Ego death in the concept store dressing room
SS26 Eurosummer chicslop economics!
Like most places that exist for convenience but instill terror through unsolicited comparison, the dressing room is the perfect place to die. It’s where hierarchy ceases to matter, where you and I are equally reduced to our shame and left to deodorant stains and foundation marks of those who came before us. So many things to unbutton and unzip ahead of sweaty-sticky summer nights, and the clothes I’ve picked to try on are a foretaste of the emotional spiral to come.
Erica, the sales assistant, has a soft voice and a relaxing presence as she urges me to try something on. She knows better than anyone that a confinement of three walls and a curtain is among the most vulnerable places to be. She’s my mother figure on commission and I’m her baby – helpless and naked and afraid and wishing the empty space between my tits had been filled by generative AI, because no matter how long I try to protest against perfection, I could use some of it here, today. Sweat drops collecting under my hairline reflect my readiness for humiliation, and it’s hard to tell if this tension headache between my temples is precursory or if it’s just really hot in here. The earth has been warming up faster than I’ve been able to do great things.
This isn’t Aritzia, where I would have to strut down the communal rug to stare in the only floor length mirror and feel a wave of collective shame wash over me, having to absorb my silhouette through the eyes of every size zero woman in SoHo coalescing. This isn’t Brandy Melville, where I could find solace and comfort in the confessional v <33 j written across thin veneer walls, or camaraderie with a thirteen year old in the cabin next to me that would agree I’m too geriatric for the store but have utmost respect for my attempt to spiritually calcify, which we both know is better than to age out of Brandy into Reformation. This isn’t a Paloma Wool ephemeral pop-up, where I’d have to scribble the items I want to try on with a borrowed pencil, and it’ll be the most sensible thing I’ve written in months.
This is an unknown, private equity owned concept store with 23,000 Instagram followers and thirteen items in stock made from recycled fabrics of unknown origin, all engineered to bring me to my most miserable, itchy self. The tops retail for 300 EUR and were made for women like me, women that feel we have a lot to say and not much left to care about. No better breathing representation of how consumerism intercepts womanhood and bends it to its will than a boutique with sterile and anemic aesthetics, and yet I’m here, ready to contribute to Eurosummer and Catalan chicslop economics1. I put these clothes on to feel gossamer and water-soluble, an Alka-Seltzer looking to relieve – or looking for relief.
To feel good in a dressing room requires a lot. It means being an active civic participant in your daily choices and radically accepting of what is. This is where we assess my quarterly human performance. In the world, on the internet, in the body. But admiring the body I’d been awarded would mean the world had to rotate backwards first and meet me halfway in this repulsion. I watched a girl grab four items off the rack, stacking them and taking them into the dressing room with enviable conviction. It was the most natural thing to her – an ordered sequence of events from curiosity to desire to decision. She must know an object cannot have control over a living thing, but exists to make this living thing’s life better. My fault is that I exist in service to the objects that I own, and I obey them in a way that is Derridean and truthful. I’m expecting the clothes to tell me what I’m worth and what size I am. I got the object-subject thing all messed up. Maybe by trying them on I’ll live out a fantasy of somebody less afraid of themselves, and then I’ll understand.
But I have been running rock hard and steady on the idea that I need deeper fixing. Since I was born I’ve needed deeper fixing. When I walked into this dressing room, I didn’t just want to try clothes on – I wanted to see if I could find some deeper fixin’ amongst the low-waisted beige trousers. It’s my subsidy of ruling out diagnoses and negotiating what exactly is and isn’t wrong with me. Standing here for the past fifteen minutes, I’ve stared at my exposed cleavage in this halter top and thought about life, death, rebirth, and pregnancy. Mostly pregnancy, and how scared we get of our bodies changing, but then we have to sandwich the human worry between acknowledgment of the privilege it is to grow a life inside of us, the sacred excitement that takes residence. Saying something is a blessing offsets the horrors that surround the blessing, maybe. And like anything with women, we can be applauded for hard things as long as we don’t admit those things are hard. “I’ve noticed that my tits don’t look as they used to,” I imagine saying to a woman with a newborn in her arms, “And I’m not even thirty. Is that normal…?” I’m simply looking for advice. She would eyeroll me, displeased and bored by my lack of imagination, she’d groan at how much I’m banking on mourning the trivial. And I’d feel ashamed for seeking unity. Girls shouldn’t be hopeless if they’re also fertile. I tie the halter top at the back of my neck in an attempt to give myself a lift. This isn’t all horrendous. There has to be hope for me in the world. I may just need to size down so it sits tighter.
The lights are fluorescent but dimmed, hospital-like abstraction creeps in, and then there’s this palpable buzz of the fan airflow against the mid-century teak chair and I’m suffocating between the mirror and the curtain and my own demands, capitulated by this pressure to fit better in the clothes I pay for out of my own pocket, but then I’ll have to tell the sales assistant, who already hates me because I don’t speak Dutch and don’t possess the right face or body card for the boutique’s Instagram stories (maybe they’ll pity-repost me but that’s as far as I’ll get) that I need this top in a smaller size. Erica is not going to believe me. “No, this fits just right, honey,” plays in my head in a condescending monotone. She’ll take me out back and put me out of my misery. Finally, I can be somebody then. Not an early Palantir employee or a Cybertruck owner on a lease, but someone equally metaphysically corrupt and self-convinced. Symmetrical. Structurally and cohesively attractive. There’s gotta be a way out of this sweaty claustrophobia attack that isn’t Backrooms.
The culprit of my suffering is unknown to me. God knows. The media. Unruly hair. My mother looking fifteen years younger than she is. My dad’s genetics. I’m going to purchase this top and walk out with one of these limited edition paper bags and feel excited for the next fifteen minutes. I belong to something bigger than myself. This top excelled at making me experience a feeling, even if that was disgust, and that means a lot. It shows solidarity with everything that doesn’t take me as I am, that sags against my hoping, the friction that distorts my efforts to hold it all in place. Pain bites back and I love it. I remember that the first step to getting what you want is saying it out loud.
“Could I please try this in Small?” I ask, head sticking out of the dressing room. Ready for my guillotine.
“Sure. I’ll bring that over in a sec.”
Concept popularized by Nymphet Alumni
Holt shit yes thank you so THIS is why I feel like going shopping is actually ontologically delectably exhausting
The last paragraph has me on a chokehold (well actually, this whole text does). You write precisely as I feel, the whole pregnancy paradox, thank you SOOOOO much for this amazingly raw piece 💗💗💗💗💗💗