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This is blatantly false. My wardrobes are bursting at the seams. My credit card bill is screaming with the weight of fast fashion guilt. I bought a pair of size 5 Loubotin boots, because they were £60 in a charity shop. I’m a size 3. I own three coats that don’t fit me. Yet here I am again, staring at my wardrobe with my coffee in hand, fuzzy morning brain blank with indecision.
Twenty minutes later, the caffeine kicks in and I choose a pair of dark jeans, a green top and a shearling jacket. I feel mediocre, average, invisible, sure to run into at least seven other people dressed like me within fifty seconds of stepping out of my front door. I don’t like it; today is an important day, and I need to look the part. I long to be the sort of person who demands attention. It doesn’t come naturally to me – I am small in every dimension. I get lost in a crowd easily. I hug people’s chests, not their faces. If I was caught in a stampede, I would be the first to die. I exclusively date and attract tall men, who I make feel needed because they can tower over me, envelop me in their gangly arms, take things off shop shelves. I command care, not attention.
I scan my wardrobe again and pull out one of my favourite jackets – a short crop in a small turquoise and white check. I try it on and observe myself in the mirror; it makes me look sweet but fashionable, emphasising my small frame. I put it back. Unoriginally for a 30-something Londoner, clothes are my kryptonite. I justify their purchases by telling myself I am a multi-faceted person; I have many personalities to dress. I own no less than nine blazers, a garment I wear precisely four times a year – once a quarter. They are my armour; deflecting from the fact I spend most of my time at my seemingly prestigious job staring wistfully into the many office towers opposite, hoping to catch someone shagging against a window. A complete list:
– three blazers in pastel colours (dusty pink, warm off-white, and baby blue, for the quarters I haven’t done well and need to use my feminine wiles to convince the 50-year old men staring me down that I am worth keeping, if for nothing other than reminding them of their relative advantage);
– two close-cropped blazers in black and grey (for the quarters I have been a mediocre performer and need to not be noticed);
– A green-brown countryside-chic jacket and a wool houndstooth (for the quarters when my old boss Percy will be there, who is the kind of posh that makes you betray your values and think maybe it doesn’t matter if your husband was a Tory, if he came with a townhouse in west London and a hefty line of credit),
– A boxy oversized blazer in a grey and cream check (for the quarters the board’s power lesbian is in town, so I can signal to her that I will muff-dive if it meant getting a promotion but I will keep it to myself),
– A chocolate brown with fringes on its sleeves (for the quarters I feel bold enough to admit to having a personality, and maybe a fun one at that).
My work personalities are not the only ones that need dressing. I have several friend groups, which I used to believe was due to being an extroverted and well-rounded person, but I now know is because I am deeply indecisive – I can’t decide which ones I like the most. I need them all. Each friend is an opportunity to become a slightly different person by hoping they will rub off on me. I am collecting parts of their personalities and aspects of their wardrobes
like strands of DNA, trying to weave all the parts that appeal into a patchwork quilt I can present as my own.
Perhaps a smart off-white blouse would do? I think of the west London gays, a small group of impeccably dressed men who have graduated, through their grown-up jobs, from south to west London, from sweaty, drug-fuelled weekends in Vauxhall to haunting the wine bars of Notting Hill. I envy them their appropriately sized, cohesive collections of quality neutrals. I imagine their easy mornings, tracing their fingers across a row of soft fabrics in their wardrobe while sipping their oat lattes, laced with the quiet confidence that whatever the day brings, they will face it looking fucking sharp. I imagine them being asked ‘Describe yourself in three words’, and actually having an answer. Neutrals are only worn by the self-assured.
Or I could swing the other way, something loud? I pull out a red and pink flower-pattern top, something my ‘hot mess’ friends would wear with a pair of jean shorts that cut into your labia. You know the type – she wakes up in a stranger’s bed on a Tuesday, flies to Mexico on the Wednesday, gets her fourth tattoo on a Thursday, somehow makes a living out of making greeting cards and selling foot pictures on the internet. Some days this seems to me an appealing lifestyle choice; I imagine all the narrative fodder I would have if I too had so little regard for routine and financial security. I am certain I would do their life well, filling it with enough one-night stands and hallucinogenic trips for a two-series critically acclaimed BBC show. So I buy a short green sundress with a daisy print, cut my hair into a bob and pierce an extra hole in my ears, thinking it will finally make me want to join an artist commune in Hackney. But I hate tofu, and I can’t stand people who substitute mental illness for personality.
The group I should try to mimic today are my friend Penelope and her fellow academics; a group of university friends who were far more invested in their studies than I was, and have a collection of postgraduate degrees that would make my parents immediately transfer my inheritance. They wear brown leather satchels, wide-framed reading glasses and earthy coloured shirts. They remind me of a person I wanted to be back then; fearfully clever, yet sexy, in a sheep-ish librarian with a stunning rack and a filthy sparkle in her eye kind of way. Some days, this is who I imagine I want to become; a quiet bookworm with a not-so-secret writing talent who spends her time reading high-brow literature in coffee shops, the obscure title carefully displayed to attract a similar-minded, bespectacled Hugh Grant in Notting Hill type. But I’d rather tweeze my bikini line than ever read Proust again, and I don’t have the patience for the prolonged soliloquies involved with dating an intellectual.
I am an advertiser’s wet dream. This is how I shop; I see something I like. I don’t look at the clothes as much as I look at the person wearing them, and imagine all the ways in which their life is easier than mine, all the ways in which they are sure of who they are. I think ‘the only kind of person who would pick out that gorgeous cream crewneck jumper is someone who has their shit together. They are doing pilates in the mornings, having a green smoothie, dating rich Scandi-looking men also wearing cream jumpers, living in an Islington period one-bedroom with scented candles and coffee table books. I could do that, if only I had that jumper!’ I buy it, imagining it will amount to a personality transplant. Of course, I am wrong. Cream looks sickly against my already pale skin; I am clumsy, not graceful – I will smudge it against the tube door, leaving a black stain that I don’t know how to remove. I am careless – I won’t take care of the fabric properly; it will be a bumpy mess in two months and join the rest
of the unsuccessful attempts at personality surgery in the bag next to my door that I will eventually, in about a year, take to the charity shop.
I buy new clothes imagining they will make me the kind of person who wears them. I try them on for size, discarding them at the end of the day for an oversized band t-shirt I’ve worn a thousand times. I worry that is who I truly am – a slob who can’t even be bothered to put on real pyjamas. So I contort myself into new clothes and new potential lives, willing each new addition to stay permanently, a set fixture of the shiny new person I am becoming. I dislike people commenting on my abundance of clothing. I worry they see right through me; the mismatched jumble of pattern and colour, an ever-changing carousel of style personalities an outward reflection of the chaos inside.
When I first saw the Crown, I bought a Barbour jacket. I secretly hoped it would attract a member of the aristocracy into my orbit, like a cat in heat rubbing against the lamplights of south London, leaving behind a trail of wax only someone who holidays in the Highlands could detect. I longed to have the lives I saw on screen, of psychological torture and family dysfunction in luxurious surroundings. I would be so good at being rich and pointless, I thought, filling my days with melancholy, nostalgia and lounging.
When I was fifteen, I fell in love with a floppy-haired boy who made terrible graffiti tags. I was his police look-out, in a town with no police presence. I bought a pair of electric blue and deep purple DC trainers to make him fall in love with me, the tomboyish but shy skater girl, perfectly matched to his fantasies of an artsy, sensitive paramour. I wore distressed jeans and cut an ill-advised fringe. It didn’t work – the shoes did nothing to disguise my talent for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, and no amount of board shorts improved my poor coordination.
My phone buzzes. It’s my friend Claire, wishing me good luck for today, with a row of hearts. Claire is the kind of grown-up who writes thank you notes and sends you flowers on your birthday, rubbing her adultness in your face. She got married recently, to a man she has been with since she was 15. She belongs to a small group of friends who are doing age-appropriate things like buying houses, getting married and having children, and somehow managing to do all this while living in one of the most expensive cities in the world. They wear Lululemon leggings, headbands and fuzzy cardigans; already assimilating into the 8:30am school drop-off crowd. There are days I want those things too, wondering if I’d make a good mother despite my terrible listening skills and, at best, average empathy. The only way I could ever have a child would be with a man who is so enthusiastic about child rearing he’d do everything after pregnancy. I realise they are in short supply, and so I haven’t invested heavily in this option.
I settle on a grey bodycon dress with a pair of white cowboy boots – some personality but tame enough. I step out my front door and start down the street. It’s a cold winter morning, air so fresh it burns my nostrils to breathe it in. I walk past a shop window and stop. There is a coat – large, floor length, with a yellow and dark blue chequered pattern and a short box collar. It commands attention. Before I can stop to think, I am handing over my credit card. I put on the coat, admire the colours in the floor length mirror, and feel a definite sense of happiness spread through me. Today, I am going to be difficult to miss.
I check my phone; I am late. I’ve already spent £200 on a coat, so I hail a black cab and get in. ‘Nice coat, love’, says the driver. ‘Where are we going’?
‘Thanks; I smile. ‘Southwark Crown Court, and if you could please step on it – my hearing is in 20 minutes’.

About Tina Bencik
Tina is a Slovenian-born occasional writer and full-time fallible human based in London. In her writing, Tina likes to explore themes of femininity, feminism, and friendship, and the mistakes she regularly makes in trying to accomplish all of those in her own life.