There may be nowhere to go, but this writer is still getting dressed up like there is.
Your go-to comfort outfit doesn’t have to include a well-worn pair of sweats.
AWEEK BEFORE THE United Kingdom announced official COVID-19 lockdown measures in March, London-based brand J.W.Anderson celebrated the opening of its first flagship store in a still-thronged part of Soho. I wore a gold and silver lamé dress from its spring/summer 2020 collection that had dramatic flailing sleeves and a plunging neckline, which is what I like to call “medieval extra.” I was in a neon-lit bar standing shoulder to shoulder with close friends, yelling over the music. It was a bacchanalian night in the best way possible—we had already sensed that it would be our last hurrah before a new reality set in.
As someone who is usually overly dressed up with somewhere to go, overnight I found myself housebound with nowhere to go. I’d gone from a life of intense face-to-face action to suddenly having my only real physical interaction be limited to my daughter, Nico (half of the time—her father and I share custody and maintained that under lockdown). Within a week, the lack of stimulation was more than palpable. I found myself switching on the radio, the TV and Spotify at the same time just to create some sort of background noise that resembled people.
My new stomping ground became centred around three spots in my house. There was the sofa with permanent bum imprints in the living room, where by day Nico and I gorged on a triple bill of Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney Plus and by night I watched weird British Film Institute movies or joined drunken Zoom calls with friends on my laptop. There was the kitchen, where I obsessed over making needlessly complicated chiffon cakes with fiddly designs to fill up the time vacuum. And then there was my closet.
If you’ve seen my Instagram, you know that it’s an overstuffed anti-Marie Kondo closet of chaos. For me, it’s a precious inner sanctum that contains the spoils of a lifetime of collecting (a.k.a. hoarding) treasures. My closet is not only where I get dressed but also a testament to my career in fashion—graduate pieces from young designers I’ve championed, souvenirs from far-flung places and a compendium of contemporary fashion from the past 15 years or so, from Christopher Kane’s first collection, which he presented in 2006, to newer breakout designers like ASAI. Its value is in its intimate connection to my livelihood and my personal journey.
During lockdown, I found myself inadvertently rifling deeper every day. While Nico napped, I’d go in with the intention of doing some folding and then find myself combing through the hangers. I clambered to the top, pulling things from dusty boxes. Bigger gowns! More colours! Dressier fabrics!
Most things in my wardrobe have an element that draws the eyes or the hands, be it a bright print or an odd texture. Even my jeans have something going on—a ruffle or a striking wash. For as long as I’ve been buying my own clothes, I’ve treated personal style as an ongoing experiment, building layers of references, texture and colour. At first, this was as an act of rebellion against the uniformity of a strict upbringing (having been raised in a conservative Hong Kong by a Chinese family), but it came to define my own sense of self in a notoriously ephemeral industry. Everything in my closet is a testament to 20 years of a style journey, from my Harajuku teen days to my mishmashed eclectic 30s via my nu-rave and indie-twee 20s.
A month or so into lockdown, my clothes had taken on an even bigger role in my self-reflection. That quote about being “all dressed up and nowhere to go” suddenly took on concrete meaning. I may have been going nowhere and seeing no one, but the very act of putting on a super-extra dress lifted my mood in lieu of the highs I’d get from socializing in the outside world full of stimulation.
The ritual of going into my tiny walk-in closet and pulling out a long-forgotten dress or putting together an outfit with complicated layers became an event to look forward to and broke up the doldrums of the day. Pre-lockdown, we’d turn to our wardrobes to help us in social and functional situations—getting a job,
looking hot for a date, going to a wedding, working out. They then became trusty friends, helping us through an uncertain period of sustained solitude. Putting on a party dress I once thought was too flashy to wear momentarily convinced me that there would be better times ahead.
Invariably, these were older pieces that I hadn’t worn in a long time and that reminded me of a more carefree, time-rich era. And they mitigated the need to buy anything new. For one, to receive non-essential deliveries felt like an indulgence in itself, and, really, when on average we wear only 50 percent of what’s in our wardrobe, reassessing what we already have makes even more sense. Because of the cyclical nature of fashion, old Balenciaga by Nicolas Ghesquière pieces—which I used to find on eBay on the cheap—felt relevant and new again.
Then there are the clothes that remind me of the really good times. There’s that early Alessandro Michele for Gucci dress that I wore when I didn’t know that I was pregnant yet and was still knocking back gin and tonics and the vintage worn-to-death slip-dress in which I jumped into a pool on holiday in Mykonos for an impromptu night swim. There are many Molly Goddard dresses, stored squashed in an exploding box of tulle, worn so frequently and with such abandon that some of them have small tears or faint stains. Memories and moments live on in my clothes. So, I would put them on, even if only for a few hours in the evening or in the morning, and say to myself, “This, too, shall pass.”
Sales of pyjamas have supposedly increased, and I’ve seen more iterations of two-piece loungewear on Instagram than I ever thought possible. So much has been written about the virtues of comfort dressing, but comfort doesn’t just lie in elasticated waistbands, soft fabrics and loose silhouettes. I don’t own track-suit bottoms, and I don’t wear workout clothes beyond running in the park. I used an embroidered Simone Rocha dress to fight feelings of anxiety at 5 p.m. every day when I’d turn on the TV to listen to the government reiterate “Stay at home, save lives.” Fighting the futile hopelessness of non-flattening curve lines on multiple graphs with fashion might sound ridiculous to some, but if workout videos with Joe Wicks and baking banana bread have become coping mechanisms, why shouldn’t our wardrobes be one too?
Rather than being restricted by fashion during the lockdown, I’ve been emancipated by it. The idea of dressing for myself, with no societal dress codes or rules to adhere to, has become even more of a reality for me. Gone are the quick-fire thoughts of “Will the slits on this Attico dress ride up too much while I’m commuting on public transit?” or “Is this Miu Miu jacket too weird to wear to an important meeting?” and “Will this old Jean Paul Gaultier tattoo top freak out the other parents at the nursery drop-off?” (The answer is, “Yes, it will.”)
I’ve also felt liberated in other ways. I wore a Paco Rabanne chain-mail dress without a lick of makeup. I wore mismatched off-white socks and old Birkenstocks with my Chopova Lowena billowing-sleeved kilt/ shirt-dress to run out and collect contactless deliveries. Or if I wore impractical shoes, like a pair of frilly pink Gucci mules, I did so while my feet were propped up on the couch, backlit by my TV screen with a Sex and
the City marathon on the go. The lockdown meant that I got to wear my wardrobe on my own terms, not just as a form of social armour.
If ever we needed an affirmation of the power of fashion, the pandemic emphasized how the things that are physically closest to our bodies—our clothes— can dramatically change our mood. Dressing up is our way of holding on to the feeling of going to see someone (anyone) special and hugging and kissing them, eating something nice or just venturing out because the open air is so inviting.
The shiniest, most colourful, most voluminous and loudest things in my wardrobe helped me to combat the lows of the lockdown, but everyone will have their own specific sartorial saviours. Teaching ourselves that what we wear can be a form of self-pleasure, or even self-help, will perhaps make us reassess our relationship with clothes. We will once again buy new things. We will still dress to impress others. The conventions of dress codes will resume. But we will have seen the invisible force field around our clothes that only the wearer will recognize. Their ability to be emotive. To hold memories. To lift us up when there is no one else to turn to.