The time, life and brain-space-saving power of a uniform
How to always have something to wear for who you want to be today
I don’t know what came first, the longing for a uniform or the body dysmorphia. I use the phrase advisedly since even now I’m not sure that it is dysmorphia and not just, y’know, actual fact. Like most women I know (not all! And, yes, some men too, but very much also not all…) I look in the mirror and rarely see the whole of me – still alive, relatively healthy, comparatively thriving when plenty of others I know are not. Instead, my eyes are drawn to the too-wide hips, the belly that hasn’t been flat since my appendix burst aged 13 and the surgery left me with an “apron” more appropriate to someone who’d had a Caesarian... I won’t go on. It’s boring and you get the picture, I’m sure. You’ve heard it before.
Either way, I’ve had a problematic relationship with the whole elaborate process of “getting dressed” for as long as I can remember. I was (and still am!) a blocky kid with a disproportionately big bum. Even at 7, 8, 9, I could find considerable fault with my body. I learnt young. Consequently, I hated jeans. Or trousers of any kind. Which seems weird now given that I live in them. But back then, school uniform was a blessing and the occasional aesthetic free-for-all provided by class days out a total hellscape where the offending hips and thighs could not be hidden under the equal opportunities unflattering regulation grey and bottle green.
Give me a uniform and I could close my eyes, sling on the same clothes I wore yesterday and the day before, give or take, and be out of the house in minutes. Give me a choice and the school bus waited for no girl, certainly not one standing in front of her wardrobe begging her clothes not to hate her. (Sorry)
I’ve lost count of the buses/trains/tubes I’ve missed over the decades while that same scenario played out in bedrooms the UK over; wardrobe gradually emptying as the floor filled and the minutes ticked by as I tried and failed to find something to wear for who I wanted to be that day. Every single day. You can only imagine how exponentially that multiplied when I started working on magazines in London’s eating disorder square mile. (I apologise if that sounds flippant, but you know how you can get on a plane in London, get off in New York (or worse, LA) and feel like you gained a stone? It was like that going to work every single day. I honestly knew people who lived by the mantra “eating is cheating”, it wasn’t something the gossip magazines made up.) Those were the years when I ate everything or nothing at all. And whether I was a small UK 10 or busting out of a 14, I hated the way I looked. (As an aside, I remember reading a piece by a then-fashion journalist bemoaning the horrifying fact she’d had to buy a size with two digits (ie a 10) in Topshop and nobody called her out. Ah, bless the noughties.)
It wasn’t that I didn’t like clothes – on the contrary I loved (love) them. I just didn’t feel they loved me back. And slowly I grew to resent them. The time, the effort, the money. More than the clothes, I resented the way men could throw on a shirt, jeans and jacket and be considered good to go. The way, for them, the much lauded “effortless” was an everyday occurrence, whereas for us it seemed to come with a substantial price tag and a day at a salon. The way ‘they’ never had to change out of flats into heels around the corner from a venue. The way black tie events (not my natural milieu at the best of times, but of which there were many in my magazine editing days) seemed to involve compulsory dress shopping every single blimmin’ time while my male contemporaries just bunged on a dinner jacket and moaned about having to wear a tie.
All this has changed a bit now, of course, thanks to rental agencies and celebs wearing converse and adidas sambas under their big frocks on the red carpet. But the imperative to “scrub up”, to tweak yourself into next Tuesday, remains.
The nadir? Fashion shows. What else?
I floundered for years. Making ludicrous, expensive mistakes in last minute dashes up Selfridge’s escalators (often encountering other similarly stricken editors on their way down) and keeping Netaporter in business. In an attempt to feel like me. Actually, scratch that, not like me. Like someone else entirely. Like someone who was at home in fashion land. (Someone who was probably also stick thin…)
I adapted, of course. I tried planning “outfits” the night and then the weekend before. But the very notion of outfits has always foxed me. I read an article by Guardian fashion editor Jess Cartner-Morley which advised planning your entire fashion week’s/month’s outfits (there’s that word again) before you went, packing them, wearing them and refusing to deviate whatever happened. She also advocated dressing for who you were rather than who you thought you should be. That resonated. Not that I was sure how to do it.
Then I saw a picture of Mark Zuckerberg’s wardrobe: rows upon rows of grey t-shirts. I was eaten alive with envy. It wasn’t the t-shirts I coveted, it was the uniform. The promise of getting up, getting dressed and going without having to think about it. The promise of a life lived without the daily 7am self-esteem drain.
That image, those grey t-shirts, stayed with me. What, I wondered, was my grey t-shirt? And why shouldn’t I wear it everyday if I wanted to.
My gateway drug was a pale blue cotton men’s button-down from gap (such a bog standard staple that they still sell them). I bought it pre-fashion week around about 2013 to go with a black lace skirt from Paul Smith that I haven’t been able to get so much as a calf into for most of the last decade. I wore it, then I wore it again. Not just with the skirt. It went with everything. It was, in fact, the kind of thing I’d been watching true fashion people wear for years all whilst they told the likes of you and me, the unsuspecting shopping public, to buy or wear something completely different.
That shirt opened a door. It was a gamechanger; a lifechanger, even. It removed the ‘what shall I wear today?’ pain from my life and I’ve never looked back. I now own six blue ones. Alongside eight blue and white striped versions and six more with stripes of various other colours. I’ve had most of them years, and most are men’s. Although in the last couple of years women’s shirting has experienced a comeback which has boosted my shopping opportunities. They get bigger or smaller/looser or tighter as fashion dictates, but otherwise remain unchanged. Initially I wore them with full-on fashion skirts or pants. Now I wear them with one of my 20+ pairs of jeans (5/6 on current rotation), ancient hush leather leggings or the tracksuit bottoms my husband hates (copyright Jo Elvin!). Trainers (eight pairs but there’s always room for another) or clumpy boots (ditto) or Birkenstocks (ditto again). Depending on the weather. Blazers or padded liner jackets. And that’s it. Except in winter I rotate five (currently) M&S men’s crew neck jumpers.
And yes, I shop like a bloke. I buy things in multiples, in the same size and the same colour. On repeat. And when I don’t, swayed by something I read or something I saw on Instagram? 99.9 times out of 100 I regret it.
If this sounds boring as hell, I hear you. It’s certainly not a recipe for Instagram #ootd success. If you get joy from poring over your wardrobe each morning, I envy you. A bit. Some of my best friends can’t think of anything worse than wearing the same thing everyday, just as I can’t bear the idea of having to think about it at all. Slowly it dawned on me that when I got dressed I wasn’t putting on my best self, I was putting on a disguise. It was a joy to realise I no longer have to.
• Where do you stand? To uniform or not to uniform? What are your go-tos?
A QUESTION!
On an entirely other note… are you interested in a midlife problem page? I’m thinking about starting one as an irregular regular. Let me know if you’re into it and I’ll start a thread to discuss it further. Sx
Finally, someone is writing about the tyranny of women's clothes. I've been held hostage to "dressing for who I want to be" for years. Perhaps it was the pandemic when my work clothes never saw the light of day, or perhaps it's just getting older and tired of trying to fit my foot into the glass slipper. Thanks for giving voice to the journey from stranglehold to liberation.
I remember reading a piece from a woman who had worked with architects and high-end advertising folks at one point. Wherever they met, in whatever corner of the globe, she noted that they all (male and female) wore muted colors and similar pieces of clothing. (Think Steve Jobs with his black turtlenecks and jeans.) The individuality was expressed through everything else--from earrings and eyeglasses to shoes and socks. And they didn't overdo it with those accessories, either.