The Pandemic Personal-Style Apocalypse
About six months into quarantine, Mal Durham had a personal-style epiphany.
“I decided, ‘You know what, I'm a 34-year-old queer woman. I'm going to be the kind of queer woman who wears a lot of rings on all her fingers,’” she says.
Prior to the pandemic, her style was “very high-femme”: She favored dresses and skirts, and dyed her short, natural hair every color of the rainbow. After months at home in sweatpants, though, she found herself wanting to try something different—button-down shirts, cigarette pants, velvet blazers, and, of course, all those rings.
Under normal circumstances, she would have been able to try out her new look at a dinner party with friends and been rewarded with their validation. As it was, though, “I had to give myself permission to do that for myself even if no one else got to see me,” she says.
This was particularly important—and particularly fraught—because of her history with fashion. “I've always been fat, and I had a complicated relationship with clothes for a really long time,” she says. While she grew to love style, it took a lot of work to get to the point that getting dressed wasn’t a referendum on the state of her body.
Not getting to present herself to the outside world was something she had to come to terms with, she says, because “part of that is people witnessing and seeing, like, ‘That is a fat person who looks put together and amazing.’”
Now, since receiving her second vaccine dose, she’s been sorting through her wardrobe and figuring out, “Okay, what am I taking with me into the outside world? What is that gonna look like?… Will it feel like too much?” she says. “I don't think I'm going to know until it happens.”
In some ways the past year has created ideal conditions for personal transformation. No matter who we are (or were a year ago), our lives have been upended by the pandemic. We’ve been forced to sit with ourselves—far more than any human should probably have to—and evaluate our priorities. Our routines have changed, and our wardrobes have too.
And while it seems increasingly unlikely that we’ll emerge from this time all at once in a triumphant wave of crowded dance parties, a future in which a dinner party with friends is just a normal Friday night, and not a potential super-spreader event, finally seems within our grasp. When that time comes, what are we going to wear?
Personally, the relentless sameness of quarantine has deepened my appreciation for anything even slightly offbeat. Give me clashing prints and bright colors. The more personality, the better. With so much bleakness in the world, fashion feels like a vital sign.
Twelve months of couch clothes have also made me utterly intolerant of discomfort, though, which rules out nearly all my heels, a large swath of my dresses, and any bag too fussy to wear while riding a bike. I can’t say I’ll miss them, though surely they sparked joy at some point. But why bother with pieces I don’t love when there are so many others I do? I can only hope, post-quarantine, I’m less prone to impulse purchases that languish in my closet for years. (Looking at you, balloon-sleeve tops.)
Talia Abbas, a commerce writer at Glamour, says this time has made her much more conscious of what she buys and where it’s coming from. With nowhere to wear most of the pieces she already owns, she says, she’s steering away from trends and gravitating instead toward timeless investment pieces, like the Charlotte Chesnais ring she saved up for earlier this year.
“Fashion has always been such a huge part of me,” she says, “and I think COVID has made me think a lot about how clothes fit into who I am and how I want to present myself in the world. I genuinely think I will come out of this having a stronger sense of who I am and what I like.”
For Alice Bodemyr-Dunaway, a financial analyst in New York City, working from home has been an opportunity to break free from corporate dress codes. Going to an office every day, she’d built up a wardrobe filled with tailored dresses from Kate Spade and Alice + Olivia, Chloé flats, and Golden Goose sneakers. While her look was always more alternative than that of her colleagues, quarantine turned that side of her style up to full volume.
“It got to a point where I was like, 'No one's seeing me… I'll just experiment for a couple months,’” she says. “And from there, it turned really punk, really fast.”
She traded her work wardrobe for leather pants, Dr. Martens boots, and (Zoom-appropriate) leather jumpsuits. She finished her tattoo sleeve and bleached her hair from fire-engine red to silver. A lifelong Nordstrom disciple, she started shopping instead from local designers like Christian Benner—known for his custom leather jackets—and trawling eBay for vintage tees.
“I told my mom, ‘If you had let me be emo in middle school, I don't think this would be happening now,’” she says with a laugh. Now that she’s found a style that feels true to herself, she can’t imagine turning back—though she concedes she’ll eventually find a shirt without holes to wear to the office.
During the past year sweatpants have dominated the fashion conversation, but as optimism is starting to creep into our collective mindset, our nationwide obsession with loungewear could be waning: On recent earnings calls, retail CEOs have trumpeted the return of dresses and denim. And while few women may be pining for the days of pencil skirts and underwires, it seems that many of us are finally ready to dress up again.
Brooklyn-based art director Mandy Braatz felt the hunger for capital-O outfits come back a few months ago, prompting her to reactivate her lapsed Rent the Runway subscription. Uncharacteristically, she made a beeline for statement outerwear, starting with an emerald-green full-length faux-fur coat, which she says she’s mostly worn to sashay down the aisles at Target.
“It actually surprised me how much I liked it,” she says. “I thought it would feel too outlandish, but it was fun to wear.”
The experience of the past year has made her reconsider her old reluctance to try pieces that seemed too impractical or over-the-top. “Life is short,” she says. “Wear what you want to wear. Wear the big ruffled neckline or whatever it is.” As the city reopens and a sense of newness pervades, she says she feels emboldened to step out of her comfort zone, stylewise.
My own motivation to wear anything other than sweatsuits is improving with the weather—and the news cycle. With every hit of positive news I’m more inclined to put on, say, a pair of hoop earrings or vintage suede pants, though I also no longer have any qualms about leaving the house in no makeup and whatever I happen to be wearing.
Glamour digital producer Khaliha Hawkins can also track her mood by what she’s worn to leave the house. She tells me that, during the last year, she’s bought only one pair of sweatpants but finds that putting on jeans and heeled booties makes her feel put together. “When the pandemic started, I was wearing sweatpants and it was a reflection of having to work from home instead of going into an office and using my cute outfits as conversation starters,” she says. “But then I realized it’s just not me and I feel more ready for the day if I have jeans or a dress on.”
If you love fashion, the idea of wearing loungewear for the rest of your one wild and precious life is probably not an inspiring one. Hopefully, though, there are lessons we can take from the past year that could lead to a better relationship with the clothing we own and the industry behind it.
For one, the fact that brands pivoted so quickly from party dresses to hoodies “really proved that they cater to us, not vice versa,” says Erin Parker, a commerce writer at Glamour. “We make the calls. So maybe we'll continue to see that: brands looking to us and asking us what we want rather than telling us.”
Figuring out what we want, though, may take some time; I can count on three fingers the number of times I’ve worn a handbag in the past year, but that probably doesn’t mean I plan on forsaking them forever. Most of my online shopping excursions have involved adding half a dozen things to my cart, deciding I have nowhere to wear them, and finally closing the tab.
Post-pandemic life will inevitably look different than the time that came before, and I expect many of us will need to get our sea legs as we figure out how to dress for it. But at least we’ll be doing it together, finally face-to-face, telling each other how great we look in our leather pants and new rings.
Originally Appeared on Glamour
