In Defence of Getting
Dressed Up for No One

Last Tuesday I wore a silk blouse to the supermarket. Not because I had somewhere to be afterwards, not because I had forgotten to change, and not — as the cashier seemed to imply — because I had misread some social cue about the appropriate formality of a Tuesday morning shop. I wore it because I wanted to. Because I had ironed it the night before and the act of ironing had been meditative and the blouse had rewarded the attention. Because wearing it made the fluorescent-lit vegetable aisle feel less bleak.

I mention this because the cashier actually asked. "Are you going somewhere nice?" There was no malice in it — it was a perfectly friendly question — but I've been thinking about it since. The question contains an assumption: that effort in dressing is transactional. That silk is a currency you spend in exchange for social recognition. That there must be an occasion to justify the choice.

The Question We Forgot to Ask

There is a version of this conversation that happens constantly, in a hundred different registers. Someone wears heels to a casual event and is asked if they knew it was a picnic. Someone turns up to a work meeting in a good suit and is asked if they have an interview. The implicit message in each case is: your clothes have communicated something unintended. You are performing at the wrong level. Dressing up, in these interactions, is legible only as communication directed outward. The idea that it might be directed inward — at oneself, as a kind of private ceremony — doesn't appear to register.

And yet this is precisely why most people, if you ask them about a piece of clothing they love, will tell you about how wearing it makes them feel rather than how it makes them appear. Not "it looks expensive" but "it makes me feel like I can handle anything." Not "people notice it" but "it makes me feel like myself." The affective experience of clothing is intensely interior, even when the garment in question is the most outwardly extravagant thing imaginable.

Dressing as Private Ritual

We have a surprisingly rich vocabulary for the external purposes of dress — signalling, performing, presenting — and a comparatively impoverished one for its internal purposes. We talk about self-expression, but that still implies an outward transmission. We talk about confidence, but that's a downstream effect rather than the thing itself. What we lack is language for the experience of dressing as a private ritual, a thing you do for the pleasure of doing it, like making a good meal you will eat alone, or singing in a room with no one in it.

The problem is partly historical. Dress has almost always been theorised as communication — as a language addressed to others. Even psychoanalytic accounts of fashion, which might be expected to attend to the interior life, tend to focus on what clothes communicate about the unconscious rather than what they do for the person wearing them. The observer's gaze is so thoroughly built into our thinking about clothing that we struggle to imagine dressing outside it.

But people have always dressed for themselves — in private rituals, in the care taken over a garment nobody would see, in the silk underwear worn under entirely ordinary clothes. These practices suggest something different: that dressing can be a form of attention paid to oneself, a way of taking one's own life seriously, a small daily insistence that you matter.

The Argument for the Blouse

When I think about the most reliably joyful dressers I know, they share one characteristic: they have almost entirely stopped thinking about how their clothes will be received. They dress early in the morning, in private, and the decision is between them and the clothes and, sometimes, the light coming through a window. The pleasure is in the putting on, in the assessment in the mirror that has nothing to do with imagined approval and everything to do with some internal register of rightness.

This is not narcissism. It is, if anything, its opposite: a profound indifference to the mirror as instrument of social appraisal. It is also, I think, the purest form of personal style — not a style performed for others, but a style developed in faithful conversation with yourself over years, responsive to mood and season and the particular quality of the day. It cannot be Instagram'd into existence. It cannot be assembled from a capsule wardrobe guide. It is earned, gradually, through the accumulated experience of getting dressed every morning and paying attention to how it goes.

So yes. I wore the silk blouse to the supermarket. And when the cashier asked if I was going somewhere nice, I thought about it for a moment, and then I said: "Yes, actually. Home." I meant it completely.