Today was one of the four or five legitimate summer days you get in the UK each year - the kind of steamy 24 hours where nothing is annoying and everyone is hot. The warm weather brings out a carefree side in all of us - for many, it encourages frisky behaviour, like skinny dipping, or messaging your crush. For me, the effect was sort of the latter, but my crush wasn’t a person, it was clothes.
My first act of abandon was DMing a woman called Clair, who I’d met two weeks ago at a vintage fair called Second Life markets. Clair is the kind of person I hope I’m steadily becoming. When I met her, she was dripping in architectural jewellery and wearing the Guidi boots I’ve had saved on Depop for about a year (If you’re a size 39 and have a grand to spare, then today is your lucky day.) I couldn’t place her outfit, but it fit somewhere in the Rick Owens/ Comme des Garçons/ noir kei ninomiya universe. She told me she’d had an events business in New York, before moving back to London during the pandemic and starting an online store to sell off her fashion archive.
At her booth, I’d found loads of great things - but the one I really clicked with was a perfect Prada tank. Nonetheless, they say if you love someone, you have to let them go. By a similar logic, if a Prada tank is over £100, I also have to let it go.
On the Threads of Conversation podcast, I finish each episode by asking guests to pick ‘the one that got away’, so I’ve heard enough stories to know that nothing haunts you more than the vintage you didn’t buy. For days afterward, I found myself idly thumbing the pictures I’d taken in the loos whilst trying it on. I imagined our life together; the places we’d go, the selfies we’d take. Sometimes I even messaged the photos to a friend, hoping they might confirm my fantasy by saying the things I wanted to hear (“You’re perfect together! It’s meant to be!”)
This morning, I couldn’t bear it any longer. Veins pulsing in the heat, I dove into Clair’s DMs, trying (unsuccessfully) to mask my impassioned state.
I thought that the purchase would be enough to scratch my hot weather-induced itch, but instead it did the opposite - unleashing the full force of my capitalist desire. My next target was an all-red outfit I’d found for a friend’s wedding after months of searching for something (anything!) that wasn’t a bias-cut Reformation dress. I settled upon a diaphanous top and trouser combo which a friend in Berlin had found, only to discover that it was not available for UK shipping. 30 minutes later, I was exchanging emoji-filled messages with the brand’s whatsapp customer service (read: flirting with an AI bot) before *kerching* - I spanked my debit card yet again.
For a frugal shopper such as myself, I was starting to feel a little shocked by my reckless behaviour. But it was too late, I was already in the grips of madness. By this point, the temperature had climbed to 30 degrees, and I was beginning to sweat. “I’ll just go for a walk and enjoy the sunshine,” I muttered to no one in particular.
When I say a walk, what I’m ashamed to admit was that I was planning to walk 50 minutes to a Vibram shop, where I was going to try on yet another item on my wishlist, the brand’s weird and wonderful Fivefinger shoes. They say you have to see something advertised seven times before you buy it, and given how obsessed I am with Marie Lueder’s work (she styled her debut show with Vibram Fivefingers) I was way beyond that point. Especially after reading Liana Ava’s take.
The nail in the coffin of unseparated toes was the one-two punch of French cool girls Lola Proute and Melissa Bon, both of whom posted pictures of them wearing the futuristic footwear. Another symptom of my heat-induced multiple personality disorder: I’m normally skeptical of being ‘influenced’, but today, I gladly lay down and accepted my fate. If they were gifted, idc!!!
50 minutes later I found myself in the Vibram shop (a very funny store - it’s essentially a shoe repair shop with a wall of frog shoes in different shapes and sizes), presided over by two geezers who seemed equal parts amused and confused by the steady influx of fashion enthusiasts. “We’ve been here since 2016, and every year we see more and more women into fashion,” he told me, nodding in my direction to confirm I fit this demographic.
Sitting down on a sort of bean-cube (a bean bag, but shaped like a cube) I wiggled my digits into the first pair of shoes, when another girl arrived at the shop. She wore a floaty red skirt and one of those ‘perfect white tees’ that every brand ever has been trying to get right, but really only works if it’s been passed down from a brother or a lover, or machine-washed since childhood. She announced she’d come to try on the exact same shoes as me. I laughed to myself - here we were, the groundswell of girlies, latching onto the teat of a new trend.
We hit it off, comparing different shoe styles and agonising over which ones to buy. Paralysed with mutual indecision, we sheepishly texted our boyfriends for a second and third opinion. After an hour of deliberation we decided that we’d come this far together, so we had to get the same pair. (By this point the only other customer in the shop, an outdoorsy gentleman from Amsterdam, had long since left.)
As we were paying for our new shoes, the door opened and another girl arrived. Her peasant skirt and ballet flats told me all I needed to know - here was another fashion girlie, joining us at the watering hole of early adopters. As I tapped my card, I wondered how long the fun could last. Was it only a matter of time until a politician ruined the fun, like Rishi Sunak’s Sambas, or Kamala’s Brat summer?
When I got home, I opened my laptop and revisited a piece I’d started writing a while ago. It was melodramatically titled ‘crisis of faith’, and was about my conflicted feelings around fashion. It covered many of the things I’m sure we all feel: that fashion has become increasingly corporate, that we’re having things mindlessly shilled at us from every angle, that the industry does terrible things to the people and the planet. Despite knowing all this, I can’t quit*.
I once read an article where the writer said that the real tragedy of a break up is that the shared language of the couple dies forever. Those silly words, jokes, references that you’ve gathered become useless. The archive is abandoned, gathering dust in the attic of past relationships and half-finished ideas. It’s a bit dramatic, but this isn’t dissimilar to how I feel about fashion. No matter how much my head tells me to leave this industry, or loosen my grip, I can’t help that every time I hear the tune, my brain hums the words. I can’t unlearn the song, and if I’m really honest with myself, it’s my favourite kind of karaoke.
Fashion is a lingua franca for people from around the world, and it’s fun to be part of the conversation. I voraciously consume fashion and the surrounding media because I want to TALK to people about it. It’s a vehicle for me to communicate with my friends, and like today, make new ones.
This is the kind of energy I feel in the newsletter world, where I’m constantly inspired by writers like Viv Chen, Emmanuelle Maréchal, J'Nae Phillips and Emilia Petrarca, who make fashion feel like a fun community of new ideas and friends. At a time where we’re all increasingly lonely, this feels like a positive pocket of the industry - one that me and my newly-divorced toes are happy to be part of.
*although I do try to shop ethically on days where I’m not in the grips of a heatwave-induced capitalist frenzy
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Threads of the week
If you’ve come this far, I don’t think I need to say any more about this outfit.
Loose Threads
How Sha’Carri Richardson could walk on water.
An interesting example of when (and why) not to credit a creator.
If you’re not following Hannah Rose Tindle then you should, because she’s A Wit.
I was just checking the vibram online store! So funny. They’re coming. But how can the boys wear them without giving complete nerd?
Marie Lueder does make you feel and want things, even if they seem counterintuitive. Very much enjoyed this read!