For the longest time, I was convinced there would be a better moment.
I had a dress that felt too beautiful for a Tuesday afternoon. Shoes that deserved a city I wasn’t in yet. A perfume that needed a candlelit dinner. Every purchase seemed to come with an imaginary disclaimer: save for something special.
The problem with that mentality is that “something special” has a habit of continuously moving further away. You imagine you’ll wear the dress on holiday, then the holiday becomes a wedding, then the wedding becomes your birthday, then your birthday somehow doesn’t feel important enough either. Before you know it, you’ve owned something for two years and it’s still waiting for permission to exist.
I’ve realised we do this with more than just clothes. We save the expensive candle until the house is clean. We keep the nice ceramics in the cupboard. The fancy wine for when we have guests. Somewhere along the way, we started believing that preserving beautiful things was more important than actually experiencing them.
But isn’t that what they’re for?
I don’t remember the outfits I’ve kept perfectly pressed in my wardrobe. I remember the linen shirt that still smells faintly of sunscreen because I wore it every day in Italy. I remember the heels that became undeniably impossible to walk in after a night of dancing. I remember spilling red wine on a cream dress and laughing because, at that point, the evening had already become one worth remembering.
The clothes I love most are never the ones in perfect condition. They’re the ones that have lived alongside me.
I think fashion becomes much more interesting when you stop treating it as something to preserve and start treating it as something to participate in. Clothes are surprisingly resilient. They’re supposed to crease. Leather softens because you carry it everywhere. Denim fades because you’ve worn it enough for it to become yours.
Nothing becomes meaningful by sitting untouched.
I’ve also started questioning what actually counts as an occasion. Why have we decided that birthdays deserve beautiful outfits, but an ordinary Wednesday doesn’t? Most of our lives aren’t spent at weddings or parties. They’re spent buying flowers at the supermarket, grabbing coffee before work, calling our mum on the drive home and meeting a friend for a wine after work.
If that’s where life is actually happening, why wouldn’t we dress for it?
Maybe that’s why I’ve fallen so deeply in love with getting dressed. It has very little to do with other people and almost everything to do with how I want to move through my own day. Maybe the blazer won’t change what’s on my to-do list, but it changes the energy I bring to it.
We spend so much time waiting for life to begin that we forget it already has.
So wear the dress to dinner. Wear the suede skirt to the office. Put on the perfume before your morning coffee. Carry the bag that’s “too nice.”
Because one day, you’ll look back and realise these ordinary moments were the special occasions all along.
xx