Goodbye to the hell of changing rooms — and good riddance!

WHO hasn’t had that chilling nightmare, the one where you are naked or wearing just your underwear in a room full of strangers?

The strangers point, they laugh, whisper and judge. The relief you feel when you wake up and realise it was all a silly dream is palpable.

But there is another nightmare, one most women have experienced. Where you’re in your undies, in a confined space, pulling on clothes as fast as you can. You’re in such a blind panic that you put things on back to front. Your palms are sweating, your heart is racing and you hear footsteps approach. Suddenly, the curtain is pulled back, as an intimidating stranger demands: ‘How are you getting on?’

It’s the all too real nightmare of the shop changing room.

A survey by plus-size retailer evans found customers loathe changing rooms so much many buy in store, try in the comfort of their own home, then return the clothes if necessary.

Or, they purchase online and return unsuitable items. In the early days of internet shopping sending back clothes was a pain, but (unlike shops) they listened to customers and worked to simplify the process. Free posting, courier collections and pre-printed returns labels all make it now relatively hasslefree to send things back.

Amazon is trialling (in the u.S.) a service called Prime Wardrobe, where customers ‘try before they buy’ clothes which will be sent by courier and they have seven days to decide if they wish to keep or return the items before their credit card is charged.

It all spells the death knell for the changing room — a demise few women will mourn.

THedownside of buying new clothes on the High Street has always been the ordeal of trying them on. It’s improved little since I started paying for my own clothes more than 30 years ago.

Back in the eighties, when I was a teen, the trend was for communal changing rooms.

Dozens of young women all piled into one hot, sweaty, space. The changing room ‘mean girls’ would hog the best spots and nab any mirrors.

On the odd occasion there would even be men in the female changing room as some girls would take their boyfriends in with them past uninterested store staff.

You’d have thought phasing out communal changing rooms over the next decade would have made trying on clothes in-store a little less stressful. It didn’t. Instead arrogant retailers continue to treat customers with growing indifference.

Many shops now offer cubicles no bigger than the average phone box.

And they are often fitted with doors and curtains that do nothing to preserve modesty.

Half-length doors that leave a gap at the top and bottom look fine until you drop your bra, absent- mindedly bend to retrieve it and expose yourself to everyone queueing outside.

Or there are curtains never quite big enough to meet in the middle. And to top it all there’s the final horror — of the mirrors and the lighting.

I know I’m no Victoria’s Secret model, but there have been times when I’ve looked in a changing room mirror and wanted to weep.

It’s thanks to Marks & Spencer’s wretched three angle mirror that I first discovered I had back fat. Another time, another shop, the lighting was so unflattering, my body looked like it was made of cottage cheese.

Then there are the ridiculously flattering mirrors that make you look a dress size smaller than you really are.

The feeling of euphoria as you twirl and pose is wonderful . . . until you get home, try the dress on again — and see all the lumps and bumps the magic mirrors had erased.

Some clothes shops employ the dirty trick of not having a mirror in the changing room.

A sneaky sales ploy so you have to step outside to have a look at yourself, whereby the staff, often working on commission, will pounce. even if you look like a sack of spuds, they will tell you that you look wonderful. You end up leaving with half a dozen items you despise and later return.

For security reasons, most stores will not let you take more than five items into a changing room at one time.

So, if you have, say, seven items you have to leave two of them with the assistant. She will swap them with you when you pass her some items you’ve tried on already.

The system never works. The assistant always vanishes. I get fully dressed, go to the rail for my two items, only to find they’ve been put back out by another staff member.

NOTall changing rooms are hellholes. I’ve tried on clothes in some that were bigger than my flat. One had thick- pile carpet, scented candles, squashy velvet sofas and complimentary soft drinks.

But the more luxurious the changing room the more likely it is that the assistant will feel she has the right to walk in and ask how you are getting on.

When I was 25 and size 10 I didn’t mind being seen in my underwear. Now I’m 51 and not a size 10, I don’t want to be looked up and down, and told what suits me by someone half my age and size.

These days I rarely try anything on in store. The changing room is one of life’s little miseries that I’ll no longer tolerate.

Some brands such as evans and Gap are experimenting with ‘ virtual changing rooms’ on their websites.

Online shoppers enter their height and measurements and see how clothes would look on someone their size.

Best of all, there’s no frosty busybody popping up to ask how you’re getting on.