca has never taken drugs, not out of any special respect for the law, but because she thinks a lot about the significant human cost. ‘It’s vulnerable people who lose their lives to it,’ she had explained. ‘And they’re only there because they have no other options. I think it’s bullshit – you’re at a dinner party, and everyone is cooing over the Fairtrade coffee and ethical chocolate truffles, then the coke comes out. There is no such thing as Fairtrade cocaine.’
The penny dropped. My drug of choice – clothes – might not be chemically addictive, or illegal, but it came with a human cost. I didn’t want to pay it, any more. I was terrified of facing life without my comfort blanket. But the fear shook me awake. My life was easy – too easy. I didn’t even allow difficult emotions to get in my way. I feared being judged for the way I looked. I feared walking into a room and feeling unwanted. So I draped myself in armour made by millions of other women in some of the most frightening conditions imaginable. Women who were legitimately frightened of getting burned to death but still had to keep coming to work.
I started Not New Year full of resolve – and rage. I was furious with myself for letting the problem get so bad and determined to hate myself into a state of purity and abstinence. However, I soon realised this wasn’t going to work. Instead of punishing myself for my wicked ways, I had to embrace the creative challenge I had set myself.
I could not shop my way out of a minor dilemma – like desperately needing to impress a frenemy at a book launch – so I had to make good use of the things I could find, like a Womble. Did I have the chutzpah to style out the sequins I’d been hoarding? How many times could I wear the amazing silk dress I found in Help The Aged without feeling self-conscious about who had already seen me in it? Could I source a second-hand version of the tweed blazers everyone was wearing on Made In Chelsea? Instead of cutting myself off from the shops completely, I slowed myself down. I relished rummaging in charity shops. It’s amazing how many perfectly good Zara tops get given away. And it’s startling to discover how quickly you can go off fast fashion when you see so much of it looking worn, crumpled and falling off its hanger.
At first I bought more clothes than necessary, but my binges slowed down. I wasn’t breathlessly shopping, and as the year progressed, I became better at working out the difference between a genuine need and a craving. I could see something I ‘had’ to have, then count to ten and walk away.
The most sobering, enlightening change came when I started to sell my old clothes. As my eating and drinking habits changed, my body changed too. Some of the dresses that had been too small were now too big. I’d missed my wearing window. I’d always donated clothes to charity shops, but deep down, I knew I wasn’t solving a waste problem – merely relocating it. Over two million kilograms of used clothes end up in landfill every week. More than 70 per cent of global clothes donations end up in Africa. Some can be upcycled and resold by local traders. Most are unusable, and simply sit, giving off carbon and causing environmental damage.
Reselling my old clothes was a way for me to slow down the fast fashion cycle. I felt as though I had an obligation to prolong the life of the unworn pieces I’d bought when bingeing. And if anything has put me off fast fashion, it’s this. It’s terrifyingly easy to see a lovely photo of a dress and click ‘buy’ before you’ve really thought about it. It’s very hard to resell it.
You have to take your own photos – which usually come out horribly - then check the dress for tiny stains and spots. You need to steam it, answer a series of very irritating questions from people who can’t read product descriptions, then you wait for someone to buy it for a tenth of what you paid. You take it to the Post Office, and hold your breath and hope that’s the end of it. And after all that, you might get an angry message claiming your dress stinks of invisible cigarettes, or imaginary dogs. Even now, if I’m tempted to buy something new, I ask myself ‘Do I want this enough to face the thought of sticking it on eBay in a year’s time?’ The answer is usually no.
Elizabeth Gilbert says ‘perfectionism is fear in fancy shoes and a mink coat, pretending to be elegant when it’s actually terrified.’ For a long time, I thought I could outrun fear, if my shoes were fancy enough. I believed I would never be good enough as I was, on my own. But I could dream my way to perfect look, and the perfect life.
Women are socialised to feel anxious and ashamed about every aspect of shopping, and how we use our disposable income. When I began to address my problem, I blamed myself first, and most of all. However, as I navigated life without ASOS, I became increasingly aware that I wasn’t alone. Advertising and marketing techniques have become increasingly insidious and sophisticated, and big brands know how to tap into our securities and make us yearn for something more, new and different.
I believe online shopping is what turned my passion, and my curiosity into an addiction. When we’re in a store, all our senses are available to us. We can see, touch and make informed choices. Online, the experience is frictionless. I know I’ve pressed a buy button on Instagram because the app has triggered a generalised sense of dissatisfaction and yearning. I’m not just buying a dress – I’m trying to buy a new body, a holiday, and an escape. I’m being manipulated to spend. If I have gone online because I’m feeling sad or anxious, I’m already in a dangerously receptive state.
Getting angry with myself didn’t work. The urge to shop my feelings away became stronger. Trying to be compassionate with myself made a difference. Learning to sit with those restless feelings was a great challenge. But allowing myself to experience those feelings ultimately made me stronger and happier. In the long term, shopping them away never worked.
When I started to address my shopping problem, I was scared. I knew I had too many feelings, and I didn’t know how I could bear to endure them without my online binges. But falling in love with second hand stuff has helped me to make peace with being imperfect. Life happens. We spill. We get stained and crumpled. We might, occasionally, be able to starve, spend and scheme our way to feeling like the newest, hottest and shiniest, but this feeling never lasts for long.
I grew up worrying about clothes, the way I looked, and being judged. I was self-obsessed, and scared. It took me a long time to realise that it was up to me to change this. My insecurity and my addiction put people and the planet in danger. Admittedly, I’ll always be self-conscious. I’ll always worry that people are looking at me and thinking the worst. But I’ve stopped caring quite so much about my fashion choices. Because I’m really proud of looking ‘so last year’. I actively show off about carrying the handbag I bought in 2003, or when I’ve put together a whole outfit from charity shop finds. Here’s the real twist: I’ve started to agree with my mother on matters of style. I occasionally wear her old clothes.
My relationship with what I wear will always be complicated. I suspect I’ll always be a maximalist, with a tendency to buy more clothes than I need. Like Delphine in Cold Comfort Farm, I’ll always dream of finding the dress that’s ‘better than poetry’. I’ll see a flash of fabric, and yearn for the future that could fit it, and the woman I could become. And every so often I’ll submit to the feeling of yearning, and I’ll let those urges carry me away. Here’s what has changed: I don’t let the dresses wear me, any more. I’m not looking for a dress that will fix me. I don’t need solving. The Woman Who Everyone Approved Of no longer haunts my wardrobe. I like clothes, but I like myself more. I fit.
Have saved this to read properly later, but the timing is spooky, have literally sold practically all my clothes on Vinted, so I can 'start again'. Feels meaningful! xoxox
I loved this, Daisy. I think in many ways we’ve lived parallel lives, and getting your take on it makes me feel seen, and buoyed by what’s possible. Well done, you 💗