I lost an entire weekend recently.
Just like that, it was gone. It started on the Friday evening with four bin bags, three plastic boxes, a two-hour playlist and the determination to do a ruthless wardrobe edit in just a few hours. At least that’s how it began. By the end of Sunday, however, it had become something else altogether. It became an assessment of the life I had led, the choices I had made and the ambitions
I had, perhaps, not always fulfilled. If that sounds dramatic, let me explain…
I do wardrobe edits every year. Often it is without complication; the most difficult decision being ‘Will I regret throwing out the boot-cut leather jeans that haven’t fit since 2013?’ But sometimes, depending on where you’re at in your life, wardrobe audits can become their own form of therapy.
Given that for the last two years many of us have had more time to spend inside our homes and heads, cleaning out our wardrobes has become oddly confronting. Time away from the lives we once led has made many of us question whether those were, in fact, the lives we were meant to be leading in the first place. And if they weren’t? Then saying goodbye to the clothes that accompanied us through those lives is part of the process of starting over.
At the beginning of the pandemic, I was editing a fashion magazine. My life was parties and dinners and breakfasts that required me to make a bunch of small talk and carry a fancy bag every day. It was a 22-year-long career I had loved. In fact, glossy magazines were all I had ever known, and the uniform required to work in them – for, make no mistake, there was a uniform (good hair, lots of black, something from Prada) – was part of the appeal. All I had ever wanted was to look like the sort of person who worked in magazines. Until, of course, I no longer wanted to work in them.
Midway through Covid I realised I had outgrown the person I had worked hard to become. I am a natural introvert. I crave time alone. The work I really love is writing and editing, not leading a huge team or standing on a stage giving a speech to a roomful of strangers. I live in the country. I’m happiest in a boilersuit and Blundstone boots with mud up my shin and dog hair on my sleeve. My job as an editor had required me to move so far away from that person and the things I truly loved doing that I questioned the last two decades of my career. Yes, this career and the clothes it required had served me well throughout my twenties and thirties but, as I moved into my fifth decade, it had lost its gloss. And so, just like that, I switched careers.
On paper I now work in the tech world.
I lead Substack, a global newsletter platform, here in the UK. (Which is to say it’s a company that operates on a tech platform but, at its heart, it’s about writers.) My colleagues are on the West Coast of America. We communicate through Zoom and Slack. They appear as smiling faces in hooded tops and cosy jumpers. For the most part we all work from home. Cats join All Hand meetings; toddlers wander into conference. No one cares what shoes you’re wearing.
And so I created three piles of clothes. Staying, going, gone. The staying pile are classics – good jeans by Frame, a Saint Laurent tuxedo I bought for my first fashion week but which will serve me just as well on Google Meets with a famous author or musician. I’m keeping all my jumpers (that they all happen to be Celine is a bonus) and the All Birds trainers. I’m also keeping anything in silk, because silk makes you feel expensive, even if you’re just making a cup of tea. And I’m absolutely not throwing away anything by Chanel. Just because.
As for the going pile, these are clothes I am not ready to give up. Which is to say, they are a part of me as yet unfulfilled. If
I gave away my velvet The Vampire Wife’s dress that I wore to the British Fashion Awards, I would be accepting I’d never go anywhere quite as fancy again. And I don’t want to believe that is true. And so the Prada wedges, the Brunello Cucinelli coats and the skinny trousers by The Row are staying… for now.
But the floor-length Ellery dress that I wore to the Dubai desert for a fancy launch party? I can’t imagine a place for that in my life now. Ditto my Nicholas Kirkwood five-inch heels. Or the silver sequinned Preen fishtail skirt I bought for a dinner in the Duomo in Milan. They’re ‘gone’.
Yet if they no longer have a place in my life, these clothes can still accompany other women through theirs, women who are maybe in a similar place I was all those years ago. And so in a fit of overexcitement I decided to give them away to the readers of my newsletter. No payment. No real reason. If they thought these clothes had a place in their lives, then they simply had to ask. I admit, it’s been slightly bittersweet to pack up the sequins that I loved so much. Saying goodbye to the clothes that no longer serve us is hard, because it’s an acknowledgement that a part of us has moved on. But it also feels like momentum, that my life is evolving – and there’s no greater feeling on earth.
Follow Farrah’s writing at thingsworthknowing.substack.com