So who do you really dress for?
If you thought 2020 wasn’t worth getting dressed for, let alone dressed up for, think again. Laura Antonia Jordan unpicks why choosing an outfit – any outfit – is so important…
when i was 23, I was rarely seen without my Yves Saint Laurent Downtown tote. I had bought the handbag for my burgeoning workwear wardrobe, a relatively new concept to me, not long out of university and only recently converted to the benefits of brushing my hair on a weekday morning. It was big enough to carry my ‘essentials’ (I was already wellversed in fashion-girl parlance) and was classic black leather; all the evidence needed that it was a Very Sensible Purchase.
There were endless black leather handbags I could have bought, many of them hundreds of pounds cheaper and far more appropriate for my assistant’s salary. So why had I plumped for this one? Like so much of what we wear, the apparent practicality of the bag was equally weighted by what it symbolised, what I perceived it conveyed to the world. Yves Saint Laurent, with its intrinsic Frenchness, felt like a suitably sophisticated gateway into dressing for adulthood – it would convince people I was, indeed, a grown-up and distract from my then chaotic, booze-soaked impishness. Kate Moss had a couple of Downtowns too, so it had, naturally, been anointed a thing and would demonstrate my label literacy, my kudos, to those in the know.
I dutifully took it everywhere: on tours of the pubs of north London, to the corner shop on a Sunday morning, to my yoga class. And I hardly need tell you that, however practical, a bag the size of a plump baby suddenly becomes highly impractical at a sweaty gig. Nevertheless, I was besotted.
But lust fades eventually and new lovers – sartorial, actual or otherwise – inevitably come along to flip my heart all over again. I hadn’t thought about the Downtown for years, until a few weeks ago, when emptying boxes in a new flat, I found it scuffed and scratched, wrapped in a plastic bag and shoved at the bottom of a box full of miscellaneous flotsam and jetsam, still unpacked since my last move.
The flat I was moving from was what a letting agent might describe as ‘bijou’ but which my friends would tell you was ‘bloody tiny’. For my time living there, much of my wardrobe had remained vacuum packed or rolled up in unused suitcases in a scrappy game of wardrobe Tetris. But my new flat – with its wall-towall, floor-to-ceiling wardrobes – proffered an opportunity to reunite with them.
Hanging up clothes in my new closets felt like an archaeological dig through my past lives. And as I unfolded dress after dress, jacket after jacket, I had the niggling feeling that, however much I loved them, many of these pieces – just like that bag – had been bought for other people as much as myself.
The question that’s been buzzing around my mind ever since is: who do I, who do any of us, really dress for?
If there is a ‘right’ answer, I suspect it is that we dress for ourselves. But it is as much an untruth as it is a truth. Of course we must dress for ourselves, but we don’t dress only for ourselves. Getting dressed is both a private and public act. It is to participate in a monologue and a performance at the same time. What we wear allows other people to fill in the gaps: to make assumptions about our tastes, our character, even our financial status. This year, more than ever, many of us have dressed to show solidarity with a cause. And that’s without even considering the other diktats: we dress for decency’s sake, in uniforms, to dress codes, for the weather. You should wear black to a funeral, and absolutely not wear white to a wedding.
It might be unwitting, but when we put on clothes, we are asking to be seen – or not. ‘As I travel so much with my work, I tend to dress to fit in and be unobtrusive – as a writer observing other people, I don’t want to stand out,’ says Sara Wheeler, award-winning travel writer and biographer whose books include Terra Incognita: Travels In Antarctica. ‘So, in Central Asia before lockdown it was very much full cover-up with no bright colours or patterns and definitely not my beloved shades with plastic flowers round the rims. I want to be respectful. I did a project on the Amish in
Pennsylvania and I remember driving down from New York stuffing all the flim-flam into the glove compartment as I approached.’
Elizabeth Paton, international styles correspondent at The New York Times, agrees. ‘Usually, as a newspaper reporter, I am constantly on assignment in all sorts of environments and countries and I would always adapt my clothes accordingly depending on where I was and who I met.’ We must often temper our personal sense of style when there is business to be done. I would find it distracting if my therapist wore anything other than anonymous suiting, and I don’t want a smear test from someone in sequins and feathers.
Others put on clothes as a gesture of community and communication; clothes allow us to find a shortcut to our tribes. ‘Some people dress for other women and others dress for men. I dress for my gay best friend,’ says Lauren Santo Domingo, co-founder of Moda Operandi and woman with an impeccable repertoire of gowns and tailoring. ‘I hate to waste a look on people who won’t appreciate it.’
In my own wardrobe, I can identify the intended audience in the pieces. There were those hot buys from of-the-moment labels bought for fashion weeks, to signal to my peers that, yes, I belonged there too. There were the prim prairie dresses I wore when I wished to demonstrate to my friends that I had reached a sober, settled phase of my life; they took the place of the get-into-troublewith-me party heels I’d worn previously.
In some pieces, the aims were specific. Take the white silk shirt I borrowed from a friend in an attempt to get the attention of a man I had a crush on. We’d exchanged few words at that point, but I could see he had taste, so I plumped for something suitably classic but sheer enough for my bra to be ‘accidentally’ visible beneath. This shirt, I hoped, would say: ‘I am great in bed, but I also know about mid-century furniture!’ (It worked, eventually.)
To look at these pieces side by side, you might think they all belonged to different people. But we are allowed to contradict ourselves; we can be sure of our sense of self, our character and still, as Walt Whitman put it, ‘contain multitudes’. Part of the joy of getting dressed is to try on different personas, to shine a light on the nooks and crannies of ourselves we keep in the dark.
The idea that great personal style must be synonymous with a signature ‘look’ irks me. One of the reasons I loathe dating is the painful banality of small talk; the expectation that your sprawling self can be distilled into a bullet-point list of ‘likes’ and ‘dislikes’. I reserve the right to be consistently inconsistent and for my tastes, opinions and convictions to evolve, age and weather. Indeed, just as my Spotify playlists can alarmingly jump from Rachmaninoff to Rupaul, my own look can similarly skip tempo. I don’t endlessly pick from the buffet of new trends, but my clothes do change with my mood, where I am at in my life, and who I am around.
But with the audience of the outside world gone (or reduced to a Zoom grid) 2020 has given us time to get reacquainted with our taste without distraction. Although many of us developed a new appreciation for comfort (‘I don’t wear high heels any more and I doubt I will again except at formal events. I feel free,’ novelist Neda Disney tells me), it’s ironic that, for some, that comfort has been found not in elasticated waists but in the formality of clothes designed to be shown off.
In 2020, getting dressed up, as opposed to simply getting dressed, might have felt like a relic from a world that had vanished. But making an effort for ourselves proved to be liberating. Alighieri’s Rosh Mahtani says that she never wanted to look like ‘I’d tried too hard with my clothes’. Post-lockdown, however, she has felt ‘a new desire to put on a black dress, to feel slick and polished, almost as a celebration of a bygone world’. For Henrietta Gallina, co-host of The Conversations fashion podcast, 2020 ‘got off to a weird start for me anyway’. She found ‘comfort and control in “dressing up”, more so than I used to and indulging in the exploration of my personal style – particularly for work and dinner with friends (remember that?!). My friend Jason always says a good outfit lifts any spirits and I found he was right!’
Kay Barron, fashion director at Net-aporter, is also adamant that clothes can be a good serotonin-booster. ‘Throughout lockdown, I never resorted to tracksuits or all-day PJS,’ she says. ‘I continued to select outfits every day, sometimes changing midway through the day into something else if I wanted to lift my spirits. If I was having a miserable lockdown day (and there were a few…), I dressed up rather than down to make myself feel better. And it worked.’
After a shattering 18 months where I was unravelling under grief and heartbreak, I too found that putting on real clothes ‘just because’ afforded me some much-needed optimism this year. Sure, I could walk around in grey pants and a scrunchie (for a few days I did), but swapping that for a crisp Céline shirt or romantic Simone Rocha dress allowed me to reclaim control of the narrative. Wearing lace lingerie sets – which, alas, nobody was going to see in person – in lockdown might seem like Marie Antoinette indulgence, but it allowed me to reconnect to my femininity and sexuality, which had lain sluggish and dormant for months. In these clothes I thought of Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire: ‘I don’t want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! […] I don’t tell the truth, I tell what ought to be truth. And if that is sinful, then let me be damned for it!’ Sometimes we all need fantasy.
This year’s big reveal has been, for me, that it is less about who I dress for as what
I dress for: hope. I sometimes wonder what I’ll be wearing on the days that will change my life; a new friend made, a lover met, a career-altering commission granted. I buy clothes with the promise of memories yet to be made in them, dresses that deserve to be taken out to dinner, trainers made for long walks arm-in-arm with a friend, handbags that demand I return to the ‘real’ world. I don’t dress to be anyone but myself, but I do dress to be the best version of that self. The Laura who already exists and the one who is yet to come. As Elizabeth Paton puts it, ‘I am looking forward to exploring who I am post-pandemic through clothes. What will I want to wear then? I don’t know yet. But I am definitely excited to find out!’ Me too.
‘I BUY CLOTHES WITH THE PROMISE OF MEMORIES YET TO BE MADE’