I’m a coper. I get through on adrenaline and chocolate. And somewhere along the way, I realised that finding my personal style had nothing to do with clothes – it had everything to do with rediscovering who I was. Most women I speak to are similar, we get on and do it. Then the dust settles, and you stand in front of your wardrobe and realise you don’t actually know what you like anymore.
I remember exactly when this happened to me. I’d married young, had my children, and then we split; the divorce was amicable, and my focus was on my girls. Then I sat at home one day and thought, I don’t know what I do. I didn’t know what I liked watching on the telly when it wasn’t a joint decision. I didn’t know what I liked cooking when it wasn’t for everyone else. I had quietly disappeared into the roles I was playing, without even noticing.
I see a lot of women who have reached this point, sometimes more than once. It might come with menopause, with a job change, with children leaving home, with becoming a mother for the first time or the third. The identity shifts first, and the wardrobe simply hasn’t caught up.
A client recently came shopping with me, having spent the last year becoming someone new, more confident, more herself, while her clothes still belonged to the version of her from five years before. She put something on and said, I’m actually quite cool, aren’t I? And she was right. The clothes just hadn’t been telling that story.
What I notice most is how many of us live in what I call the waiting room. Waiting to lose weight, waiting for a better job, waiting for the children to settle, waiting for life to feel sorted before we let ourselves dress for who we actually are. I’ve been wanting to lose two stone for about fifteen years, and somewhere along the way I decided I’m worth dressing for now, at this size, in this life, not the hypothetical one further down the line.
I always say to buy clothes for the life you live, not the life a magazine suggests you should live, or the life you’re hoping to grow into. If your days are spent on your feet, on the school run, in meetings, walking the dog, your wardrobe needs to reflect that. I packed away my high heels a while back as I realised I hadn’t worn them in over a year. My life changed, and they were just taking up space.
None of this is really about clothes, not at the root of it. It’s about who you are becoming and whether your wardrobe is along for the ride. Pick three or four words that describe the woman you want to be right now, then open your wardrobe and ask whether what’s hanging there reflects her. Some of it will. Some of it, for a lot of us, won’t. That’s not a failure; it’s just information, and it’s the starting point for everything else.