Every so often, I buy a shirt. Like most of my misguided purchases, it usually happens as a result of temporary amnesia.
For as long as it takes to clutch the shirt in the till queue, get my wallet out and pop my pin in, I forget all the times I’ve worn a shirt and regretted it. I forget I have boobs. I forget that collars never sit casually open on me, they always fall back into place, so I spend the whole day folding them out again like a nervous tic. I forget that it will never stay smoothly tucked into a skirt or trousers unless I actually staple it to my pants. I forget that I’m not, and probably never will be, French.
Then I get it home, put the shirt on, and it all comes flooding back to me. So I roll it into a sad ball and bury it in the cotton graveyard at the back of my middle drawer where it immediately becomes too creased to ever wear again. For a while after this I will be trapped in a cycle; taking it out at increasing intervals, thinking ‘maybe today will be a shirt day!’, realising it is too creased to ever wear again, then immediately rolling it back up into a ball and shoving it back to the back of the drawer before it can make me too sad.
If you’re wincing at this and yelling ‘but why would you keep a shirt in the back of a drawer you ANIMAL?’ then there is a strong chance you are a shirt person. Perhaps all of your shirts are stored on padded hangers in individual protective covers, or continually rotating on one of those dry cleaner carousels that you’ve had specially installed for the purpose. Maybe you radiate enough personal body heat that the creases drop out within minutes. Maybe you have a butler, I don’t know. But this is partly your fault – seeing you pass by in the street, all chic and crisply shirted, is the reason I keep falling into the same trap. You owe me, collectively, about £2,000 in unworn shirts.
Even at school, where I was required to wear a shirt for eight years – 10,920 hours of my young life, according to some very ropey maths I just did – I never managed to be a shirt person. And I did that very ropey maths on my laptop calculator, not in my head, because apparently wearing a shirt never helped me retain academic information like it’s supposed to. It just made me extra aware of my neck for seven hours a day.
There are many subtle, hard-to-define obstacles stopping me from being a successful shirt-wearer – and then there are the two biggest, less subtle obstacles on my chest. And I know what you’re thinking: ‘which is the biggest obstacle really, her boobs or her own self-confidence?’ But you’re wrong, it is definitely my boobs.
When you’re an F-cup fashion-lover, you spend your days fighting The Gape like it’s a comic book supervillain. Your weapons are safety pins, double-sided tape, press studs or hook-and-eyes if you can be arsed to thread a needle. I’ve managed to conquer some button-down dresses and tops with Bondaweb, that amazing iron-on glue tape that just seals the whole thing shut, but obviously, that doesn’t work for everything because there’s the small matter of getting the thing on. And, off again. And so all too often, boobs lose (I refer you to genius Instagram account FashionvsBoobs for the extended adventures of The Gape).
But even beyond The Gape, even if I were just a gaseous vapour instead of a human woman with a body, I worry there’s still something about me that just means I can never be a shirt person. It’s one of those epiphanies you have when you get older (and FYI I’m staring down the barrel of 30, so I am allowed to make these grandiose statements) which comes almost as a relief – like realising you can finally stop pretending to like tequila, or admit you never want to sleep in a tent again your whole life.
Here are all the people I want to look like when I wear a shirt: Charlotte Gainsbourg, Jenna Lyons, Diane Keaton, Jennifer Grey in Dirty Dancing, Sienna Miller in Alfie, Alexa Chung in anything, a woman who has had a fantastic one night stand with a guy and is now making coffee in nothing but his shirt, Diane Lockhart from The Good Wife, Olivia Pope from Scandal, Patti Smith, Thelma and/or Louise, Sophia Coppola, David Bowie circa 1976, Veronica Corningstone from Anchorman, Jimi Hendrix, a teacher I once had in year nine, Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, a woman in her 60s who runs an upmarket ceramics boutique, Princess Diana.
Here are all the people I do look like when I wear a shirt: a teenager doing their first work experience, a small-time fraudster attending a court hearing, a lady walking on the beach in an advert for bladder control aids, Susannah from Trinny & Susannah in a ‘what NOT to wear’ photo, Dawn from The Office, a waitress who can’t be bothered to buy a better uniform because she’s really an actress and just doing this until work picks up again, the sexy teacher from Busted’s What I Go To School For video, Sandi Toksvig.
I’ve tried print, I’ve tried plain. I was alive last summer, so I’ve obviously tried embroidery. I’ve tried ruffles and fancy cuffs, I’ve tried crisp cotton and vintage silk. I’ve had the most success with wearing them open over things, like a lightweight jacket, or tying them up over things like a cowgirl, but even then I look back at photos forever afterwards and think ‘nice day, shame about the shirt.’ So that’s it, enough. No more shirts. I don’t need that kind of negativity in my life. And the shirt brigade can certainly do without me, slowing everyone down, and grumbling as they try to lead a board meeting or drink red wine in a window or smoke a cigarette enigmatically on a stoop. It’s best for everyone if we just part ways now, and I make peace with a shirtless future. I mean, a future without a shirt. I mean… You know what I mean.
As I write this, there is a woman sitting next to me wearing a really beautiful shirt. It’s white, made from some kind of slinky, slightly sheer fabric and covered in a beautiful floral watercolour print. I fight the urge to ask her where she got it. ‘Good for her and her lovely shirt!’ I think, breathing in deeply and then exhaling slowly. The urge passes. ‘Good for her.’
Liked this? You might also be interested in:
How To Get To The End Of Summer Without Buying Any More Stuff
A First Person Guide To Radicalising Your Plus Size Wardrobe
Follow Lauren on Instagram @laurenbravo
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.