I added a pair of pedal pushers to my cart yesterday. A deliberate, calculated ‘add’. It wasn’t an impulse click like the purple Jacquemus cardigan that was held together by ‘a hope and a prayer’ that covered 15% of my areola.
I’d style them with a vest, low belt and Mary Janes (that I haven’t found yet) and then suddenly I was having deja vu.
I texted my mum and asked for a photo from my 12th birthday which was held at Pizza Hut ‘all you can eat’. My aunty had teased my hair into a disastrous bird’s nest and I’d crimped my slut straps into beautiful tendrils.
As the photo arrived in my inbox with several ‘???’ from my confused mother who had to scale a 3 level bookcase and scroll through ‘the best of ’98’, I realised that this was indeed some sort of existential crisis.
I was wearing pedal pushers, a Coperni-esque hip belt and pink suede Mary Janes.
Suddenly it felt that physically I’d grown but mentally I was shrinking.
But I wasn’t mad about it. I actually welcomed it.
I was speaking to a girlfriend today about learning from your mistakes, whether it be in fashion or in life. The whole ‘we reap what we sew’ kind of epiphany.
I was explaining that when I was a girl, young enough to still laminate back-to-school books but old enough for a training bra, something pivotal happened.
There was 7 of them in total. These girls had come from the house up the road from a party I wasn’t invited to and had dared each other to knock then run from my front door. But I’d seen them. The girl who I caught running was my best friend, I’d slept at her house only a week earlier.
When I called her name and she continued running I knew what was happening.
I was wearing aforementioned pedal pushers. They were in Adidas tracksuits with the button bottoms.
I’m not going to say the pedal pushers were the protagonist but in a way they were. I was always different. And it showed.
I didn’t know at 12 that what I was desperately craving was individuality. I was way too busy disguised as a sheep.
Any diversion off this path and you’d suffer the consequences.
It’s a destructive journey of conforming and then breaking free, trying to break out of the pigeon hole you stuffed your freshly pubescent body into emerging with a few more lumps and bumps and an opinion on absolutely everything.
I remember holding my mum after that incident, sobbing into her incredibly chic corduroy jacket which was now, in hindsight, giving Autumn/Winter 24 The Row energy and her promising me that one day they will feel exactly as I do now.
The concept of what goes around comes around not quite calming my aching chest or making me think that maybe keeping the pedal pushers for a mid 30’s regression would be sensible.
So many times in my life I have been swept up in a movement whether it be style or life choice because it was easier to be carried there than fight the current. It’s like diving into the ocean, the intensity quickly quashed by the impossible stillness. This is spoiled only by the awareness that eventually you’ll have to come up for air. And when you do, you either surrender to the current tor you fight it with your unwavering strokes until you make it to wherever it is that feels safe for you.
At that age denial is easier. I sat in it for days. I sometimes enjoyed my time in it.
You know when you’ve extended yourself for a loved one and instead of behaving nonchalantly you go out of your way to remind them physically and emotionally of the sacrifice you made for them. I carried my body like that everywhere it went.
But if I stayed in it too long I became so despondent that even I couldn’t stand myself.
I had that choice at 10, just me ‘nobby-no-friends’ and my ahead of the curve, structural perfection pedal pushers.
Intrinsically I knew that one day those shorts would be placed on a shelf never to be touched again, just as I knew the girls who tortured me for no reason would feel the heartbreak I felt that day.
And as I relayed this event to my girlfriend it made me think that maybe our mistakes in fashion and life can be so intertwining. Or should I say growth.
When we witness the disintegration of our own fashion choices to please a third party, is when denial is at its peak. Denial for your own personal expression and choices and denial for what happiness really is.
The seemingly menial ceremony of choosing an outfit isn’t so dissimilar to choosing those you deem worth extending your energy to.
But as a 10-year-old and funnily enough even as a 36-year-old with all that growing and all that shrinking and all the styles and innovations and failed friendships, the lasting ones and creation of new life, we still need reminding that the world that consumes your mind is just yours. No one else will ever understand it or really care because they too, are consumed in their own mind.
Whatever you’re torturing yourself for will forever be triumphed by whatever they are torturing themselves for.
Like when you take a hurdle in your life, however painful or difficult, and you navigate around it, putting the pieces into different severity sections, is exactly how you piece together an outfit.
What I reach for in the morning is almost always a reflection of how well I’ve pieced back together the discarded puzzle pieces in my mind throughout the night and into the early hours. Some days I solve it immediately and others, I leave the house without even two pieces connecting. And as I added the pedal pushers to my cart it was a very warmly welcomed reminder of how much I have grown.
I’ve clawed my way past the dreadful bird’s nest, crying into my arms on the floor at another broken friendship and a realisation I’ll never be what they want me to be to a woman who just wants to be me, just as I am.