The fashion industry teaches women to disconnect from themselves
I open my phone on a Tuesday morning, already a mistake, but here we are, and within approximately four minutes I have been told that I need to dress for my body shape, dress for my lifestyle, dress for the woman I want to become, dress for quiet luxury, dress for dopamine, dress for the office but make it feminine, dress for the weekend but make it elevated, dress for myself but also make sure it photographs well. There is a woman in a cream linen set telling me that getting dressed should feel effortless. There is another woman, also in a cream linen set, telling me that effortless is actually a myth perpetuated by people who want you to stop trying. I have now watched twelve minutes of content about clothes and I am less sure of who I am than when I woke up.
This is not an accident.
The fashion industry… and I include in this the algorithm, the influencers, the brands, the magazines that have migrated to Substack and are now doing the exact same thing but in a longer format with better typography, has one fundamental interest, and it is not your self-expression. It is your self-doubt.
A woman who feels clear about who she is and what she likes is a woman who buys considerably less. She is, from a commercial perspective, a problem. The entire system depends on you remaining slightly uncertain, behind, and in need of the next thing that will finally make it click.
So it gives you a rotating cast of selves to aspire toward, and changes the lineup just often enough that you never quite arrive.
There is the body version of this, which is perhaps the most violent. I watch a woman on my screen, she is beautiful in the way that requires significant infrastructure and a ring light, me that she has finally found the pieces that work for her body, by which she means the body she has spent considerable energy and money producing. The implication, delivered with complete warmth and zero self-awareness, is that the clothes are the reward for having the right body first. That fit is something you earn. I go to the supermarket afterward and spend four minutes reading the protein content on a yoghurt I have bought every week for three years, because apparently the body I currently inhabit is a rough draft, and the clothes I want to wear are waiting on the other side of 150 grams of daily protein and six Lagree classes and whatever cortisol supplement just went viral on the wellness side of the algorithm, which has clocked that I am a woman in my thirties and has decided I am afraid of my own hormones.
Then there is the life version, which is subtler and in some ways more interesting. Women buy clothes for lives they do not currently live. I know this because I open wardrobes for a living, and what I find, consistently, is a kind of autobiographical fiction rendered in fabric. There is the section for the woman who goes to more events. The silk that’s waiting for the right occasion, which has been coming since 2019. The holiday pieces that have only ever seen the inside of a suitcase, then a wardrobe, then a suitcase again, unworn, because the version of herself that wears them, relaxed, sunlit, completely at ease, doesn’t quite exist in her actual daily life, and she can’t quite bring herself to admit that yet. The clothes are a promissory note. One day I will be the woman these things belong to.
And then there is the other people version, which is the one nobody talks about because it requires a level of honesty that is genuinely uncomfortable. Most women, if they sit with it long enough, will admit that a significant portion of their wardrobe was purchased in response to something external. A new job. A person they wanted to impress. A version of themselves they felt they were supposed to project in a specific context. A comment someone made once, years ago, that lodged somewhere and quietly became a dressing rule. The clothes are not self-expression. They are a negotiation with an imagined audience, conducted every single morning, mostly below the level of conscious thought.
What I find, every time, without exception, in every wardrobe I have ever worked in, is that the woman standing in front of me already knows who she is. The knowing is in there. It shows up in what she reaches for when she’s not thinking about it, what she feels most like herself in, what she’s kept for twenty years despite every clear-out. The disconnection is not a personality deficit. It is a product. It has been manufactured and maintained and delivered to her phone in an extremely compelling format, daily, for years.
The work I do is not about adding anything. It’s about removing enough noise that she can hear what was already true.
You already know what you like. You’ve just been given a lot of very well-produced reasons to doubt it.
If you want to start finding the pattern beneath the noise - what you actually keep reaching for, and what that says about who you are now - the Wardrobe Pattern Assessment is where that begins. Less than three minutes. No shopping list at the end…..
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