MIRROR, MIRROR

Online retail has usurped brick and mortar. The physical store is no longer the main stage of shopping – it's a relic. And with it, the humble dressing room, once a space of ritual and revelation, is fading. But what was it, really? A mirror? A cocoon? A portal?

- WORDS DIVYA VENKATARAMAN ART KIMBERLEE KESSLER

There's a scene in Wild Child, the underrated, Kate-Nash-soundtracked coming-of-age film, where five girls take a rickety bus to a tiny English town to land in front of an op shop. The school social is coming up, and this is all the contrivance a teen movie needs to cut straight to a shopping montage. There's a lot I still find enviable about this scene, which I first watched in early teenhood, including the idea of shopping in such a focused and time-limited way. Such a clear goal, with such simple stakes: will the boy be wooed by thrifted sequins and tulle, or will he succumb to the patently shallow charms of the resident hot-mean girl?

In the film, Poppy (Emma Roberts) and her ragtag group of friends rifle through nineties psychedelia and try on fluffy tiaras and cycle in and out of the store's poky dressing room, emerging, each time, like butterflies from a chrysalis. Trying on these clothes is a group effort: hems are yanked down, sashes tied and retied in improbable ways, corsets laced tight and then loosened, for oxygenation reasons, and then perilously tightened again. The body of each girl becomes group property for a brief window, pulled and swivelled and gushed over.

The end result is spectacular and triumphant and communal: they are dressed, they are transformed, they are ready.

When I was younger, dressing rooms felt a little bit enchanted. Not with sparkle or smoke, but with quiet, ritual magic, the kind that lives in transformation. Fairy-godmother-type magic. A dressing room wasn't just where you tried on clothes. It was where you stepped out of your ordinary self and into the possibility of something more – something brighter, sharper, different. You could slip on a new self, like in the teen movies, and try it on for size. And if it didn’t fit? All that was stopping you from becoming someone else again was the swish of a curtain.