A woman told me she could never wear what I was wearing last Tuesday.
The piece was simple: a pink midi skirt. Nothing radical. Nothing that required bravery. Paired with a long sleeve top i bought in 2012But she said it with complete certainty: I could never pull that off.
I’ve been thinking about it since.
“I could never” is one of the most interesting sentences women say about clothes. It sounds like a practical observation “this garment is not for me” but it’s almost never about the garment. It’s about a version of herself she’s decided she doesn’t get to be. The woman who wears pink on a Tuesday. The woman who takes up that kind of space.
The sad thing is she would have looked incredible. I know this because I’ve watched enough women hold things up against themselves to know what a piece is asking for. She had exactly the quality that this midi skirt needed, something unhurried about her energy. The skirt would have complimented what she already has, but she’d already decided it wouldn’t.
I think about this a lot when I’m designing. Not the woman who immediately picks something up and knows but the woman who picks it up, holds it against herself, puts it back. The almost… the “I could never.”
The “I could never” is always wrong.
What she means (what I think she almost always means) is: I’ve decided I’m not the kind of woman who does that. Which is a decision. Not a fact.
Decisions can be revised. That’s the thing about them. The woman who put the pink suede skirt on can walk back in. The woman who’s been opting herself out of her own wardrobe for a decade can just... stop. It doesn’t require a new body or a better occasion or a more worthy Tuesday, it just requires changing the decision.
xx Tay