All of Europe is succumbing to the sweltering heat, becoming one with the sweat and the dust and the dirt. Swimming in canals, drinking out of bottles, baring skin. Collectively embracing texture, grit, reality. Irreversible want. Desire. I want to squeeze something until it resists, or yields, or squeezes back. Preferably with a firm grip. But then, men’s fashion week. In the middle of this heat inferno, dainty girl-men sashayed down the catwalk for Dries van Noten, dressed in see-through blouses, micro shorts, ballerina shoes. Women modeled the menswear at Amiri and Ami and Vetements. Meryll Rogge blended masculine and feminine through folded, piled, layered. Florals and poplin bloomers. Fragile, delicate, clad in pastels. While the audience panted and perspired.

If I weren’t lounging in the pool I’d be paddling around on the lake only two minutes by foot on a private trail behind our house. Surrounded by others with enough quiet insurance and unbothered leisure time to enjoy the late summer sun. Hands idle, for now.

The Durutti Column is releasing their first album in 16 years. Their music has been described as a smoke ring slowly dissolving in the air. Fleeting moments, cautiously composed. Vini Reilly is 73, has rheumatism, had a number of strokes, suffers from depression and anorexia. Fragile and delicate to the extreme, he inspires the likes of Harry Styles and Yung Lean. Harry has been experimenting with gender fluidity in his stage costumes for years now, embodying the man confident enough to wear frilly blouses, while having an affair with a newly divorced older woman without looking like a toy boy. When Durutti was first signed by Factory Records they were the odd bird out among moody post punk bands like Joy Division and OMD. Left to carefully trill on the side. Yung Lean wears vintage Durutti Column t-shirts. Battered, smoking, motionless in the chaos, wearing post-punk fragility on his body.

I’m shading my face from the glaring blue sky with a white sun hat. The only backdrop the low swoosh from brushing against the edge of the pool, and far off sounds from speed boats. Later I’ll cut up a watermelon. The sweet sticky juice will attract the wasps.

Hilma af Klint is being shown at Centre Pompidou, and Fulgur press will start shipping the reissue of Leonora Carrington’s surrealistic tarot cards later this summer. Hilma af Klint sealed her spiritual and abstract work for decades, because she didn’t believe the world was ready to see it. She claimed to be channeling higher spiritual entities, and wanted her works to eventually be shown in designated temples. After a lengthy legal battle the abstract paintings are instead on display at one of the worlds largest museums of modern art. Leonora Carrington painted her Major Arcana deck to use as a personal spiritual compass. The cards were never intended to be a commercial product or a simple fortune-telling device, they resist grasping. A macrocosmic model of the universe, more art object than divination tool. Now they are being shipped world-wide after a marketing campaign that utilised a blend of institutional prestige, scarcity tactics, and experiential tie-ins like interactive readings, multi-sensory “Magic Labyrinth” environments and custom fragrances.

My foot meets the rough stones next to the pool. Two tiny lizards scurry away like mice between the hot rocks.

It makes me think of Lennie. Of what happens when want has no master. He is grit-culture run to its logical end, touch as love that kills the thing it touched. Wanting the beauty so much he kills it. On the streets I see women with scatterings of delicate figures tattooed on their lightly clad bodies. Carving the fleeting thoughts into their flesh, trying to pin down the mirage.

I turn around on the llama, lazily offering my back to the searing sun. Nothing I grab will grab me back. It will disintegrate under my obsession.

The bell rang shrilly as she opened the door to the diner on the corner. For a second she stood on the doorstep and blinked before making her way to the counter. The diner was a narrow, rectangular room with booths along the windows facing the street. The sofas in the booths were made of green, worn-out leather, old and greasy from years of exposure to fried eggs and sweaty thighs. The barstools along the counter, which took up most of the room, had seats in the same old green leather. The counter itself was made of something resembling dark oak. Back in the day, when the diner was buzzing, stars stopped in on their way to the Broadway stages. It had been a nice-looking place. Left of the stars now were only the old black-and-white photographs on the greasy walls, the memories had left with the old owners. Instead there was a fat lady behind the counter with a name-tag spelling Rita on her prodigious chest.

At first glance she could have been part of the inventory. Her vast behind seemed grown into the chair she sat on, elbows glued to the counter. She looked as if she hadn’t shifted in years. She was watching a talk-show on a small portable television set on the counter below the shelves of glasses and plates, taking no notice of Vera as she sat down on one of the worn-out barstools. Vera glanced at a greasy menu. Pie. It was filled with pie. And burgers. Pie and burgers. No pasta or salad. It didn’t even appear that the pie or burger was served with a side salad. She scanned the counter. Not a vegetable in sight.

”Something wrong with the food?”
The grunt from the fat lady came so suddenly that Vera almost fell of her barstool.

“Do you serve any salad?”
”No. We serve food. And pie.”
Not once did the fat lady take her eyes off the screen. Vera looked at the menu again. She wasn’t really hungry but now that she was in here she had to order something. In any case, she didn’t know what else to do. She decided on key lime pie and coffee. Decaf.

She was uncomfortable. She wished she could take off the veil, but it was pinned to her head with so many hairpins she was afraid she would rip her scalp off if she tried to remove it. And the garter was itching on her thigh. ’Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.’ The dress was borrowed, the veil was new, she was old? Why did she have to go with a blue garter, she could just as easily have worn blue panties. Her eyes were blue, was that not enough? Her hair was pinned up so tight her eyes watered if she turned her head too much to any side.

”You know you’ll get that pretty dress greasy sittin’ on that chair.” Eyes still glued to the TV.
”That’s alright. It’s already greasy from the cab.” She looked down at the green substance now quivering in front of her next to a cup of coffee.

”What’s this?”

”Pie.”

She tried to light a cigarette, but her lighter went on strike. Again. Why could the world never co-operate, was it too much to ask? She peered around the diner, searching for matches. None. She tried to make out whether there were any behind the counter. The fat lady was still glued to the talkshow and it was impossible to draw her attention away from the socially impaired guests loudly sharing their lives and agonies with anyone who would listen. Just as well probably, Vera wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to use anything that had visited the pockets of the greasy whale seemingly stranded in front of her. She turned her head to the only other customer. He looked strange somehow, but she couldn’t really put her finger on it.

”Excuse me, do you have a light?”

He looked up and the intense look in his eyes caught her off guard. The rest of him seemed so, well, listless. His skin had a strange grey tone and his hair was ragged. His clothes looked as if they’d never been washed. But his eyes. They were bright green. The rest of him had a greyish brown mud-colour, but his eyes were the color of summer grass. His face void of expression, his eyes seemed to laugh at her, in a sort of disillusioned way.

”Sure.” He took his coffee and moved to the stool beside her. She braced for a stench like the garbage in the alleys behind her house. But it didn’t come. The man looked like something the cat dragged in, but he smelled divine. He lit two cigarettes and gave her one.
”Are you getting married or do you always dress like that on Thursdays?”
Why on earth would anyone ask such a strange question? Then she remembered. She was wearing a wedding dress that was too small and a blue garter that itched something dreadful.
”I’m always dressed like this on Thursdays. Just in case.”
”Fair enough. Would you settle for a quickie in the can?”
”What?”
”Nevermind. That pie any good?”

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It’s summer, I’m wearing the neon cotton shorts and cropped shirt I bought visiting my sister in the US. “Goddam you look good” — called out from across the street. I’m twelve years old, barely past my first period, barbie dolls still in a bag under my bed. Disoriented, made aware that someone else is reading my body before I can read it myself. The first in a stream of whistles, catcalls, of being stopped by grown men on the sidewalk asking me out for drinks.

Very young, with a body that looks nothing like Christy Turlington’s, exploding with emotions I don’t know what to do with. Wanting to be seen, and to disappear. In school there’s a girl’s club, for us to learn about makeup and find community. The first meeting we have to lie on a paper on the floor and have our figures traced, then our bodies are pinned to the wall.

Boys my age, almost worse than the men on the street. Irony, sarcasm and 90s detachment — “nice ass” can mean anything. “I love you with all my body and soul” or “you fucking loser, eat shit and die”. Safer to assume the latter. At fourteen a girl in my class loses her virginity in the toilet at a garage band party. He dumps her after the weekend, everyone knows.

Out in the Stockholm summer night, early 90s, in my hippie era. I’m fifteen, wearing the red and white scarf my dad bought in Palestine working for the UN in the 70s. Kungsträdgården is a sea of beer cans, ponytails, rugby shirts, hormones. Hope. A boy a few years older tries to put out his cigarette on my face.

Paléo music festival in Nyon, Blur playing the small tent. Air heavy with sweat and marijuana, lips sticky from beer and grenadine. Almost seventeen, in a batik hoodie, flowers cut from a plastic candle ring braided in my hair. A young guy comes up and asks “where are you from?” I look at him, with my clear blue eyes and very blond hair, reply “Ghana”. And walk away.

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In my early twenties, I tried to ghost a guy. It was around the turn of the millennia, and my excuse is I was young and living abroad. Back then it was an established fact that abroad didn’t count. He was tall, good bone structure, blue eyes and a full head of unruly, dark hair. He worked in TV and had just been involved in making a documentary that was getting modest attention. In short, he was perfect. We had been on some dates, there had been kissing involved, he had written me a funny poem. And I just wasn’t feeling it. I think I was vaguely embarrassed by the fact that I had no reason to not see him anymore. Except. There was no spark. So I decided to passively let it peter out. I did my best to avoid him for a few days, but in the end I picked up when he called my land line. At this point it was obvious what I was trying to do, and he angrily confronted me. He told me exactly what he thought of my behaviour, that not telling him we were done was a shitty thing to do. He got to let his angry, hurt feelings out, and I had to face the consequence of treating him badly. It was embarrassing, uncomfortable, and well deserved. And it’s becoming increasingly rare. This was before therapy-speak entered mainstream consciousness. Back then, things ended.

These days everyone is working on themselves, have set healthy boundaries, understood their triggers and landed in a good place. Or so they say. Ask anyone and they will tell you they have been ghosted, or they’re in a situationship with no clear structure or boundary. If you never defined what you are to each other, can you ever rightfully be upset with them? Therapy-speak becomes a paralysis mechanism. The language of healing forecloses action, because acting would contradict the narrative of having already processed it. Processed what, exactly? If someone quietly disappears rather than breaks up with you, what are your feelings supposed to do? The practical reality is that without a clear ‘no’ from them, you’re left managing your own threshold. How long are you willing to wait, and what to do with the silence if it stretches. The performed healing becomes a sophisticated form of avoiding accountability, for everyone. All doors and windows left ajar, waffling positioned as a power move. And inevitably they circle back. When no one is close enough for uncomfortable confrontation, but never further away than a click, the threshold to reengage is as low as your current level of boredom. None of this was possible when geography made confrontation inevitable.

When they return with “I’ve been doing a lot of work on myself” your anger is pre-empted before you can even unleash it. Will Smith’s post-Oscars processing tour is the clearest recent public example. He lost it over a joke made at his wife’s expense. The language of “healing journey” and “doing the work” was subsequently used to reframe an act of violence as a psychological event happening inside him, which effectively made his feelings the subject and deflected the accountability question entirely. Converting the narrative to focus on his personal growth pre-empted any anger others were entitled to feel.

Will Smith lost control, briefly exposing what we’ve been trying to hide since the ironic generation perfected the art of complete detachment. No one is losing control anymore. The last unoptimised space, the body in free motion, sweating, inefficient, has been captured, ticketed, made functional, as Gen Z started engaging in coffee house clubbing and kettlebell raves. Instead of out-of-control dancing at night clubs, they’re dancing while drinking coffee in daylight, or rave while simultaneously hydrating and getting their daily workout. For someone who used to go out with the motto “it doesn’t matter you can’t tell in the dark” it’s hard to understand how any hookup under these circumstances doesn’t turn into a job interview. Maybe they bring their resumés to save time. Embodied appetite is repackaged as aspirational replication. You sweat, but productively. Desire is rebranded as virtue, your need for bodily contact becomes an optimisation project.

Self-optimisation is the new emotional detachment. We work to become self-assured, well- adjusted, evolved, and self-contained. Effectively, we’re trying manage our emotions to fit the image of the perfected individual. Harmonious and in need of no one. It’s aspirational replication of an image with no one behind it. Mindfulness. Nervous system regulation. Tradwifing. Looksmaxxing. Let them. Yung Lean in Storm II, battered, smoking, stoic, standing still as chaos erupts around him. Not managing it, not performing alongside it, just absorbing it.

We want raw, unfiltered emotions again. Cigarettes, smeared makeup, friction, sweaty bodies. Sex. But intimacy is difficult. The other person makes you angry, as well as horny and happy and sad. Our aspirational optimisation has paralyzed us, but we need somewhere for our anger to go. You can’t act on real emotions from inside an image you’re trying to become, you can only perform. You don’t explode. It gets managed, processed, contained. But the feeling is still there.

Like a tight compression on your chest and throat, threatening to explode.

I was named after my grandfather’s favorite sister. An old viking name, made up of two parts that both individually mean battle, or war. In other words, I don’t arrive unnoticed. Apparently the likeness is striking. We don’t actually resemble each other, but we look at people the same way. My gaze preceded me, it was recognized in someone else first. Together with my battlecry of a name, I inherited a way of looking at people that apparently can be quite unsettling.

I like eye contact. I will look directly at you and wait to see if you look away or stay with me. It’s my deceptively quiet confrontation. I can talk to you for a whole evening and you’ll know nothing about me, but you’ll feel seen like never before. I read something just now that caught me a bit off guard, although it shouldn’t. The post-TikTok generation apparently doesn’t like eye contact, the now infamous Gen Z stare aside. The flat emotionless stare is supposed to signal that they’re in control, not performing. Ironically, I can’t think of anything more performative than sustained, unblinking, expressionless eye contact.

More tragic than the performance is the fact that looking into dead fish eyes produces no friction. There’s nothing to rub up against, only glazed over fear. If I win before we even begin, what’s the point? It’s also not actually eye contact if it’s performed to a camera, or to the person in front of you, that you’re not actually looking at. Neutral, unreadable, controlled. It’s the opposite of wanting something from the other person. The actual eye-to-eye meeting and accompanying small talk with a real person, has apparently become anxiety inducing.

I’m not immune to the fear of rejection, but I’m also addicted to the tension. I’ll try to get you to drop the pretense and say something real. The gaze held a beat longer than socially acceptable is where the magic lives. Something recognized and maybe even met, if just for a second. A door, suddenly ever so slightly ajar. An unlocked door I have no intention to walk through. I file it away like a pressed flower and move on.

My great aunt died young, I know almost nothing about her other than that my grandfather loved her and she died of heart failure at 35. Somehow the gaze survived her, traveled through him, and landed in me.

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I came into the world loud, self-confident, assertive and hungry. For life, for food, for attention. As a child, a girl, in the 80s, this was not a good combination. I was not fine-limbed, I was not reserved, I was not accommodating. I was too much, of everything. And I absorbed a shame system so thoroughly that a specific quality (appetite, unselfconsciousness, taking up space) became the thing I tried to hide, always. A girl who took up space naturally got the message that she shouldn’t.

I think I was hooked by my first real infatuation at McDonalds, we were there with a group of people. We were both at uni, he had a girlfriend, I had something, a guy back home in Stockholm. I was hungry, I ordered the McBacon, thinking I should order the salad, it’s the feminine thing to do. And he noticed. He liked it. He named it as a reason he was drawn to me. The validation was real and it was particular and it hit the exact coordinate that had been under pressure the longest. He was attracted to the very core of my personality: the excessive, the assertive. It wasn’t a quick fling, it simmered for months before anything happened. When it finally did, it was kind of magic. The first kiss was an extension of the slow burn, the build up from “it’s gonna happen” to actual physical contact felt like exquisite eternity. And then we didn’t last. Not because he was wrong about what he saw. He saw me, and it wasn’t enough. The seeing wasn’t enough to make it official, to make it land, to close the gap. To make him want to stay.

To be seen, and then left anyway, is worse than never being seen at all. Was it something I did, something I revealed, something I failed to manage correctly? The editing begins. He was my spy, but his seeing was also a projection, a curation of his own self-image. I was a mystery to solve. It’s addictive to be the object of intense attention, and the thing I thought he saw starts getting managed. Out of fear to disappoint - that I’m not that special, funny, complex, charismatic, adventurous - I quietly destroy the thing that was. Desire makes you curate yourself, and it makes us curate each other. But the edited self-presentation is fragile precisely because it’s willed.

Which brings us to the body. There’s been a lot of outrage lately over the return of ultra skinny, and rightly so. I can hear the collective cry from the barricades: Fuck the patriarchy! Trying to keep women down by diverting their attention and keeping them small. The patriarchy is real, but it’s using a mechanism that was already there. The brain distinguishes between wanting and feeling pleasure, and the drive to want is stronger. And the grass is always greener somewhere else. There was progress made with body inclusivity, but fashion cycles falsify the narrative. Individually every body can feel pleasure, but collectively it’s reserved for the few. When enough people have access the standard moves. It always does. Body ideals returned to 90s ultra-skinny despite media literacy and niche identity, because the thin body was hard to get. When it becomes accessible to enough women through GLP-1s, the standard will shift to whatever new shape the majority can’t afford, or achieve. The body is a moving class marker, not a fixed moral judgment.

Social media follows the same pattern. Too many people were too pretty on the platforms. It ceased being interesting, or rather, desirable, because it had become suspiciously attainable. Instead of performative glam, ‘grounded and real’ has become the new hard-to-get. Various trend forecasters are presenting us with data showing the increase of this new ‘authenticity’. But if the authenticity was actually authentic, you wouldn’t be able to track it. The moment it’s measurable it’s already become performance, and messy is easier to perform than perfect.

AI has not-so-quietly become the new gluttony. Sprezzatura. Talent, or sexiness, is for others to name and use, not yours to claim. Visible appetite is the violation. The moment you want the wanting, you’ve overstepped. AI protesters are protecting the idea of the ingénue, the performance of effortlessness. The moment she’s seen needing tools the illusion collapses. Insisting that the writing process be completely clean aligns it with the vintage label, it creates provenance without the supply chain. Because of AI, more people can now produce results that were previously reserved for the few, but when everyone can do it, the value of the output is diluted.

Scarcity drives desire, which is why all the fashion houses are currently parading their archives. They’re pulling from them. Or creating ones they didn’t have. The archives prove provenance, they romanticise and idolise. You’re not only buying in to a look, you are curating your identity with a piece of fashion history. Proper vintage means obscurity, and the work required to find the thing is the gap, the status signal. Anyone can walk in to H&M and buy a top from the new Stella McCartney collaboration. Not everyone can get their hands on one from the H&MxStella from 2005.

There’s an initiative coming very soon called the Digital Product Passport, DPP. Framed as a sustainability effort, it’s meant to force manufacturers to produce less waste, and the data can be used to certify resale and reduce counterfeits. Thus the QR code, which was supposed to democratise supply chain information, instead becomes the velvet rope when the passport that proves authenticity also proves you’re not in. Visionaries imagine a world where you can connect to other owners of your obscure Japanese denim, or keep track of the popularity of your Prada coat to know when it’s a good time to sell it. This proposes to eliminate the gap entirely, which is why it will fail to deliver the belonging it promises. DPP-as-membership makes the club legible, and legibility is the enemy of desire. Once the list is visible, once you can scan who else has the bag, or the denim, the exclusion stops being mysterious and becomes administrative. The gap is still real but the feeling of scarcity changes. It becomes generic belonging, and that doesn’t count.

Brands have opened their romantic archives to let us look at their ideas and soak up the atmosphere. A cynic might say this is very well timed, opening to admiration, right before the archive with the factory names is forced open. The Tier 3 suppliers. You’re about to be shown that whether you want to or not. And we don’t. We want provenance without supply chain. Our body is ultra thin and there is no blueprint on how we got it. Our vintage coat is exclusive precisely because there is no official record of heritage. This is what desire quietly demands. The ‘Je ne sais quoi’, the illegible quality that makes someone irresistible.

Everything I reach for is an attempt to get to the other side. I don’t. The woman buying the vintage Gucci leather skirt and the girl hiding her appetite are running identical software. The skirt can’t fill it. The body won’t fill it. It felt like the particular recognition at McDonald’s filled it, until it was revoked. The gap is permanent. The content just rotates.

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I recently came across a short article in a daily newspaper stating that the nightclub scene is dead. No one is out clubbing anymore. Where entrances used to be roped off and the line controlled by omnipotent doormen, you can now walk right in, if it’s open at all. The article trailed off into generic talk of lowered alcohol consumption et cetera and left it at that, and sure, that might play a role but it gets everyone off the hook too easily.

Everything is curated now. A curated wardrobe, a curated feed, a curated life. Instead of simply meeting, eating and getting drunk, possibly rubbing ourselves against a random stranger on a dance floor, every social context is either ticketed, hosted, sponsored, or algorithmically filtered. Nightlife has been privatised upward, leaving public clubbing as a dead middle ground between the exclusive and the domestic. The curation is both identity performance and gatekeeping simultaneously, and the word implies a curator, someone with knowledge and authority making considered choices. We have created algorithms so specific they can predict who you want to meet before you walk in the door. Serendipity is inefficiency, so the algorithm simply replaced the accidental encounter. The gatekeeper is no longer the beefy doorman, it’s an algorithm that excluded you long before you even left your house.

I remember going out in my early twenties and ending up in conversations so random they would likely cause instagram’s algorithm to implode. One time I struck up a conversation with a very attractive guy I recognised from university campus. 90s gym bro. Very attractive. He wore a beeper on his belt (that was a thing back then, don’t judge) and when I asked him what he was waiting for, he proceeded to tell me in detail about his avid bird watching hobby. He was waiting for fellow bird watchers to alert him to a rare bird sighting, at which he would drop everything and run. He wasn’t drinking vodka straight, it was tap water. Can anyone still deal with this level of unexpected topics of conversation? The attraction stopped at that bar, but the fact that I still remember him more than 25 years later is telling. These days everyone in your cohort is so deceptively familiar you forget them as soon as they leave the room. The result of curating the shit out of every level of existence.

The question is who decides what’s curated and what gets left out. Obscure Swedish poet Carl Snoilsky wrote this in 1881:

I do not hawk my heart's delight and pain 
To be creased by unfamiliar hands. 
My fantasy sends you bright playthings, 
But the sanctuary of feeling is never for sale.

If you don't turn your back on me at once, 
Come into my park. It is so dark and cool. 
Walk among flowers from southern lands 
And see the sculptures around my gate.

But over the threshold I will not lead you. 
Only the petrified doorkeeper may have ears 
For the shy guests of fragrance and light.

You press me — very well, one word I call out, 
That sweeps castle and park away in an instant, 
And what you see is whirling sand and gravel.

We like to think we’re the ones with the key. The gate stays shut, the garden stays ours, we remain in control of what gets seen and what doesn’t. That’s the chimera the curated feed runs on.

“Then she heard, quite by chance, that Paul had returned to England for leave and had been here already for two weeks. On the night of the day she heard this news, she found herself dressed and made-up, her hair carefully done, standing at the window looking down into the street, and waiting for him. She waited until long after midnight, thinking: His work at the hospital might easily keep him as late as this, I mustn’t go to bed too early, because he’ll see the lights are out, and not come up, for fear of waking me. She stood there, night after night. She could see herself standing there, and said to herself: This is madness. This is being mad. Being mad is not being able to stop yourself doing something that you know to be irrational. Because you know Paul will not come. And yet she continued to dress herself and to stand for hours at the window, waiting, every night.”1

Anna dresses, does her hair, stands at the window, curating herself for an audience that has already left. The archive of the self keeps running even after the curator departed. Ghosting is the modern version of Paul not coming. No formal ending, just the lights going out on their side while you keep standing at yours. The particular cruelty of ghosting is that it doesn’t close the window. It leaves the person dressed and waiting, unable to stop because there was no signal that the waiting was over. Anna can see herself standing there. She narrates her own performance. That double consciousness, watching yourself curate for an absent audience, knowing it is irrational, being unable to stop. The post goes up. The archive is maintained. The window stays lit. The self-presentation has been automated, it no longer requires a specific audience to continue.

Curation is always performance, whether we’re aware or not. We stopped making deliberate choices and are all performing for an audience that is also performing for us. Prada’s SS2025 featured accessories with concert crowds printed on them. At the show, Miuccia Prada said “basically it seems that we are directed by algorithms, so anything we like and anything we know is because other people are instilling it into us.” Miuccia has been making this argument for years, the frozen concert images on bags and sunglasses was just the most literal version yet. It works because the algorithm doesn’t ask whether something is true, only whether it performs its function and gets its effect. We’ve curated ourselves into an empty, lonely corner, throngs of people printed on our accessories, clean and permanent, non-compatible with sweaty, dirty crowds.

I was woefully incompetent at being a 90s detached bitch back in the day. But I got there in the end. I’ve curated a cool, composed version of myself, I resist being legible and accessible to others, it’s my shield against the world. I am poised and untouchable. You can’t embarrass me, I’ve preempted any attempt with posed indifference. Or so I thought. Turns out I care more about presenting the image I think will make me interesting to you than what made you interested in me in the first place. Much like the gatekeeper in the poem, I control the access so tightly that pressing for entry destroys the garden.

What they get is the gate. What you’re left with is the gate. And eventually even you can’t remember what was growing on the other side.

Opening the Archive

In February, Maison Margiela announced the launch of the ‘MaisonMargiela/folders’, a multi-layered project that includes a runway show in Shanghai, a series of exhibitions across China, and an open-to-all digital archive called the Maison Margiela Dropbox. In essence, the fashion house is making their archive public, allowing any and all to use its research for upcoming projects, and view their internal imagery and the house’s archival material dating back to its founding in 1988. The news has so many implications it’s hard to know where to start. The most obvious is the archive itself. You can now access not only the finished pieces, but the work in process and visuals that never made it to the runway. An actual archive. Actually open. Anyone can look, no purchase required. No “archival-inspired” hedging.

This is huge, especially if you’re an aspiring designer. But what they are doing is even more genius. At ‘Bianchetto: Atelier Experience’ in Shenzhen in April, they are inviting guests to bring their own garments. According to their own IG: “Participants are invited to transform an item from their own wardrobe using the technique, guided by the Maison Margiela Atelier team. Through the act of covering the surface in white paint, the piece is transformed into a house code, completed with our signature four white stitches.” And in Chengdu you can see “Tabi: Collectors exhibit”. Again, from their IG: “exhibition brings together the personal collections of 9 Tabi collectors from around the world for the first time, offering an intimate look at how the silhouette is lived with through a full-scale reconstruction of each collector’s wardrobe.”

Not only are they inviting you to see their archive, they are inviting you to collaborate with it, build on it, and become a part of it. It ceased being about appreciating fashion design and became living the brand in real time. Honouring the long-time fans of the controversial Tabi-shoe is a particularly sharp move. You’re either a die-hard fan or you hate it, and collecting it bears no comparison to collecting Birkins. The Tabi-wearer is a connoisseur of fashion that thinks rather than signals, and the shoe’s shift from fashion statement to museum artifact marks the elevation of luxury from the expensive to the irreducible.

Re-authoring the archive

The timing is interesting. The new head designer at Margiela is Glenn Martens. He’s the second designer to take over since the famously anonymous Martin Margiela stepped down, and that’s where the new head of the house can start to decide what to pull from the archives and how to transform the brand into something potentially new, but still familiar. His predecessor of course, is the infamous John Galliano, and as Maison Margiela launched their actual archive, Zara announced that they signed Galliano to a two-year creative partnership which will see him “re-author” the brand’s archives.

So many synapses are firing simultaneously here, it’s almost poetic. After nearly 40 years in business, Margiela is trying to launch itself as a ‘heritage’ brand, and opening an archive and aligning their fashion to art is a good way to do it, it places them in a room with Schiaparelli, or Vivienne Westwood. Galliano on the other hand, is on his own tour de force redemption tour. After his 2011 scandal and rehab stint, he attempted a comeback that stalled. Most notably in 2013 he was denied becoming a workshop lecturer at Parsons. Renzo Rosso brought him to Margiela in 2014 where he worked in relative anonymity, until the SS 2024 Maison Margiela Artisanal show: “Galliano’s final show for Maison Margiela was a true masterpiece, befitting the artist he is. Held on Paris’s Alexandre III Bridge, the show merged the worlds of Balzac and Victor Hugo, making it one of the most impactful fashion presentations of the past decade.” With a bang, he was back on everyone’s mind, but not for spouting antisemitic slurs. For being a true artist. The documentary “High & Low: John Galliano” released in the same year essentially ran in parallel to the show, possibly as a coordinated rehabilitation moment. One cultural, one commercial. What would he do now? Dior and Chanel were name-dropped, but nothing happened.

Then along came Zara, with their own mission of repositioning themselves away from their fast-fashion cheap past, toward a more luxury and fashion forward brand. What better way to do this, then by creating an archive, and then start pulling from it. The memes featuring Galliano pulling at massive dump sites could have meant backlash, but they exist in a landscape filled with slopaganda. It won’t stop customers lining up for the first collaboration. Galliano is using Zara as a platform to showcase the best bits from his own archive, while his talent archive is being monetised through Zara. This is curation as extraction. The radical and transgressive gets laundered into product, stripped of context, made safe and saleable.

The curated wardrobe

We keep circulating back to the word. Archive. And with it, its logical companion, the curator. Curation started as a profession at museums or actual archives, but the word got democratised into a lifestyle act, and nowhere is that more visible than on the movie press tour circuit.

Recently we had the pleasure of watching the show ‘Margot Robbie on Press Tour’. She was promoting Wuthering Heights in outfits that had been chosen specifically to fit the mood in the film. Leaning heavily on Victorian elements and Baroque opulence, with a dark romantic twist, her stylist curated her outfits as a mix of custom looks and vintage pieces. For example, a look from Galliano’s 1992 spring collection. Promoting a movie famously about repression, buried feeling, and what gets exhumed, she wore a designer whose own archive needed rehabilitation before it could be worn in public again.

Celebrities have been pulling archive looks for a while, but the increased attention paid to the stylist and the context of the look has brought the concept front and center. Instead of buying a second-hand shirt or choosing an outfit for the day, we are curating our wardrobes and sourcing archives by buying vintage pieces. Buying new clothes can be justified as adding to a collection, like the Tabi-shoe superfans on exhibit in Chengdu. Words that used to mean something specific have been hollowed out by marketing until they mean nothing except “expensive” or “tasteful” or “not fast fashion but also not explaining why”. They are doing the work of making consumption feel like restraint, or intelligence, or even resistance. But they’re still just selling you things. And we buy it, since the promise of a vintage archive to pull from elevates our own image to that of being curated by insider knowledge, not just thrown together on a whim and a budget.

Wearing archive Galliano right now is itself a curatorial act with a position embedded in it. It says the work can be separated from the man, or that enough time has passed, or that the rehabilitation was sufficient. The house of Lagerfeld is quietly doing the same, burying his misogyny and his notorious views on fat people and immigrants, instead showering us with acclaim to his artistic accolades. The fashion industry suppresses its ugly archive and markets the suppression as connoisseurship. Then turns to women and says: do the same. Present only the worthy. Edit out the messy. A curated wardrobe, a curated feed, a curated life.

Curating the self

While we may be aware of our very conscious attempt of curating an outer image, most of us would rather not admit we do the same with our actual person. We are attractive and absurd, enticing and repulsive, but just like the fashion industry, we curate carefully what gets to be pulled out and what remains hidden. The raw and uncomfortable need never see the light of day.

The archive doesn’t lie, even when you’d prefer it did. I recently found two old texts I wrote at 21 or 22, after being dumped by my first big love. The breakup turned me into a needy basket-case, and I poured my heart out onto those pages. It was all melodrama and existential angst and I never showed them to anybody. When someone leaves you, you want to rise post haste like a phoenix, untouched. Not drag it out with months of crying and clinging. We would like that buried in the archives forever. And we’re loath to admit that an ex helped curate our personality.

Those were the last pieces I wrote until a surprising burst of creativity made me write again, some 26 years later. I didn’t stop writing entirely, I went private, underground. Which is its own kind of archive, one I kept for myself, that nobody else could read or take or misunderstand. Or leave. The messy original didn’t need to be curated into the shareable version. Sometimes mundane, sometimes unravelling, navel-gazing, regurgitating. Sometimes concise lists. Sometimes nothing. Journaling as a practice kept something alive without exposure or collaboration.

My first essay in twenty-six years was 90s Bitch. Fashion criticism, but also, a piece about bodies and desire and what gets taken from women and what they reclaim. Heartbreak melodrama was the thing that closed the door, and anger, specifically anger about how women are seen and consumed, was the thing that opened it again. The eruption, after years of moderation. Something had been missing and I thought it was something external. Desirability. The relentless ageing that brings you further away from relevance. When someone suddenly flirted with me I thought this is it, I needed to feel chosen. But that feeling threw me right back to my 21 year old self, moulding my personality to be its most interesting, alluring, captivating, hiding the boring bits, the replaceable parts. I was again curating myself to best fit the room I was in.

For something to be vintage means time passed and it survived. You pair it with something contemporary and create something new. The difference between me now and then is a life lived and experiences made. As with any archive it’s a collaboration of the content and the person engaging with it. I didn’t miss being seen, I missed being the one who creates something that is seen. The writing is mine, and writing it makes me feel something.

Not the validation, the making.

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An urge to squeeze things, limbs, flesh
To touch, to taste, to bite
To tear apart and put back together
Molding, yielding.

Increasingly, I want to squeeze. Things. Limbs, flesh. Have you heard of Cute Aggression? Me neither, but apparently I’m living it. The science of it went mainstream in 24/25 and signifies the neurological urge to squeeze, bite, and compress as emotional regulation. It’s violent aggression as a coping mechanism for intense positive emotions. I want to squeeze things, limbs, flesh, because I need a tactile connection. I want to fully consume the emotion, eat and digest it, take it in, with the hope that it transforms me. For too long the world has simply washed over me. Life coordinated, optimised, dissociated.

Demna presented his first collection for Gucci earlier this year and it was a high-octane, sleazy-chic revival of the brand’s provocative late-90s era. It showed skinny silhouettes, ultra-mini dresses, glossy croc-embossed leather and wet-look muscle tees. The show was a spectacle and the finale featured Kate Moss in the iconic G-string dress. The show was polarising. While some critics loved it, the looks were also described as chicken tightly wrapped in clingfilm, and “as exciting as large muscles with a limp dick”. Some fashion commentary felt that Demna had missed the target with a collection that didn’t capture the zeitgeist, but I’m wondering if it didn’t in fact nail it. The catwalk was a parade of smoothed out surfaces, screaming to be touched. It was the death rattle of perfected flesh. Retouched. Inflated. Impotent. Begging to be squeezed.

The rest of the industry has been catching up. Both spring/summer and fall/winter 2026 could be described as fashion remembering it has a body, with surface, structure, and sentiment as key elements. FW 26/27 is bright red, furry, feathery, shiny and embellished. Cinched waists, trains trailing from the hips, and high slits exposing your thighs. It’s been a directional shift toward texture as the new status, and surfaces that give back. Designers are making clothes you want to handle, to pull at, to feel give and yield.

To feel messy, sticky, sweaty
The dirt, the grit, the stained reality
The smoke in my lungs
The irreversible.

And I’m not alone with this feeling, that something tangible is missing. Feeling the bone-deep exhaustion of constant optimisation. Gen Z is increasingly engaging in DIY. They’re hand painting, working with clay, cutting & pasting, up-cycling, physically transforming garments. The thrift-and-remake culture is literally tearing apart and putting back together again. The analogue revival of vinyl records, film photography, and journaling are all formats defined by irreversibility, by stain, by grain, by all that cannot be undone. It’s real and permanent and defies retouching.

The AW 2026 runways have embraced deliberate messiness as a beauty and styling directive. After years of perfected content, the authentic messy trend became popular in 2025 as the anti-thesis to the hyper-curated. It’s not just about being undone, it’s a genuine desire for depth, humor and human flaws. We want friction, resistance, and clutter. Runway beauty has become defined by deliberate messiness (Prada sent models out in smudged racoon eyes and half-done ponytails) and even the actual runways were cluttered and messy, with immersive environments featuring giant mushrooms and actual moss. These were ultra-maximalist sets, in bold, mood-boosting colors. No more minimalist, quiet luxury.

Gen Z is literally wearing the messiness with smudged liner as a styling choice, distressed and raw-hemmed garments, and grunge-revival plaids. The look can be summed up as undeniably gritty. The over-40 consumer, while less messy, relates to irreversibility through more deliberate investments, buying fewer, higher-quality pieces. The statement coat, treated as an integral a part of you.

But the most irreversible of all isn’t a coat or a vinyl record. It’s a memory made in a room full of bodies. I recently went to see Suede in concert. The audience was mostly Gen X, but there was a surprising number of young faces, and why not? Brett Anderson at fifty-eight, dripping with sweat, coming off the stage mid-show to physically embrace the crowd. Gritty, sticky, irreversible. Pure ecstasy.

Fuck clean girl aesthetics, sheet masks, cleansing tea, detached minds
Fuck smooth, frictionless, inoffensive, digital
Desire pre-packaged, low-calorie, carefully lit.

The clean girl aesthetic is officially being declared dead across fashion and cultural commentary in 2026, and the aesthetic turning point may have been Charli XCX’s smudged Brat-era eyeliner. It seems people are increasingly asking themselves what, if anything, is alive inside them. Something real was being smoothed away, and the cost of that smoothing is paid in the currency of human experience. What do you actually think? What is your taste? Do you really want to look back one day and realise that your entire life was shaped by instagram aesthetics without any real memories?

The clean girl aesthetic was a curated museum exhibit about performance, devoid of personality and completely out of touch with the messiness of real life. All hydration and no real sweat. Its logical endpoint isn’t a sheet mask, it’s the non-answer. The read receipt with no reply, the dissolution of something real into digital silence. No mess, no confrontation, no irreversible words. Just nothing.

Gen Z arrived into fashion already inside the clean digital frictionlessness, and their current rejection of it is performed through deliberate chaos. Fuck smooth, frictionless, inoffensive, digital. This is their generation’s actual cultural argument happening right now. Chaotic beauty and messy girl trends have emerged as explicit rejections of the picture perfect that’s been shoved down their throats since their early teens. But how do you break free of shackles you were born into?

There’s an element of self-awareness and performance even in the rawness. They aspire to feral, ferocious authenticity, but they’re doing it through the very digital systems that made it impossible. They post about attachment styles and emotional accountability, honor vulnerability, and then ghost the read receipt. They celebrate contact and practise disappearance. Their rebellion is still curated, still well lit, still posted online. The oxymoron of #analogue.

Gen X grew up with the ‘90s grunge energy and compulsive irony. Before there were memes trivialising everything from tragic death to major world conflicts, there was Gen X quietly doing the same thing with flannel and a cigarette, just slower and with better soundtracks. We taught ourselves not to care, built a whole aesthetic out of not caring, and have spent the last thirty years trying to feel something again. We called it irony, and we’re still paying for it.

Give me loud, smoky, dirty, angry, ferocious, feral
Give me obsession, fire, passion, hate, love
Give me worship, radical attachment, misery, ecstasy.
Give me something I can hold.

Celine’s designer Michael Rider wrote in his FW26 show notes: “I love when messy, complex, layered inner lives come through underneath great clothes”. Amy Smilovic, founder of Tibi, said in a recent interview “People are wanting to feel something. What better way to feel something than to literally give them something to feel?”

And the demand is being answered differently depending on who’s asking. Gen Z doesn’t dress to look rich. In response to the fashion world’s constant price increase and focus on top tier clients, luxury becomes the obscure, the rare, the hard to find. The under-30s are more likely to thrift it, make it, or do without, and their mood-board is loud, ironic, nostalgic, and deeply rooted in online culture. They dress to express, to provoke, to advocate. The over-forties have the spending power to actually buy the expensive and irreversible, and while some still go for the designer it-piece, many channel their spending power to the search for vintage. Celebrities are increasingly toting ‘archival pieces’ on the red carpet, and the over-forties are hunting down exclusive pre-loved, the it-piece with a back story. It’s the asymmetric Gucci by Tom Ford leather skirt, or the delicate lace blouse by Alexander McQueen.

People are feeling hollow and the urge for touch is permeating contemporary culture way beyond the catwalks and red carpets. The Catholic church in both the US and Europe is reporting that baptisms are surging as young adults are looking for truth, purpose, and community. In western christianity, the Catholic faith is the most analogue, the Rosary being the most obvious example. You’re counting beads with your hands, and moving through prayers in a repetitive, embodied rhythm. It’s fundamentally a sensory, offline experience. Not to mention incense, holy water, genuflection, the sign of the cross, candles, saints’ relics… The faith is felt through the body and material objects, not just held mentally.

Tarot cards have also experienced a recent spike in interest among gen Z, and over 8 million videos were posted under #tarot on TikTok in 2024 alone. Tarot is deeply analogue: you’re holding and shuffling a deck, over and over. Gen Z is simultaneously gravitating toward the Rosary and tarot cards, for surprisingly overlapping reasons: embodied practice, self-reflection, beauty, and a sense of grounding in an overwhelming digital world.

Even more hands on: working with clay. The visual appeal of hands in clay and spinning wheels has made pottery a favourite among millennials and Gen Z. Pottery engages both the mind and hands, creating a meditative rhythm that many find therapeutic. Have you tried working with clay? Using your hands to mould clay is not only sensory, it’s a deeply sensual experience, even without Patrick Swayze spooning you.

And then there’s the cigarette. The gesture, the drag, the exhale; it’s old school, analogue, irreversible. Sales of rolling tobacco are up, and a generation that grew up being told smoking kills is lighting up anyway. Not despite knowing better, because of it. The cigarette isn’t a health choice, it’s a fuck you to optimisation. Most of my early kisses were laced with cigarette smoke and teenage adrenaline.

The rosary, the tarot card, the pottery wheel, the leather corset, the cigarettes. Catholic revival, mysticism, craft studios filling up with Gen Z on a Tuesday night, runways loud with fur and feathers and flesh, the smell of cigarettes in your hair. It’s a loud reclamation of appetite after years of being told to disappear into beige, white and minimal. The body and mind’s argument against clean, frictionless, and inoffensive. The thread connecting all of it isn’t religion or spirituality or a sudden interest in ceramics or layered feathers. It’s a generation aching for things to touch, for the dirty, and the real.

And I’m feeling it, desperately. I want messy, loud and rough. Fuck curated and nonchalant, give me chalant and raw, give me volition. I want passion and fury!

The body is demanding its due back from the screen.

The couture shows have wrapped once again, and we just saw all the stars parade across the Oscar’s red carpet, done up real nice in mostly Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Dior. As someone who’s into fashion my algorithm is currently flooding me with luxury, and I’m experiencing a certain fatigue with feathers, lace, silk, and cheek bones. What even is luxury anymore? The God of Questionable Quotes Karl Lagerfeld told us already in 2010 that we’re delusional if we think buying a Chanel bag is luxury.

“People can dream with a Chanel bag that they live in luxury. But luxury in fact is something else.” — Karl Lagerfeld

Do you own a private jet? No? Then go back to your plebeian little life and stop pretending that your classic flap bag means you live in luxury. He said it, but we were too busy saving up for that bag to listen.

The fashion houses used to make a good profit catering to the aspirational shopper. You know, the ones who buy the ‘cheap’ high end luxury items (key rings, bag charms, wallets), or maybe they save up for The One Bag. They are NOT spending a million on Hermés furniture to be allowed to buy the croc Birkin in black. Over the past five years these fashion houses have steadily raised their prices and all but abandoned product development for the aspirational shopper. They are now wholeheartedly catering to the VICs, or Very Important Clients, who are the top 2% of customers who account for about 45% of global luxury sales. Or, to put it another way: Mrs Moneypants, who has a personal sales assistant on speed dial, probably arrived to the store with a driver, and gets all their purchases delivered to their home, because carrying a shopping bag is gauche.

The illusion created for us by aspirational luxury is made even more difficult to swallow under the blatant wealth we’re now surrounded by. There was always the ultra rich, and they always had their expensive, eccentric habits, but there was a time when extreme wealth was more of a rumour. Because we rarely saw it up close it remained a myth, or a cute anecdote. You heard about it, read about it occasionally in a magazine at the dentist, and then got on with your life. The distance was the point because it allowed the fantasy to function. The Chanel bag was a portal to a life you could almost imagine, if you squinted. Cue the rise of wealthy tech! Theirs is a wealth that few of us can wrap our heads around. As the extremely rich got extremely online, the fantasy soured. They rent a city to get married, order yachts so large you have to dismantle historic bridges to transport them to the sea, do space travel for the photo op, and spend millions every year to stave off death. Recently, they’re even man-spreading front row at fashion week. Quelle horreur! We watch it play out on the same screen we use to check our bank balance. The cognitive dissonance is spectacular, and it has broken something fundamental about aspirational luxury. You cannot feel elevated by a handbag when you’re still wearing it with your Zara shirt while flying commercial on vacation. The bag hasn’t changed, the context has made it absurd.

So, you ask yourself, what does this VIC look like? She’s thin, and most likely over the age of forty-five, or it’s her husband (who’s also shopping for his girlfriend). It makes total sense that skinny is the new luxury! While we have long gotten used to the female body being objectified and sexualised to satisfy male desires, it now seems it’s being monetised on a new level. The female body has become a class marker. Can you afford the luxury of staying thin and young? Even when the price for GLP1 injections is steadily decreasing, it’s still costly to keep up long term. And it’s not only the female body, it’s also her face. The new era of ‘longevity’ (that’s bs talk for eternal youth) sees women as young as their early thirties get deep plane face lifts, which start at about $20k but can cost upwards $100k. These procedures typically have to be repeated every 10 to 15 years, meaning a total investment of $100k to $500k over your lifetime, if you want to keep up. We all knew that wealth played a big role in ageing well, but that it would be this literal? Aside from your expenses on supplements, skin serums, GLP1s and a personal trainer, add your face lift to the cost estimate. And that’s before you bought the classic Chanel jacket in its updated see-thru version for CHF11.5k, and the see-thru top and skirt to match (add another CHF11k). At least you can deduct the cost of food, since you’re no longer hungry.

Did you think we were done? Bless your heart. Lately, apparently, small breasts have become known as ‘designer boobs’. It’s interesting how they went from representing the starved, indie body in heroin chic, juxtaposed to sex bombs like Pamela Andersen and Anna Nicole Smith, to signifying ultra luxury, but there it is. The current body trend is protruding bones: hip bones jutting out, collar bones standing erect (Schiaparelli made a gown with floating shoulder straps in 2024, that to me seemed to poke fun at the poking collar bones) and visible chest bones, topped by small, exclusive breasts. The recent fashion weeks cemented the fact that super skinny and flat-chested is in, with catwalks parading models thin as sticks up and down, week in, week out. Rumour has it some photographers complained that the moving thin models didn’t photograph well, apparently they were too thin to stick on film. Both Chanel and Dior, two ultra luxury fashion houses that are getting a lot of attention lately due to their changing of the guards (Matthieu Blazy coming to Chanel and Jonathan Anderson taking over Dior) presented silhouettes that can only be described as waif-ish and ethereal. The women, like their clothes, were practically see-thru. Blazy got a lot of positive attention for including older models in his couture show, but I’d like to point out that thinness still took center stage. Also, model Stephanie Cavalli is only 50 years old, and looks like a skinny 25 yo with grey highlights. That’s not inclusion, that’s bullshit! But we’ve long been calling size 8 (EU size 38-40) plus-sized, so we should be used to this level of absurdity.

All the big fashion houses realised that you need new clothes to show off your new figure, so they’re tailoring accordingly. Wisps of fabrics, fluttering around protruding bones (note that the body-con dress is out, since bloating is a common side effect of GLP1s). So is luxury affording that handbag? No. Luxury is being able to wrap yourself in Chanel-branded gauze when strutting down the street, your collarbones seeming floating off your shoulders. Also, spending thousands on pants, skirts, and dresses with hemlines dragging on the floor, so that every step you take is not only gorgeous, but also shredding your outfit. You are obviously both rich enough to not have to walk busy, dirty streets, and to not care that the outfit is ruined after three wears. Jonathan Anderson, in a recent interview, said

“It used to be that you would dress up for status purposes, now it’s more about the psychology, or what group you’re part of.”

Again, a designer who openly admits what it’s all about! Dressing for the group you (want to) belong to still is very much dressing up for status, and now that status is thin, young, and rich.

Since the launch of MTV, the majority of videos shown on the channel portrayed women as two-dimensional sex-objects, whose empowerment and sexuality was driven entirely with the aim to satisfy male desire. Butts wiggle, boobs jiggle, and even when the artist is female she’s often backed by male producers and record labels. The fashion industry is playing the same game. Women may be the target consumer, but the business is run by and large by men, in retail, on the designer side, and the media reporting it. But if the fashion houses are leaving the aspirational shopper in the dust, tailoring both their clothes and their prices to fit the ultra rich and ultra thin, why should we even care? Because, as was always the case with trends, it trickles down. All the way down to the kindergarten playground.

Little girls (and boys!) do not read Business of Fashion or follow couture week, but they are exquisitely attuned to the women around them (their mothers, their teachers, the older girls at school) and they absorb everything: the skipped lunches, the whispered comparisons and the creeping sense that a woman’s body is always a problem to be managed. They absorb the idea that taking up less space is something to aspire to. I recently overheard a third grader gleefully announce that her mother doesn’t eat breakfast, or lunch. She had no idea she was describing a tragedy. If the fashion industry and the wellness industry and the luxury industry are all pointing in the same direction (thin, young, expensive), then that is the direction the culture moves, and the culture does not stop at the gate to the playground.

The O.G. feminists were fighting for basic equal rights for women: the right to vote, work, sign their own rental contracts, and open their own bank accounts. Feminism these days seems to have boiled down to being able to pay for all our consumerism bullshit by ourselves. Don’t even get me started on the expectation that emancipated women pay 50/50 on dates, when it’s implicitly understood that they spend more on clothes, hair, makeup, nails and bikini wax (you never know where the evening might go) before even showing up. Women lived the more expensive lives even before society started tacitly implying we have face lifts at thirty-five. Healthcare, haircuts, shoes, clothes, sanitary products, it’s all more expensive for women, but women still earn less than men. Women are presupposed to pay more for clothes and makeup to merely look presentable in any situation, be it business or pleasure. Further, women often pay higher rents because they opt to live in safer neighbourhoods, and are more likely to take a taxi rather than use public transport, since they don’t feel safe on the streets.

When I was 16, an Argentinian boy told me that the high rate of anorexia in his country was due to a deliberate effort from the government to keep people’s minds on appearance, and thereby off politics. It was 1994, and a 16 year-old Kate Moss had recently cavorted topless on the beach for the cover and feature story of The Face magazine (July 1990). I was quite chubby, and secretly wished to be able to be at least a bit anorexic myself, but I sadly lacked the constitution for self-starvation. In short, I had already been brainwashed to believe that my soft flesh and wide hips were disgusting. While I thought that lovely boy a bit of a tinfoil-hatter at the time, now I think he may have been enlightened beyond his generation. In these days of female agency and voice, we earn less, spend more, and try to take up as little physical space in the world as we possibly can, and we call it empowerment. Congratulations, we won?

Is this luxury?

I started choosing my outfits at three. My mother says she lost all influence after that. I believe her.

I’m Swedish. I haven’t lived there in over twenty years. In that time I’ve moved eight times, had children in three countries, and spent most of my adult life shapeshifting by adapting my accent, my appetite, my opinions to fit whoever needed me to be something. Wife, mother, expat, peacekeeper, woman-who-takes-up-the-right-amount-of-space.

I was good at it. I’m done with it now.

Start with whichever pulls you: 90s Bitch, on the revival, the not-caring that wasn’t freedom, and Kate Moss slipping on her Gucci thong again. And Then Everything Cracked, on perimenopause, identity, and the specific chaos of not knowing who you are when the roles fall away. Some Thoughts on Micro Shorts, on sex being back on the catwalk, nobody actually having any, and wearing the ruffled bloomers for the vitamin D.

Midlife is not a decline. It’s a detonation.

Welcome.

“… my major aim was to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped. As I have said, this was not noticed.”

“the essence of the book, the organisation of it, everything in it, says implicitly and explicitly, that we must not divide things off, must not compartmentalise.”

To her, the format of the book, the four distinct sections of the notebooks, was crucial. It showed that the idea of separation was impossible.

The Roles Women Learn to Play

What spoke to me in The Golden Notebook was Lessing’s astute observation of the experience of being a woman: The different roles she plays, in different situations, with different people. But most importantly, the fact that women are always playing a role in order to not scare or upset those around her, be it husband, boyfriend, colleague, superior, or even their child. The only relationship that exists on equal footing, with honesty and truth, is the one she has with her best (female) friend. In that relationship there are no roles to perform. Things sometimes remain unsaid, but they are implicitly understood and accepted. In all other relationships a woman is moderating or adjusting herself to keep the peace, and to please.

Entering the In-Between

Over the course of this past year or two I have come to find myself in a state of transition: moving away from a role that once gave me purpose, toward another role that I cannot define. I am not yet there, so instead I exist in the in-between, in the limbo, in the chaos. It is something experienced by all women, but despite being universal it is intensely personal, and somehow shameful. It’s quickly labeled cliché, and we promise ourselves to not be the sad trope.

If you didn’t catch on yet, I am talking about perimenopause, which ultimately lands you in Menopause (read with suitable doomsday-music playing in your mind). The After-Life. Women reporting back to us from the Other Side often claim they are quite happy there. It’s described not as a decline, but as a rebirth, a new beginning into an empowered phase of life. That doesn’t change the fact that those of us still on This Side dread it like the plague.

If you are a woman somewhere in the middle of life, you may recognise this strange moment: the roles that once defined you begin to loosen. Children grow older, your body changes, and things that once validated you (attention, productivity, being needed) quietly start to disappear. And suddenly you are left asking a question you never had to ask before: who am I when these roles fall away?

A Life Built Through Relationships

Life is relationships. Most of us believe we are a fixed, coherent person, but who we are shifts depending on who we are with, and each new relationship reveals a slightly different version of ourselves. When you meet someone new, you also meet a version of yourself you didn’t know existed, or maybe had forgotten about. This is the magic of falling in love: you fall in love with yourself as much as with the other person. But in this magic moment of connecting with someone, I often find myself in fear of bursting the bubble, of ruining the rosy image they have of me. My words or actions might shatter the illusion of who they think I am. I control my breath so as to not take up too much space, and my chest tightens so my feelings won’t spill over. Because if the intensity of my emotions scares them away, the person I could have been evaporates with them.

Living the life of an expat adds another layer of distance to your relationships. You move in and out of people’s lives and your close friends become scattered across continents. When you never stay in one place permanently, being an outsider becomes part of your identity as you decide where to assimilate and where to remain apart. I have spent the past twenty-four years living this life. I left my native Sweden alone but met my husband soon after, and together we have moved across borders eight times. I’ve borne children in three different countries. Each move means new languages, new relationships and communities, and constant reassessment of the ones left behind. Should I keep up my French? Is this a phone call, text message, or IG story friendship? Will I find a hairdresser that won’t butcher my hair? The only constant is our family: Home is where we are, not where we happen to live.

I Mother, Therefore I Am

Back to my state of chaos. I’m approaching a Certain Age, that age when construction workers stop catcalling you, that age when people follow up a compliment with the dreaded addendum “for your age”. At the same time my role as a mother has begun to shift because my children are getting older. For the past eighteen years I have had a very clear identity: Nurturer of Life. These small humans depended on me for almost everything and in return they gave me purpose. I am Mother. This, of course, is a life-long role because children never stop needing you and you can’t clock out and just not be a mother for a weekend, but the shape of the role changes and some parts fade.

Before becoming a mother I was a young woman who found validation through friendships, work (first school, then professionally), and the appreciative looks and comments of men (I was young in the pre-#MeToo era, so many of those comments were wildly inappropriate). When my children were small my validation came mostly through them. Directly, through the love they gave back, and indirectly, through how they were perceived by others. Anything from compliments to how lovely they are, to leaving the dentist without cavities, validate you as a Mother, far more than praise for your professional work could ever validate you in your career. Because being judged a Good Mother is not just a grading of your parenting, it is a judgement of you as a person. I am a good mother, therefore I must be a good person. There is no separation, you cannot divide the role from the self. I Mother, therefore I Am.

When That Identity Starts to Shift

Then perimenopause came knocking. My children are older, my hormones are shifting, and suddenly I no longer feel driven by the urge to keep the peace and nurture at all costs. For many women this phase coincide with raising teenagers, and if there is one lesson teenagers teach quickly, it is that you must to separate yourself from them. You can force small children to eat their vegetables, brush their teeth, go to bed at a reasonable hour, and limit screen time. You cannot force a teenager to do ANYTHING. All you can do is hope that what you did earlier had some positive impact, and pray they emerge on the other side as reasonably happy adults who still speak to you. You realise pretty fast that you are not, and cannot be, the sum of your achievements as a mother. But motherhood can become so all-encompassing that it quietly replaces every other source of identity and validation, until your worth feels measured solely by how well you nurture, give, and endure. So where does validation come from when this foundation starts to shift? The obvious answer is from within, but how the hell does that work when, for 20-plus years, your validation came from external sources only?

Reading a book is a highly personal experience. You notice themes that resonate with your life at that particular moment, which is why it can be both rewarding and disturbing to re-read a favourite book five or ten years later. Because Life Happens, and experience reshapes your view of the world. I am no longer young but not yet very old, my children still live at home but they no longer need my constant presence, life happened, and I am no longer the same person I was before. Recently my youngest daughter told me she believed every “old person” secretly wanted to be young again. I beg to differ. I would not want to go back to be my younger self again, to trade in all the iterations I have lived through to arrive here.

Cracking Open

I think I was always innately guarded, private perhaps, but lately I often feel as if living under a glass dome, separated from my surroundings by an invisible shield. I am in here, while life happens out there. Over the past year I often experienced a strange kind of dissociation. I’d look down at myself, in places where I used to feel perfectly comfortable (school pickup, on holiday, grocery shopping, walking down city streets) then suddenly think: “This is all bullshit, none of this matters!” It’s deeply unsettling, mostly because I no longer know what does matter. I feel simultaneously indispensable and irrelevant. Indispensable in the small world that is my family, and irrelevant to the world at large.

My family used to feel like the castle that sheltered me, but now it feels more like the fortress that imprisoned me and rendered me invisible. Then last year something unexpected happened. Someone suddenly, surprisingly, shockingly, saw me. Not as a mother and not as part of a family unit. Someone found me interesting and asked me if I felt alive? It was as if my entire being had been encased in granite that suddenly began to crack. I shattered like a smashed mirror, and now here I am. I am Chaos.

Validation from someone else is NOT the magic key to fulfilment, that is not the point I’m trying to make. That moment was a catalyst, not the cause or the climax. In the introduction to a later edition of The Golden Notebook, Lessing writes

“This theme of ‘breakdown’, that sometimes when people ‘crack up’ it is a way of self-healing, of the inner self’s dismissing false dichotomies and divisions”.

As a mother you so easily lose yourself in the relationships to your spouse and your children. You are defined by your role as a nurturer, and when this role changes you are left with a diminished sense of self. If I am no longer needed to keep another human alive, what is my value?

Everyone Says: Sit in the Chaos

Let me clarify one thing: I will NOT be wrapping myself in cellophane à la Kathy Bates in Fried Green Tomatoes, nor do I intend to reenact Eat Pray Love by abandoning my family to “find myself” in Asia. However, I am not one who sits comfortably in confusion for very long. I like to identify problems and then solve them, quickly. Consequently, I journaled, I spoke to my closest friends, I discussed it with my therapist, I had a tarot reading, and on the recommendation of a close friend, I consulted a medium. I even went to a yoga retreat in Mallorca! Infuriatingly, every path led to the same conclusion: Let go of that which no longer serves you, stop seeking external validation, and Sit In The Chaos. My path will reveal itself in due course and I cannot rush it or force progress.

What the actual fuck!? This is not the neat solution I had hoped for! I actually don’t know what answer I was looking for, but something to do with Divine Destiny, probably. I am used to providing complex logistical solutions and multilevel emotional support to several people on a daily basis. I am good at solving other people’s problems. And I am tired of this shit! I would like a Path Forward to arrive at my doorstep, wrapped up nicely in tissue paper, and crowned with a sparkly bow.

Can someone else - FOR FUCKING ONCE! - just solve this without me having to do the fucking work! But apparently, that’s not how this shit works.

Clothes as the One Constant

As I now sit in this chaos and meditate on my future relevance, I need to anchor myself to something that has always been true. Not cling to a former version of myself, but connect to a tangible, tactile, constant part of me. For me that constant is clothes. As superficial as it may sound, I have always loved them. Not fashion exactly, just clothes and what they can express and make me feel. My mother says I started choosing my outfits at the age of three, and after that she lost all influence. In my early teens I spent hours in second-hand stores, and then altered my finds to fit my size and purpose. My main goal was to look like no one else, or possibly like a hippie, both of which was difficult to achieve in the aggressively conformist 90s Sweden.

Taste and style changes as you move through different stages of life. When I met my husband I was 23, and like me, the millennium was still very young. I wore tank tops and very low cut pants; on weekends it was bright green eye shadow and asymmetrical tops. I was new to Germany and the average Frankfurter considered a clean T-shirt adequate evening wear, meaning I was perpetually overdressed. And I didn’t drink beer. Out of place doesn’t quite cover it.

When my children were small any sense of style I had collapsed entirely. At first, my main objective was to be clothed while constantly breastfeeding, and that phase alone makes any coherent aesthetic nearly impossible. Most women just aim for ‘not milk-stained’ and still fail. Then came a time when I dressed for playgrounds and food stains, to sit comfortably on floors and in sandboxes, to try to the hide extra weight that seemed impossible to shed, and to not get hurt (anyone who’s worn interesting earrings within reach of toddlers knows what I’m talking about). My clothes were all over the place and nothing looked quite right. Or felt quite right. But then, neither did I. The only thing that really mattered was the wellbeing of my children, and what I wore was mostly irrelevant, as long as it wasn’t outright ugly. All of me was irrelevant if it didn’t pertain to my kids, and so I erased myself along with my sense of style. Then followed some years when we lived in LA and I could best be described as ‘Jennifer Aniston on a day off’: jeans, t-shirt, flipflops. Many of you will likely judge me for this (for erasing myself, not cosplaying Jen), and say this was not the case for you. You might claim you stayed true to yourself, but you probably didn’t. Just like I didn’t.

Dressing Without Apology

What remained constant through all those years was my love of clothes, even when they wouldn’t fit me, literally or otherwise. Ironically, now that I have reached a stage when I’m no longer trying to attract a life partner, I have finally found my way back to the uninhibited joy I took in dressing in my early twenties. It doesn’t hurt that I am now in a position to afford clothes that I once only dreamt about.

As I separate myself from my role as a mother I feel sexy in a way I never knew before, and it feels almost delusional. I’m not going to go so far as to say that I’ve made peace with my body (thank you 90s Heroine Chic for life-long body dysmorphia) but I know what my body can do, and I’m tired of apologising for it. More importantly, I think it’s finally time for my body to serve me. I dress to provoke, to intrigue, and to delight, but most importantly, I dress how I feel: alive, sensual, and mischievous. And I refuse to be embarrassed by it. You may see it and appreciate it, or not. It really doesn’t matter to me! Because I’m no longer positioning myself on a market, neither romantic nor professional. I simply am. Older, wiser, hotter, and no longer in need of your validation. Give me pleasure without expectation, give me joy without repayment. Give me life.

I am still motivated by the fear of being average, and I always aim for slightly punk, even though at almost fifty I am clearly not. Not punk, but also not average, I think. But in this strange moment when my identity feels blurred and unfinished, being complimented on my outfit does soothe something deep inside me. See? I can still dress to draw attention. Not the attention of attraction, but that of admiration.

When the Compartments Collapse

The compartmentalisation that Lessing achieves in the structure of her novel, that all women do to their lives, is what comes back to bite us in the ass when we hit this certain age. We are mothers, partners, coworkers, and friends, but we are not one person. We are different personas created to suit different aspects of our lives, because as women we still live to please, tirelessly. Until one day when we realise that we just can’t anymore. It is Bullshit! We cannot keep it up, because in the process of soothing everyone else’s egos, we forgot our own.

I can no longer hold my breath to try to fit inside someone else’s fantasy of who I could be. This is what finally shattered: the impossibility of juggling all the opposites of the expectations of me.

Perhaps we are meant to crack open, to let the shards show, to sit in the chaos long enough that we recognise ourselves again. I don’t need validation from anyone else, I only need to stand in the mess of my own making and finally, unapologetically, allow myself to be seen.

And so here I am. Mother, lover, caretaker, observer.

I am life. I am heat. I am skin. I am ecstasy and misery. I am unashamed. I am chaos.

Worship me. Or don’t. I don’t give a fuck.

Maybe this is what the chaos is for.

The YSL romper will set you back about EUR 3000 and the Miu Miu micro bib shirt is EUR 780 - so who is the intended customer for these slips of fabric? Miu Miu is supposed to be girlish, playful, and radical, and the target demographic is a 20-29 yo girl. Meanwhile, the Saint Laurent customer is supposedly urban, stylish, and aged 20-40. A 20-something with long, slim limbs and a large, disposable income to spend on non-office attire? Outside of influencers posting sponsored content and celeb brand ambassadors, this customer barely exists. Miuccia Prada herself says that Miu Miu represents the woman she would like to be, and since she’s in her 70s, I’m guessing she means in spirit. And truthfully, the over 50s are probably the only demographic who can comfortably afford these clothes. But take me as an example: I’m almost 50, and no amount of squats and deadlifts will make my legs ready for micro shorts.

Incidentally, we (peri-)menopausal women might be the only ones who still actually want to have sex, and not the prettified, tidy version either. Something about not giving a fuck anymore seems to make us want to. Catch up on all those lost years of worrying about their egos and our bodies. But we know better than trying to use micro pants to get some, and apparently, we don’t have to! It appears younger men are on to us. We all learned how to fan-girl hard in the 90s and now it could finally serve us! The allure of not wanting to settle down and have kids, actually enjoying the sex, and we stopped caring if we look good in that angle? Let’s just say it’s in the bag. Or rather, in the sack.

Bella Freud asks all the guests on her show Fashion Neurosis if a bad outfit will make them lose the attraction for someone. It’s a fun question, and probably meant to be provocative, but it’s beside the point. Anyone knows that if you’re in it for the sex, the clothes don’t matter (they’ll be off soon anyway) and if you’re in it for the long haul, the wardrobe is a work-in-progress (meaning she’ll work on it and he’ll make progress). Sex appeal is all about the attitude and if you’re turned off by flip-flops or corduroy, you were never that into it in the first place. Ask any woman to explain what in the world she saw in that tattooed dude with no steady income, but an avid interest in microbrewing and surfing, and she couldn’t tell you. It probably had nothing to do with his outfit (or his bank statement).

Where was I…? Right, non-pants. So will micro shorts make us feel sexy? We know straight men will probably like them (lots of bare skin), but the reality is that women never dressed for the (heterosexual) male gaze. We dress for ourselves, for other women (our friends, but mostly to one-up our enemies), and for gay men, who know to appreciate it. Straight men are generally overwhelmed by Outfits. They understand dressed vs naked and prefer a feminine silhouette over boyfriend fits (and they HATE it when you borrow their shirts). They don’t understand Alexander McQueen SS 1997 or why Gucci by Tom Ford is better than Alessandro Michele. So, will the gays and our girlfriends appreciate underpants as outerpants? I mean, I guess I like it from an aesthetic point of view: it’s shiny, lacy, and frilly, sort of like an explicit fan-fic version of Pride and Prejudice. But would I wear it?

In the 90s, there was an Australian soap opera that really tried hard to sell us that women were lounging about at home in tight boxer shorts and push-up bras. Yes! Women everywhere trying to get comfy reach for the metal wire push-up. It’s a no-brainer. And now they’re telling us that well-to-do middle aged women, when contemplating what to wear this summer while strolling trough Paris or Milan, are sure to reach for their ruffled micro bloomers. Pair them with a bib shirt! This is sure to make us feel elegant and sexy while out and about. On the other hand, why the fuck not? Our legs (and torsos) deserve some sun and love too, even the wrinkly, sagging ones. You know what? I think I just might. But not because I think it’ll get me some. I’ll be doing it for me and the vitamin D.

Ah yes, the Good Old Days. When a feminist was a menopausal woman in a tent dress with henna coloured hair and African godess statues on her mantlepiece. Cool, attractive, girls laughed along with sexist jokes and wandering hands and eyes. Look at me: I’m not one of those easily offended overly sensitive women on the barricade about equal pay and maternity leave! I’m cool with anything. I’m just like one of the boys, except I’m actually the butt of the joke, not in on it. The exploitation of the female body is fine, we’ll just call it art and pretend she doesn’t mind. She’s At One with nature and her sexuality, like Brigitte Bardot back in her day. Or Lolita. The male gaze is just the true appreciation of beauty and he’s a GENIUS! Be grateful for the attention, it won’t last.

The most popular girl in the 90s was thin, lofty, unattainable, and disinterested. A boyish waif, sustained on cigarettes and Big Gulp, who forgets to eat if she’s not reminded, and loves dancing in the rain. She doesn’t care about anything! Nonchalant doesn’t even begin to describe her. Try dissociated. She’s wearing whatever crossed her path between the bed and her front door, be it her toddler sibling’s t-shirt, her dad’s shirt, or, as in the case of Kate Moss at a party in 1993: a see-thru slip dress and black panties. Her hair is messy because who has time for such worldly things as hair brushing? She woke up like this! Makeup still on from last night. God forbid anyone thought you cared about anything. But don’t go too far, the boys still prefer the girls who look like barbie dolls if they’d brush their hair.

This fundamental state of not-caring is what all the current 90s mood-boards misunderstand. Also, kids today are moisturising, cleansing, hydrating and getting at least 8 hours of sleep — they have no idea what a blackout is. Or a one-night-stand. Mood boarding the 90s is an oxymoron, anyone who lived through it will tell you. No one would have owned up to planning their outfits, that would completely contradict the ironic statement of their generation. Look at me, I’m wearing a too tight, washed out My Little Pony T-Shirt with these ripped tights and my grandma’s bloomers! Or, if you’re trying to look blasé but expensive, all black (pro-tip: it’s also slimming!). I don’t care about your opinion, but please tell me I’m pretty, and let’s not pretend that I’m smart or anything. Tell me again about your band.

‘Caring About Things’ is pretty much the worst thing you could do in the 90s. That would make you a nerd, and ‘Not Being A Nerd’ is maybe one of the only things that mattered. If you reached the pinnacle of Cool you could allow yourself to be nice to the bottom feeders, the real nerds (we’re talking Rain Man level), but only then. You could be talented, as long as it seemly fell in your lap and you did nothing to actively attain it. Being good at something because of hard work and dedication; blood, sweat and tears? Loser! Don’t be passionate about anything, except ‘Not Caring’. You could be passionate about refusing to conform (as long as you were conventionally attractive beneath the smudgy makeup) but that’s about it.

It might sound cool now, some 30 years on, but the fuck-it vibe of the 90s is not a desirable state of affairs! I’ll take passion and intent over nonchalance any day. Sit me down with someone so passionate about their interest that they’ve read every book, heard every podcast, and are now BEGGING to tell me all about it. I want people to show that they care! About love, about me, about their stupid hobbies and weird neighbours (but please don’t tell me about your band, I really can’t anymore). And I will tell you about my latest obsession while we’re at it. It is NOT uncool to fret about what impression you make on others; it is one of the cornerstones of society to care about what people think about you. That’s what sets us apart from sociopaths and narcissists (another it-label these days).

But the not-caring has made a comeback, sneaking in with the ‘Setting of Boundaries’ and ‘Healing Work’ that everyone’s supposedly doing. Is my dependancy on Chat GPT to interpret your mixed messages draining a small rainforest every day? Sorry! Venice is crumbling into the ocean? Let me just throw some useless money at you and let me plan my wedding in peace. Do I find this situation mildly annoying and inconvenient? No problem! I’ll just ghost you, and if you don’t get the message I’ll block you as well. Are bombs flying all over the place? Sure, but let’s talk about the global mood board — Pantone’s color of the year — and how we can bring sexy back while not actually having sex, because who has time? Sex doesn’t really go with my infrared mask and moisturising routine. We’re wearing see-thru clothes and thirsting after gay men having sex on screen, but we’re FINE!!! (It’s better than the real thing anyway, much less messy and confusing.)

While I, and anyone growing up in the 90s, may be forever brainwashed to believe that the skinniest bitch wins, for a while it seemed like girl power, body-positivity and inclusiveness had been heartily embraced by millennials and Gen Z. Paired with the trend for everyone to be a feminist, the world was on the verge of finally becoming that lovely place the tent-dressed, henna-haired women were on about! Kumbaya!!

Then Kate Moss slipped on her Gucci thong again and we collectively declared: nah, fuck it. You got a light?