Are You Wardrobing?

There’s something thrilling about splashing out on a wearable classic after a decade in which fashion trophies ruled. All hail the rise of wardrobing aka dressing for you.

- Jess Cartner-Morley

We all have our rituals when it comes to the making of significant, bank balance-denting fashion purchases. There is the online shopping brigade, worshipping privately at their laptops, pining for the delivery man and consummating the relationship (with the new dress, not the delivery man) in the privacy of their bedroom. There are the impulse shoppers—the women who buy expensive sunglasses at the airport. Me, when I really want something? I visit a shop. I love the theatrics of boutique shopping: the flourish with which the ribboned bag is handed over, the conspiratorial smile you get from the doorman when you walk out swinging it.

My shopping ritual never changes, but the nature of what’s inside the bag has. Until recently, if I spent significant funds on a purchase then you could bet what nestled in the tissue paper was a delicate, precious, ornamental kind of purchase. The pintucked lace Christian Dior dress I bought for my 40th birthday, the Edie Parker clutch when I got a pay raise, the Sophia Webster sandals I just had to have because I couldn’t stop thinking about them. As exquisite as Fabergé eggs, all of them—and about as useful.

But this year, something changed. I came away from the Gucci show in Milan lusting not after the rainbow chiffon gown or the Canary coloured feathered coat, but the pancake-flat black loafers with an understated horse-bit chain. The night of the Balenciaga show, I went to sleep dreaming not of the cocktail-worthy Prince of Wales-check tailoring, but of the Green and-blue anoraks and red puffer jackets. Where once I bought fashion as if for a trophy cabinet, I now buy clothes for a real-life wardrobe.