cotton

on getting dressed

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There hasn’t been a full-length mirror in my home for nearly a decade now. I never, truly, know if my shoes work with the rest of my outfit until I leave the house, and perhaps get into one of those lifts lined with mirrors. Instead, I see my reflection in bits: from my shoulder to my hips, in the low, wide mirror above my dressing table; from my waist up, half-way up the stairs, in the oval mirror I bought for £8 from Deptford Market. Face, in the bathroom. A blurry, misted headless version in the darkened glass of the oven door.

By and large, this suffices. I don’t have a daughter, but if I did I’d be happier raising her in a house short on mirrors; there are enough people telling little girls how to look in this world. But I’ve been thinking about the mirror situation because my reflection has changed a lot over the past couple of years. When I catch it these days I try to find her, the woman I used to be. Where does she fit among the hastily dried hair, the skin worn by sleeplessness and stress? I know I look older, but nevertheless I ask these impossible questions: how much older, what was there before, is this how I imagined it to be?

I’ve never been one for the beauty pages but I’ve poured over the fashion ones since girlhood. Not for the labels, but for the colours and cuts and the way things change and somehow always stay the same. The drastic shifts from tight to voluminous, from long to short, high to low. At worst, a patriarchal, consumerist trap to keep us spending our inherently lower incomes on things that promise to make us happier, but never actually do. At best a means of expressing ourselves, of drenching ourselves in beauty and comfort. Of making our bodies, things we are so often quietly at war with, feel like they belong to us.