It was Thursday morning, and I stood in front of my bathroom mirror, looking at my outfit. It looked too done, so I decided to try a French tuck, you know, that casual half-shove of fabric into your waistband that fashion influencers say takes three seconds and makes you look effortless, like Jane Birkin. But when I tucked it in, it went too deep, and I looked a little like an anxious accountant at a company party who was so worried about being late to the party that he didn’t take thirty seconds to take a look in the mirror to be sure his shirt tails were where they were supposed to be. If I let it hang out an inch too loose, I looked like a crumpled laundry sack, and instead of looking effortlessly chic, I looked effortlessly bad. I stood there, looking in the mirror, watching the clock, and realizing I needed to get going.

I was irritated and trying so hard to get it right, to get that effortless rightness. As a therapist who’s practiced for over twenty-five years, analyzing human behavior and defense mechanisms, I found myself having an existential crisis over where my shirt’s tail would fall. I couldn’t help but see the irony in my behavior. To someone watching me, it would look like I’m just playing with options, but on the inside, there was a level one psychological breakdown filled with cognitive distortions and unpleasant self-talk. Ugh, why can’t I do this? Others make it look so easy, and the final, classic thought is: it must just be me.

Effortlessness is the primary fashion neurosis of our time. “I just woke up like this” is a silent subtext in far too many fashion images. Looking good isn’t enough; to be the ideal, you have to look naturally and effortlessly good. This myth says you must look great, but under no circumstances are you allowed to look like you tried.

There are three cultural archetypes that embody the fiction of effortlessness. The first that comes to mind is the Parisian chic look, the Jane Birkin uniform I can’t achieve. Think of Jane in her white crew-neck sweater, vintage jeans, tousled hair, ten-year-old ballet flats, and carrying a straw bag because she felt leather bags were too fussy. This look feels like it says, “I just grabbed what was clean off the chair, threw my hair into a clip, and am off to buy a baguette.”

This fantasy is as much of a fiction as the trad wife trend. Being a trad wife takes a ridiculous amount of work, and being so stylish that one of the most expensive and gatekept bags in the world is named after you does too. Both looks have oppressive implications, just in different ways with different consequences. Jane’s “I don’t care” bohemian style seemed genuine, but she also admitted to spending hours lining her eyes with kohl , even sleeping in it, because she was worried she would look plain next to Brigitte Bardot. Jane’s effort came from fear she might not look as good as Serge Gainsbourg’s former lover. Even Jane worried about the eyes of the other, and the male gaze, hence the kohl.

Every how-to on effortless French hair I have ever seen involves product and effort, even though it is supposed to be effortless. David Mallett teaches us how to have effortless hair: “The French are obsessed with the I-don’t-care-thing, which is very much about their personalities; they don’t want people to think they care, but yet they’re very obsessed, and they do care. They’re nonchalant, but deep down, obsessed, it’s beyond. It’s highly studied…”

An American cousin of the French “I don’t care” look is the Clean Girl aesthetic and her sister Model Off Duty. This group’s uniform is a designer trench coat over heather gray sweatpants, a white tee, chunky dad sneakers, a slicked-back ponytail, and petite gold hoops. The backstory of the “I just threw on my boyfriend’s coat on the way back from the gym” look is that it actually cost more than an annual Pilates membership. The sweatpants were bought at Net-a-Porter and then taken to a tailor to improve the drape, which is why they look better than the ones bought from the Gap. The effortless no-makeup look comes from an eleven-step skincare routine of serums, peptides, and assorted essences, followed by a no-makeup makeup routine.

Then there’s Quiet Luxury effortlessness. This mythology is the uniform of Succession and assorted billionaires who seem to dress in minimalism because they’re so gosh darn busy they don’t have the time, energy, or interest for clothes. Charcoal crew necks, black cashmere tees, and a blank baseball cap with no logo. In truth, it’s an $1,800 Loro Piana baby cashmere, harvested exclusively from the underfleece of Capra hircus goats. This aesthetic isn’t a lack of interest in fashion or in how they look; it’s hyper-distilled status masquerading as utilitarianism.

We haven’t all come to these myths of elegance on our own. Here is what the industry has to say about effortlessness:

“We must never confuse elegance with snobbery. Elegance is effortless.” —Yves Saint Laurent

“The key to great style is to feel comfortable and look effortless. When you try too hard, it always shows.”—Michael Kors

“The best looks always have that feeling of being effortless, even if they took hours.”—Marc Jacobs

“There’s something very cool about looking like you just threw on whatever was lying on the floor.”—Alexa Chung

“Always look like you put things on at the last minute.”—Inès de la Fressange

“French women never try to look like they’ve spent a lot of time getting ready. It should always look a little bit messy, a little bit unfinished—effortless, even when it isn’t.”—Carine Roitfeld

“… Style is about a certain careless chic—it has to look effortless.”—Diana Vreeland

Erving Goffman argued that social interaction is divided into front-stage and back-stage. Front-stage behavior is the polished and public performance, what we want to be seen. Back-stage behavior is the space for rehearsals, the parts of ourselves that are not ready for prime time. The effortless myth pretends back-stage doesn’t exist. Generation Alpha has coined the term “aura farming”: setting up situations or poses for social media posts meant to accrue mystique, spirituality, and the nonverbal message that the farmer is unbothered, even though it is entirely constructed. This is a whole lot of backstage behavior intended for a front-stage audience.

The desire for effortlessness is a kind of regression into magical thinking. Freud would call it infantile omnipotence. As a baby, when you cried, milk appeared. When you shivered, a blanket arrived. But as a baby, you didn’t see all the effort that got you that milk: lactation, lactation consultants, breast pumps, and bottles that went into feeding you. To an infant, desire and fulfillment are inextricably linked. As we grow up, we learn, or should learn, that time and effort exist between wanting and having.

I am not a Cognitive Behavioral therapist, but I know a cognitive distortion when I see one. There are three cognitive distortions in effortlessness. Problem number one is what’s called Emotional Reasoning: if it feels hard, you must be doing it wrong. Difficulty can mean you are doing it absolutely right, but if you buy this idea, then you are under the deodorant mythology: Never let them see you sweat. The second is All-or-Nothing Splitting. You either got it or you don’t; you’re either effortlessly chic or an insecure try-hard. The third is the “Should” script of ease: When we say “should”, we are saying that something isn’t as it “should” be, and if you aren’t effortlessly put together, then there is something wrong with you, which of course isn’t right. Mix those three together, and you get the bitter psychological cocktail called the Effortless Fallacy.

If we are going to unpack the insidiousness of fashion and style “effortlessness,” it seems fitting to choose a French philosopher who is a snazzy dresser. In his book The Fashion System, Roland Barthes argues that the fashion business sells far more than clothes; it sells the fiction of naturalness, i.e., ease or effortlessness. For example: My silk slip-dress was supposed to take me from daytime to dancing. The catalog copy failed to mention how sensitive the fabric is. It also didn’t warn me that I absolutely would have to wear Spanx with it, and that is not effortless. I also bought a linen suit that promised easy-breezy summer living, but it didn’t mention that I’d have to iron it for twenty minutes before I wore it, and that it would look unironed ten minutes after I put it on.

The fiction of effortlessness doesn’t stay in our closets. Once we buy into the myth that you should look great without effort, it can spread to other areas of life. For example, we might believe that if you “follow your bliss,” work will feel like an endless flow state, or that if you meet the “right” person, love will be a happily ever after with no work required. And if it requires work, it isn’t the right relationship. The more we buy into the fiction, the more likely we are to see anything that requires friction, sweat, or a second draft as proof that we can’t be a writer or that, if drawing doesn’t come easy, “I am just not artistic.”

We might equate effort with the “try-hard” insult hurled at kids with color-coded binders who dared to care about the test—and apply it to adult domains. Effort becomes something shameful. When someone compliments an outfit, and we reflexively wave it away with, “Oh, this old thing? I’ve had it forever,” despite spending three hours scouring the rack for it, we participate in the fraud. The person who hears that disavowal of effort can wrongly believe that they are uniquely defective and that we are just intrinsically good at it. What if we told the truth and said, “Thank you. I spent twenty minutes steaming it, wrestled with the front tuck until I almost screamed, and tried on three pairs of shoes before choosing these shoes. I tried very hard, and I love how it looks.” This statement is an act of rebellion against a fiction that makes us feel less than.

Admitting we made an effort in how we look, dress, or live isn’t arrogance, and it isn’t and shouldn’t be shameful. I believe that admitting effort is a kind of rebellion. It breaks the collective delusion that everyone else arrived in this world either with “it” or without it. Real style isn’t born from rolling out of bed; it’s born from care, curiosity, friction, and choice. Let’s abandon the lie of nonchalance and claim the dignity of our effort.

Leopard. Just leopard. I have been thinking a lot about you.

While traveling across the U.S. this past week, I saw you a lot. And I am sad to report that a lot of it wasn’t good. A lot of it was leopard on leopard on leopard. Leopard paired with rhinestones—lots of rhinestones. Leopard that read tacky to my eye—an eye that thinks of itself as preppy at heart, even as it chooses minimal and beige more than it shows pink and green. Leopard so strong and unyielding that it made me think about you, or rethink you, and, in doing so, think about myself.

Back in the 80s, leopard print was considered tacky. Something for Tarzan’s girlfriend, Jane, over-the-top grandmas who lived in Miami, or mobsters' wives. I don’t know how I came to see you this way, maybe from watching The Golden Girls and remembering a leopard jogging suit on Blanche or seeing it in movies made by Francis Ford Coppola. I don’t know for sure; I just know that you definitely weren’t for me. I think I started to see you on the singer Blondie, or maybe on a singer in the Ramones, in a thrifted, ironic version of taking a print mostly worn by rich old ladies and making it edgy and punk, something they found at the Goodwill. I didn’t recoil from you then—but I never thought I would wear you—you were for girls with self-bleached white hair, red tartan miniskirts, and ripped denim jackets, with safety pins holding body and soul together as they slammed at Black Flag concerts.

I don’t know exactly when you and I got into a relationship; it might have been in the 90s. That is when you were no longer for grandmas who smelled of Chanel No. 5 and the hairspray that kept their curled, teased hair in place, or for gals who might find a mohawk a reasonable haircut for a man. I don’t know who introduced you to the runway first. Dolce and Gabbana? Christian Dior? Whoever it was, they democratized the print and turned it into something that symbolized youth, a certain flavor of femininity and power. I believe this is when we became friends. But for the life of me, I can’t remember the first piece of you I ever bought, and I certainly don't know what I wanted from you.

I have a freakish memory about certain things; I can remember the first dream a client had when I started seeing them over 10 years ago. I know what my husband wore on his first date and what he ordered at the restaurant. I remember a conversation I had with someone in full and glorious 1983. But I can’t remember when leopard entered my closet, and that feels really, really strange. Because at some point leopard became a feature of my fashion personality, and I imagine if you polled friends and family, they would agree.

This was the leopard in my closet from 1990-2010

1. Leopard Tory Burch pumps

2. Leopard Tory Burch pumps that I replaced after I wore out the first pair

3. Leopard Tory Burch ballet flats

4. Leopard Kate Spade straw handbag

5. Leopard Kate Spade wallet

6. Leopard Kate Spade sweater

7. Leopard 9 West pumps

8. Leopard J. Crew Skirt

9. Leopard Manolo Blahnik pumps

10. Leopard J. Crew scarf

11. Leopard Equipment silk blouse

12. Leopard Equipment pajama set

13. Leopard silk jogging pants, unknown origin

14. Leopard J. Crew calf hair leopard belt

Looking at that list, what’s interesting is how little leopard I actually had. It wasn’t much, but it became an absolute part of my style and sense of self. Maybe because, at the time, it was the only print I let into my closet. It also became one way I showed any fashion whimsy. So even though there wasn’t much of it—it was a placeholder for a part of my personality my closet, filled with black dresses, could never show. I was committed to a closet filled with timeless, classic clothes I would always have. That said, none of the aforementioned classics survived the great Marie Kondo Spark Joy clear-out of 2020–but much of the leopard did.

You wouldn’t expect a baby shower in Valencia, California, a SoCal suburb famous for master-planned communities, the place Edward Scissorhands lived, and the home of CalArts, to have a huge impact on one’s relationship with how you dress. You wouldn’t think such an event would affect how I wear you, dear leopard, but it did. I attended the party wearing a faux Chanel suit in black boucle from J. Crew, black Donna Karan opaque tights, black kitten heels, and a leopard scarf. In retrospect, it is not what you might suggest someone wear to a baby shower—but if you know my infertility journey, you might not be surprised that I needed a dark psychic force field to protect myself from grief and envy.

I remember the room; I can picture assorted guests and feel certain I struggled with small talk with strangers as I ate crudités. I imagine there were games and present openings, and I was wondering how soon I could leave without looking rude. I can imagine all of that based on who I am and how I function at parties. However, I remember one thing absolutely. The mother of the soon-to-be mother’s mother was wearing a whole lot of leopard print and, to say it kindly, it was a lot. I think the woman who invited me to this event saw me taking in the leopard outfit, turned to me, and, as she looked at my leopard scarf, said: “This is why you have to be careful about wearing leopard after 40.” She then shot me a look like a disapproving aunt from The Gilded Age, and the look was meant for me.

At first, I didn’t take it as an insult; I heard it as a warning—but the burn hit me as I drove home. Okay, first of all, I ranted, I am NOT anywhere near her mother’s age; her mother is well over 25 years older than me, I said to myself as I merged onto the 5 freeway, and another thing, I continued: My leopard, unlike her mother’s use of leopard, is tasteful. I raged at her without her knowing, and that leopard looks like she got it at Ross Dress for Less. My anger was extinguished by the time I got home. But every time I buy or wear leopard, I think of her and her warning. I worry and wonder if I have leopard blindness. Do I look tacky? Does the leopard age me? Do I look like Blanche DuBois? After I finish my inventory, I always answer no. I don’t look tacky; I don’t look older because I am wearing it. I don’t look like a soon-to-be resident of the Villages. But what if I do?

My current closet contains the following items of leopard:

1. Leopard calf hair skirt from Ralph Lauren

2. Leopard pussy bow silk blouse from Ralph Lauren

3. Leopard in a black-and-white version from L’Agence

4. Leopard car coat from Macy’s

5. Leopard wide calf hair belt, unknown origins

6. Leopard belt I got at a horsey/cowboy store in Utah

7. Leopard Manolo pumps

8. Leopard Valentino pumps that I never wear

9. Leopard silky scarf my friend Leah bought me

10. Leopard Lululemon leggings in a muted black and grey

Ten items of clothing that have become a “fashion neutral,” which isn't a lot; but it isn’t enough reason to remain part of my personality, and yet it does. And, truth be told, I have never worn any of it since I moved to the Pacific Northwest, except the calf hair belt. Yet it remains a major part of who I am, even though I rarely wear it now. But why? This is where psychology comes in.

As with all depth psychological work, we start with personal associations and then move to archetypal ones.

My personal associations: Leopard print is whimsical; it says I am not boring; I have a fun, spirited side. I have an edge. Though I could be mistaken for a basic blonde, leopard signals fashion moxie and a free spirit, which is also likely why I own several pairs of black leather pants that I mostly pair with staid cashmere sweaters and loafers.

Archetypal associations: Leopards symbolize the untamed, the nocturnal, and the instinctual, a predatory impulse that refuses to be domesticated. In African, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian cultures, chieftains, high priests, and kings wore leopard skin, so leopard print can symbolize and unconsciously communicate status and power—even if we aren’t aware we are doing so. Leopard print also has a Dionysian-like quality, symbolizing danger, eroticism, and instinct. Leopard print works as a kind of organic camouflage; its light and dark allow the wearer to move between the tension of opposites: visibility and invisibility. As I mentioned before, leopard symbolizes rebellion and transgression—a fashion contrarian and border-crosser (like our friend Hermes) that moves between luxury and trashiness.

When I work with my clients' dreams, unpacking the symbols that their psyche offers is second nature to me; I can see what their psyche is saying. But for those of us who work with dreams every day, it is highly unlikely that, on our own, we'll see what all the symbols are saying to us; we are just too close to it. I say this to make clear I don’t have an exhaustive understanding of my leopard love, and I believe unpacking it in therapy would bring me even more insight.

I had believed that my love of leopard print was just a touch of whimsy, a splash of color in a sea of black and beige. But when I look at leopard's archetypal associations, I can see what leopard print might do in the psyche of someone who is naturally agreeable and conflict-avoidant. I no longer think leopard print is just an accent that adds a pop. I think it’s a kind of boundary that announces, “Hey, don’t let my polite smile and classic cashmere fool you; I do have teeth.”

When I think about that woman at the baby shower and the message she was giving me about aging and aesthetics, I think she was really warning me about visibility. She was consciously or unconsciously saying that as women grow older, we have to file down our edges, lose our claws, and quiet the animal that lives within us. I think about her warning every time I pull a leopard scarf out of my closet, put the calf hair belt around my waist, or even when I’m not wearing it. Leopard, you serve a purpose in my closet, part of my psychology. Even if I don’t wear you much, I will keep you in my closet because of what you protect and what you say that I maybe can’t say yet. Yes, a lot of the leopard goes unworn here in my new home in the Pacific Northwest, but the spots remain a silent, material reminder of the wildness I refuse to give up.

I grew up in a family whose world was the fashion business. The therapist I saw as a kid, who wasn’t exactly the Carl Rogers of empathy, could see that my parents needed to talk to me about something other than the fashion business. She made suggestions: “Maybe you could ask her what happened at school today, or what her weekend plans are.” They would smile and nod at her suggestions, then go back to talking about spring silhouettes and which styles they sold the most. I suppose that is why I turned something I hated hearing about into something meaningful, and why I write about clothing from a different perspective.

Another thing you should know is that my parents were incredibly good-looking—in their glory days, my dad looked like a young James Stewart, and my mother looked like Ava Gardner. Because they got so much attention for how they looked, they naturally assumed they'd have beautiful children.

Looking at photos of myself from birth through eighth grade, I see a child as cute as a bug’s ear. But around eighth grade, I morphed into someone I cringe to look back on, and it was when I was in that awkward in-between stage with baby fat and a face that was in transition that my parents made clear that my looks were disappointing. In a million subtle ways, they told me I wasn’t pretty, thin, or fashionable enough. I'm not telling you this to invite a pity party, but to explain how I became who I am.

Intellect, kindness, and generosity were not the coin of the realm. I wasn’t the only one judged by how I looked or what I wore. Everyone my parents encountered fell into a strict aesthetic binary: yes or no. Either you were attractive and well-dressed, or you weren’t. You live in that kind of water long enough, and you don’t even realize how toxic it is—you just keep swimming.

As an adult, every time I visited my mother, I knew she would immediately scan me for flaws. If my bra didn’t flatter me, she’d remark that I looked like a nursing mother—perhaps the ultimate criticism coming from a woman who herself wasn’t entirely built for motherhood. If my clothes somehow measured up, she would pivot to other imperfections: “Ooh, that pimple looks sore.” Delivered with an exaggerated empathy for an ordinary spot easily fixed with a dab of Clearasil and covered with concealer, her outsized reaction sent a clear message: You have something horrifying on your face, and that is all I can see.

I learned to become an inward-facing, flaw-seeking missile. My hair was the wrong texture, my freckles were a defect I hoped to grow out of, and my “freshman 15” became the universal explanation for whatever went wrong—why I didn’t get the part-time job at Contempo Casuals, why I wasn’t invited to the party, or why boys thought it was funny to prank-call my house and call me names. Everything was explained away by my perceived lack of attractiveness.

I adopted the same logic that I learned at home: If only I were prettier and thinner, my life would be perfect. Pre-therapy, I believed that— I really believed it.. So much so that in eighth grade, I kept a journal listing everything I could do to make myself attractive: lie out in the sun, slather on Bain de Soleil to make my extremely pale skin into something it could never be, grow my hair long, buy Bonne Bell Lip Smackers, dress like Dida. But as someone of Celtic descent, I had zero capacity for tanning. Even with a cocktail of St. Tropez, Hawaiian Tropic, and cocoa butter on a silver reflector mat—or my dad’s at-home tanning lamp—I never tanned. My skin simply refused. And the lip smackers and Dida-adjacent outfit did nothing to transform me into a version of me that I deemed lovable.

It might sound like I am blaming my parents for my body dysmorphia and my lifelong project of trying to become attractive. Once, I did, but I don’t anymore. Today, I can see that both my parents genuinely believed their looks and style were golden tickets to love and success—which is deeply sad. And they wanted me to have the advantages they had, and they thought looks were the only way to get there. They were objectively beautiful people, but while their appearance opened doors, they still had to do the heavy lifting once inside. Still, they were convinced that without those physical assets, I was doomed to a life of mediocrity; of course, they didn’t want that for me, so they made suggestions, a lot of suggestions.

My therapist #3, whom I started seeing when I was twenty-one, a man who, while incredibly smart and who read Thus Spoke Zarathustra in German and Sartre in French, had an academic aesthetic; his Supercuts haircut, clunky earth shoes, and dorky glasses were the first things my parents would have noticed about him, and those things would have disqualified his opinions from being taken seriously. I definitely noticed all those things, but I liked him—and I liked that he noticed more than how I looked.

I don’t remember the things I told therapist #3 about myself, but I know that none of them were nice. I am sure I told him all the physical qualities about me that made me permanently and intractably ugly. He challenged my beliefs about myself, and I wrote off his questioning as him just being nice. When none of his interventions worked, he told me the story of the Ugly Duckling. I know you know it, but here is how it goes:

A mother duck sits on her nest waiting for her baby chicks to hatch. One egg is bigger than the others and takes longer to hatch. Finally, when it does, a big, dark-gray, awkward-looking bird hatches. And the ducks and all the other animals on the farm relentlelly mock the duck. Sad and rejected, Ducky leaves the farm and finds a home by the icy lake. When spring comes, he sees himself in the mirror and discovers he is not a duck, but rather a beautiful swan. The end.

I read the book as a kid, but I never saw myself in it. But as soon as Therapist #3 read the story to me in his Santa Monica office, I knew he was right. But I had a lot of work to do to finally see that I was a swan; I.e., I had other qualities that ducks couldn’t see. I knew it was true, but even then I couldn’t name what about me was swanlike.

Today I could list the qualities the ducks couldn’t see in me, but I won’t, because my inner duck would say that is bragging, and it just can’t tolerate that. But I know I have them. What I can’t do is tolerate a compliment about anything exterior. Tell me I am smart, funny, kind, and I can accept that. I can accept the compliment of being stylish, because that isn’t me—it is something I do. But if you tell me I have nice hair, or, God forbid, that I am pretty, this swan transforms back into her inner mudhen, cringes, and waits for the lie and the discomfort to end.

If you grew up in a family where the people whose job it is to love you, and you see in their eyes or hear in their words what is the latest thing that is wrong with how you look— you have options for how you are going to be in the world: you can become like them and think you are the cat’s meow, and find fault in others. Another way is to be a fault-seeker in yourself and others. Or you can think you are terrible and everyone else is amazing, which is what I did. I would look in the mirror and know what I would be criticized for, and I did it to myself before anyone else could, and I am happy to say that mostly I look for what is beautiful about others except when it comes to clothes, where I will admit that my internal voice can sound an awful lot like my parents’ .

When I see a woman, I automatically notice what's beautiful about her. I imagine I originally developed this skill to compare myself to others, but after a lot of therapy, I learned that appreciating what was beautiful in other women didn’t have to lead to immediate comparison, contrast, and self-attack. I don’t know how old I was when I started sharing my appreciation of other women's beauty; I would guess it was well into my thirties. But I do know that it is something I like about myself. I feel incredible joy in celebrating a woman’s beauty—saying you have beautiful hair, a radiant smile, or stunning nail beds (yes, I have said that). Seeing beauty in others and celebrating it with them is something I really like about my Swan self.

Then came Harvey Weinstein, Woody Allen, Matt Lauer, and all of the other men who brought about #MeToo. In this era, I stopped saying the beautiful things I saw in others. I feared that complimenting a woman could be objectifying and unwelcome and that, in some way, it would suggest her looks were all that mattered about her, which I didn’t believe, so I stopped. I would still notice how the color green amplified her beautiful complexion or how gorgeous her eyes were, but I just wouldn’t say it. I assumed the time for compliments was over, that we just couldn’t do it anymore—that these creeps had somehow stopped me, and others, from saying what we thought, because we didn’t want to hurt anyone, even though it was meant as a genuine compliment when I told you how beautiful your dress was.

And then I moved to the Pacific Northwest. I don’t know how to write about this without triggering my Ugly Duckling complex, which wants you to know I am not all that, so I am going to be vague. Since moving here, strangers have complimented me a lot. Women I don’t know have come up to me and shared what they appreciate about how I look or my style, and we've had heartfelt connections that grew out of a sincere compliment.

I recently wrote a Substack note about an experience I just had:

I don’t know when it happened, but something in the culture made me stop complimenting other women as if telling them they had beautiful eyes or a gorgeous smile was objectifying them.

At lunch today, a waitress came over to me and said, “I have to tell you what beautiful hair you have.” The irony is that I have been saying less-than-loving things about my hair to myself lately. She told me that she had been going through cancer, and as her hair has been growing back, she has been looking to other women for inspiration on how she wants her hair to look. She added that she usually just notices women’s teeth and eyes. I told her she noticed those because she has beautiful eyes herself. The next thing I knew, we were hugging. A stranger and I were hugging each other . On my way out of the restaurant, she handed me this beautiful bouquet of flowers she had grown in her garden. My heart was overwhelmed by her kindness

I say this to say that we should, or at least I am going to, tell every woman about the beauty I see in her, inner, outer, and otherwise. We all deserve flowers, literal and otherwise, and they’re a wonderful thing to give and receive.

For a long time, I lived under my parents' flaw-seeking gaze, whose nonverbal message was that I had to be perfect and beautiful to be loved, and in a culture that warned me appreciation might be mistaken for objectification. The waitress reminded me what a compliment actually is: an act of recognition, and a moment of real connection.

I know what it feels like to live in a state of constant measurement and being found wanting. I also know what happens when someone looks at you and simply sees a swan. I refuse to let old fears stop me from offering that same gift to every woman who crosses my path.

The sentence is only four words long. In one context, it’s completely harmless—an innocent question about an outfit, a curiosity between friends. Say the same thing to a man, and depending on the context, he might hear nothing but a question about clothes. He wouldn’t necessarily register how something that seems like an innocuous question could carry such traumatic, terrible weight. For certain, he has never had those words weaponized against him, or against any man he knows. He might have heard the line in a courtroom movie, asked on the witness stand by a sadistic defense attorney, but even then, it just can’t land in him the way it lands in a woman. It will never hit the same way it does for a woman who owns a miniskirt or a wrap dress with a plunging neckline, knowing that any piece of fabric in her closet could one day be used as evidence against her.

I did my graduate thesis on The Genesis of Shame and the “Fig Leaf” of Fashion— in it, I explored how we use clothing to cover, compensate for, or mask and reveal shame using the Garden of Eden myth as a way to understand the nature of shame and covering and what covering can reveal and hide.

Yet those four words I am talking about today never made their way into my thesis. In retrospect, I am sorry they didn’t, and I am not sure why I left them out at the time. I imagine that, with my own trauma history, at the time it was just too heavy of material for me to address. If I had included these words in my thesis, it wouldn’t have been a couple hundred pages. To fully unpack this topic, I would need five thousand, ten thousand, twenty thousand words just to explain the history and the impact of those words on women, female bodies, and sexuality.

To understand why a simple inquiry about clothes carries such ancient weight, it makes sense to look back to where our collective relationship with shame and covering began—and who was blamed. In the Garden of Eden story of Genesis—a story that millions of Jews and Christians believe as literal truth—the first woman is framed as responsible for all of our suffering.

“And the man said, ‘The woman whom You gave to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I ate.’ And the Lord God said to the woman, ‘What is this you have done?’”

The moment the myth of paradise and ease falls apart, the fig leaf of clothing enters the story as an admission of guilt. Adam and Eve eat the fruit, become self-aware, and panic at their nakedness. To cover their shame, they sew fig leaves together to hide. When God sees them, Adam admits, "I was afraid because I was naked; and I hid myself." The fact that they wore fig leaves proves to God that they did something wrong and leads God to decide the woman is to blame; her makeshift clothing becomes proof of her transgression. This very first story of Judeo/Christianity establishes a blueprint that has haunted women ever since.

“To the woman He said: ‘I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception; in pain you shall bring forth children; your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.’” — Genesis 3:12–13, 16

Whether you believe that story literally or mythically, it exists collectively in our psyches. In 2026, that judgment of clothing as proof of wrongdoing still exists, unevolved from the original story. Millennia later, when something happens to a woman, the culture doesn’t look at the perpetrator; it looks to Eve to see what she was wearing.

Just the other day I learned of a brave woman who posted a video about a terrifying experience—being chased in a car by men who intended to follow her back to her hotel room. When I looked at the comment section, expecting overwhelming support, I saw women repeating the Garden of Eden narrative. Line after line of women picking her apart, asking her the original question: what were you wearing?

Almost every woman has felt those four words in one way or another. She may have had them said about her; she may have whispered them to herself; or, horribly, she may have caught herself thinking or typing them about another woman—clinging to the lie that if she can just figure out what someone else did wrong, she can keep herself safe.

Behind those four words, the subtext is always about shifting blame. It shifts the focus away from those who inflicted the harm and onto the person who endured it. By asking about what she is wearing, society turns an act of external violence into a failure of personal responsibility.

To hear those four words—especially as a woman, and most especially as a woman who has been sexually violated is a literal physical blow. I say literally in the exact way it’s supposed to be used. I feel knocked over. I feel gutted, sick to my stomach, and dizzy. My mind fragments, and I can’t even access my intellect or words because of the shock and outrage of such an accusing question. I feel a physical impulse to wrap my arms around my chest and brace myself, and I feel grief, and I feel pain, both physical and psychological, for every woman all the way back to Eve.

The cruelty of those four words is that they set a trap you can’t escape. Even if she answers that she was wearing a body-covering outfit that concealed absolutely everything, the questions continue: Why were you out so late? Why were you drinking? Why were you walking alone? Why did you go to his room? The moment you answer one of these questions intended to assign blame, another takes its place, perpetuating the sinister illusion that any detail of a woman's behavior could somehow make an act of violence reasonable.

In my work, I have sat with countless women who have internalized that question, even if no one ever said it out loud. I’ve sat with them in a room and watched them spiral through the exact same thoughts: What did I do? How could I have prevented it? How is it my fault?

We ask this endless loop of questions not to understand the perpetrator, but to blame the victim. Because if we can convince ourselves that violence is caused by a short skirt, a drink, or being out at the wrong hour, then we get to pretend that safety is something we can control. In this line of questioning, we don’t have to face the truth that it was never about the clothes, the alcohol, or the time of night. It was only ever about the person who chose to cause harm.

Sometimes I wonder what Jung would think if he were alive and saw me bringing Jungian thought to something as “frivolous” as fashion. You just saw me put quotation marks around “frivolous” as if he said it, but he didn’t—he never said anything about clothes or fashion, and if he had, I am not sure there’d be much left to say on the topic. When I think about what I write about here, I find myself doing what Jung would call “holding the tension of the opposites”—which he believed was psychologically necessary for change. And even as I am doing an incredibly Jungian thing by being aware of the internal or maybe external judgment, occasionally the ambivalence, and mostly the “f*ck it,” I am doing it anyway. I know that everything we do has a psychological core, and that is why, when I wrote for Psychology Today, my column was called Freudian Sips and was all about making psychoanalytic and analytic thought accessible and available, and not some hoity-toity thing that only people who talked like Frasier Crane’s brother were interested in.

All of that said ( you are watching me in real time in the tension of the opposites), I think about how someone in the analytic/psychoanalytic world might see this writing about The Material Unconscious as unserious, unworthy, or unimportant discourse, and I know it, and I feel it, and yet here I am writing about it with no intention of stopping.

Sunday night I watched the film that seemingly had nothing to do with clothing or fashion. It was Joachim Trier’s film The Worst Person in the World. If you haven’t seen it yet, don’t worry, I am not giving any spoilers.

Late in the film, a quiet, devastating scene shows Aksel, an artist in his forties, trying to explain to his younger girlfriend, Julie, a shift in human experience she is too young to know. “I grew up in a time when culture was passed along through objects. They were interesting because we could live among them. We could pick them up. Hold them in our hands. Compare them.” He went on to explain that he would go to the record store to buy records or to a comic store to buy comics, and that going and being in a place and buying a thing and then taking it home and holding it had an impact—an impact that has been lost.

Hearing that line, I did what almost anyone in our era does: I reached for the remote, pressed pause, and rewound the frame several times to make sure I captured his exact words, and then I voice-to-texted them into my iPhone.

As I captured the quote, the irony was inescapable. Had I seen this film years ago at the only art-house theater near where I lived, which was a 15-minute drive to Hermosa Beach, I wouldn’t have been able to hit pause. There would have been no way to stop the film or turn to a glowing screen in my purse, no internet search to instantly retrieve the script verbatim, no way to lock the exact syntax into place.

I would have had to sit there in the dark with the line. I would have stopped paying attention to the film and rehearsed it in my head, hoping that I could hold onto it, but likely after I would have gone to the restaurant across the street with my date, and we would have talked about the relationship issues the film presented, and by the time I got home, I would have remembered that there was something profound in the film. But what was it? Maybe the line would have made enough of an impact that I would write a note in my journal to rent the film when it eventually became available on video.

The Architecture of Memory

In that Hermosa Beach arts theater, seeing a foreign film required a lot of physicality. I would have had to look up the times it played in a newspaper. I would have driven in a car, bought a paper ticket from a person behind a glass window, smelled the popcorn in the lobby, and sat surrounded by assorted strangers—all of us who had made the exact same spatial commitment to the moment. There have been 1,000 essays and a bunch of books that talk about all that was lost in the friction of experience and the price we all pay for not ever having a handwritten letter holding the distinct pressure of a friend’s pen and their idiosyncratic signature, a paper ticket stub that lived in my pocket long after seeing A Room with a View, or a book on a nightstand that registers memory of the trip to the Either/Or Bookstore to buy it and the banter I had with the salesguy that was definitely flirting on both of our parts—the book holding all of that as well as the weight of holding it in my hand as something that will endure.

The Vanishing Archive

Another line in the film hit me hard in the psyche with equal, quiet psychological violence. I am going to be intentionally vague about the context so I don’t spoil it. Askel says that some day, when he dies, the private, unrepeatable archive of a woman he loves, that he carries in his mind, will die with him: memories of her that even she doesn’t know exist. This is the point where I ugly-cried —not just for Askel or for the woman, and to be honest, for me, for my husband, and for all of us—that this is the truth and that it is terrible.

The heartbreak of dematerialization is too terrible to bear. Just as a digital file lacks the physical body to hold a sensory history, no cloud can back up the quiet, fleeting ways another human being witnesses us. When the person goes, the archive goes with them. The sadness of that is not just the loss that comes with death, but that we will never fully know how others love us, what silly, weird things they do that we appreciate, like how they drink like a cat, or the way they say the word library like it is a kind of berry. And the pain of imagining those things being forever gone is just too much. There are versions of me that exist in other people’s minds and hearts that I will never know, and someday, with their death, that version of me will go with them just as my version of all the people I love will die with me.

To someone who never walked the aisles of Blockbuster to discover there were no more copies of Splash, never paid a $2 fine for not rewinding, or hunted for a parking spot at the Del Amo mall, this might sound oversentimental. On some level, it is. I can assure you that when that was all happening, I complained about each and every one of those annoyances, wishing for a day when none of these annoyances were necessary. Looking back, I realize those “annoyances”—the popcorn-scented lobbies, the sold-out books I drove across town to ultimately not get, the accidental overhearing of strangers’ conversations that seemed like they were disruptive as I watched a film—gave a texture of being alive together in a shared physical landscape that, at least in those forms, has died.

In the not-too-distant future, a time will come when the beholders’ memories of those annoyances will die, and with those deaths, the lived truth of that world will die with them. Even as all the cool kids now turn to vinyl records, film cameras, cassette tapes, and VCRs, those returns are conscious, intentional choices and an entirely different experience. There will come a time in the not-too-distant future when no living person left on Earth has had the direct, unchosen experience of a busy phone line or waiting for a record store to open to buy that song.

The Portable Architecture of the Body

And this is where clothing comes in and the question that lingers in the background of my own work: Why spend so much time writing about clothing? Why analyze fashion, sartorial choices, and the mundane items of cloth we wrap ourselves in?

Even with all that is lost, physical experiences still require friction—eating, building a house, sitting on a piece of furniture, being hospitalized, and others my Gen X brain can’t think of right now. But what makes clothing different from a house, a sofa, or a meal is that it is the only physical matter we wear on our bodies and carry into almost every moment of our lives—clothes are our constant companions.

Your home is static; you leave it behind when you walk out the door.—even if you live in an RV. Furniture never goes for a walk. What you eat is there, and then it’s gone. The car you drive is parked in your garage. But clothing—it is at home and with you everywhere you go. It is the outer skin you choose—a constant threshold between your private and public life. Aksel’s quote is offering me an unexpected answer. Clothing is not trivial—it is the last non-negotiable, portable physical frontier of the human experience.

The Sacred Value of Tactile Friction

Friction is anything in the physical world that pushes back against us—the weight of real stuff that demands time and effort to get from here to there. It is the bump in the road our AI car didn’t know how to respond to. Friction slows us down and demands that we take the wheel. Without friction, we come to expect that everything should happen effortlessly and instantly. Friction is the gap between wanting something and having it, and the physical effort required to bridge that gap reminds us that we have a body living in a tangible world where things like meaning, love, happiness, and success take time and effort.

Clothing cannot be streamed, downloaded, or automated away. It demands to be picked out, taken off the hanger, and put on our body, and then it stays with us in an uninterrupted, sixteen-hour-a-day tactile conversation that is there in every move we make. The weight of a heavy wool coat, the awareness of the limited range of motion that comes with a tailored jacket, the unexpected rush of wind against the leg from a wide-leg pant as we walk across a room. All of these things are solid somatic anchors against the floaty dissociation of a world that becomes more and more disembodied. Even if we order every garment online and never set foot in a store again, friction remains built into our relationship with clothing in a way a downloaded book, movie, or album could never.

The only frictionless part of clothing is ordering online (thanks, Apple Pay). After that, I sit back and often impatiently wait for it to arrive. The effortlessness part ends the second the UPS gal delivers the package to my porch. Then I have the same argument in my head that I always do about the horrors of packaging and why they sent this tiny dress in this ridiculously large box. Next I find a knife and violently wrestle with the plastic packaging, knowing that knives and I have a history of not getting on well, and that this could go terribly wrong. When I finally free the dress from its packaging prison, it’s time to see whether my fantasy of how it will look on me matches reality. I carefully pull the dress over my head so I don’t besmirch it with makeup, then shimmy it over my swimmer’s shoulders. I then look in the mirror to see if it fits my body and, perhaps, my unreasonable expectations. If it does, then I wash it, hang it up, and eventually put it on, take it off, wear it, and take it with me into my life, where it will start to accrue experiences and memories.

If the dress doesn’t live up to my, perhaps, unrealistic expectations, I start the whole thing over again in reverse: frantically hunting my kitchen drawers for the roll of packing tape I know I bought and berating my organizational skills. Then I drive to Mail Boxes Etc. and stand in line behind a grumpy guy trying to overnight a document. When he learns it costs $72.50, he will take his outrage out on the woman behind the counter as if he owns FedEx and is personally responsible for the pricing. Then I step up with my package and work to overcompensate for what she just endured. I learn she is going camping with her kids this weekend, and I will be handed a receipt with tracking information that I will undoubtedly lose. Everything I just described can be written off as annoyances, but it’s much more than that—they were the actual scaffolding of the experience.

In a world rushing to strip away every physical bump in the road, clothing adds a rich, indispensable texture that the e-world is constantly trying to take away. Holding onto that isn’t superficial; it’s how we stay human.

“Quietness, composedness, cool-headedness... ‘Coolness’ is a kind of physical and spiritual energy, a quality of personal presence.”— Robert Farris Thompson

Today’s unpacking is brought to you by the quality of Cool.

Before we go any further, I beg of you—in a thoroughly uncool, un-detached fashion—to pause right here before reading on. What does cool actually mean to you? Who comes to mind? What colors, cars, albums, or films register on your personal thermometer? Give yourself a minute to free-associate and write it down; it’s worth knowing, because you are worth knowing. You deserve to know your associations with this, because your internal map is far more interesting than anything I’m about to lay out.

Now that you’ve run through yours, here is what spilled out of my brain on my first pass: James Dean, Steve McQueen, Sidney Poitier, Kate Moss, Sade, Miles Davis, Joan Didion, Cary Grant, Jane Birkin, and Snoopy’s alter ego, Joe Cool.

To my eye, cool is a dispassionate affect, an indifference to the shiny and new, and a clarity of self. It’s the right vintage leather jacket, classic Levi’s 501s (the originals), the Oliver Peoples frames Cary Grant wore, Big Sur, California minus Esalen, and a 1970s Mercedes 280SE convertible. Cats are cool. Dogs are wonderful, devoted, and, to be honest, my pet of choice, but they are definitely not cool. If I had to pick a clothing brand on the cool spectrum, I’d say Acne Studios—which I readily admit I am not cool enough to pull off.

Even as I know who I think is cool, I wanted to know what the x factor for cool is, what it is and what it isn’t, and what it is mistaken to be and where it came from. My inspiration for trying to understand cool came from an interview with model, designer, and author Jason Jules, who wrote Black Ivy: A Revolt in Style (seriously, go listen to it). The interviewer, Avery Truffelman, called him cool, clearly intending it as high praise, but Jules cringed. “I have no idea what cool is,” he said, “so the idea for me of something being cool is quite a turn-off... I have a feeling that if something is cool, then it’s temporary.” He’s talking about hype-cycle cool. “Ooh, cool shoes.” “Wow, cool car.” The kind of cool that expires by next Friday. I get that definition exists even if it isn’t what cool is intended to be.

Jules went on to explain that calling someone cool, if you mean effortless and that the coolness came naturally, is like telling an elite athlete they’re just “naturally gifted.” It erases the blood, sweat, tears, and sacrifice it took to get to that level of mastery. Jules wanted it known that he puts real thought, time, and energy into his style. He rejected the compliment because, in his mind, “cool” was a quality that was perceived as something that exists without work. By that definition, he definitely isn’t cool. But he is fabulously dressed and incredibly stylish. His reaction to cool got under my skin and into my psyche, and it got me thinking.

In looking into cool, I found a list of public figures deemed the “Epitome of Cool.” Some made sense, but a few choice inclusions made my jaw drop. Tom Selleck: loved you on Magnum, P.I., but doing reverse mortgage commercials instantly strips you of your cool card. Sam Rockwell doing ads for Walmart? Absolutely not. Don Draper? Yes, cool. Jon Hamm? A handsome and talented man, but to my thermometer of taste, I can see his effort. And that’s the thing: cool doesn’t even mean likable, which is an important distinction in itself. Also, how on earth did Cillian Murphy miss the cut? His baseline emotional temperature sits naturally in the Arctic.

If I had to guess where the adjective cool originated, I would have probably guessed in a Haight-Ashbury coffeehouse in San Francisco in the late 50’s/early 60’s filled with beat poets snapping their fingers. I was wrong. Cool actually began as a spiritual way of being in West African cultures, known among the Yoruba as itutu—or “spiritual balance.” It described a person’s inner composure and self-possession, not what they were wearing.

Cool went from a spiritual idea to a kind of psychological armor for Black communities suffering systemic violence. In this iteration, cool was a conscious, sharp boundary—holding onto your center when reactive anger was the expected response. As Cornel West wrote, “Coolness is a virtue that came out of the Black struggle to keep your composure, to keep your dignity, to keep your sense of self in the midst of madness.”

The next iteration of cool came from Jazz musicians. Kerouac, Ginsberg, and the Beats lifted the cool poise and the unpredictable rhythms of jazz into the cadence of their poetry. Looking back at the Beats now, their cool feels like what we’d simply call performative. But the poise of Lester Young leaning into his tenor saxophone? That was, and always will be, the real thing. His cool is cool then, now, and always.

If you’ve been hanging around my writing for a while, you know I was going to drag Carl Jung into this party—even if I’m certain he never used the word “cool” to describe a person or a pair of boots or a jazzy beat. But Depth psychology gives us a brilliant lens for exploring the temperature of the day. In Jungian terms, temperature works as a perfect metaphor for psychic functions. Affect is hot; consciousness is cool.

For Jung, “hot” is the domain of raw drive, passion, rage, and what he calls complex-possession. Which is when you’re swept up in a complex, you are hot, reactive, and turbulent. “Cool” is the domain of reflection, discrimination, and conscious distance. Consciousness, Jung believed, requires a drop in emotional temperature so you can see straight. Jung’s concept of Introverted Feeling has a distinctly cool climate—it turns inward toward structured principles rather than performing emotional outward displays.

Jung was obsessed with medieval alchemy, not because he cared about turning lead into gold, but because he realized the alchemists were accidentally writing a guidebook to human transformation.

Alchemically, transformation demands both hot and cold. The fire—calcinatio—burns away our egoic illusions through emotional suffering and heat. But fire alone just turns everything to ash. For a new self to solidify, the psyche requires coagulatio—the cooling phase that freezes liquid insight into a stable structure.

Just as too much fire is a problem, so is too much cold, which can turn into emotional freezing and show up as a trauma response where we numb out completely. But in the right dose, a cool boundary can serve as essential psychological armor. Coolness, or healthy detachment, can help one with the impulse to people-please and stay in your own skin.

I think, work, and write through a psychoanalytic and Jungian lens. It’s how I view the world, people, and wardrobe choices—the whole premise behind The Material Unconscious. Still, I wondered what other schools of thought had to say on the matter. I ended up looking at a study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology that asked people to name the core qualities of “cool.” They landed on six traits: autonomous, adventurous, open, hedonistic, powerful, and extraverted. Autonomous? Sure. But extraverted? That one makes my internal thermometer—and my Jungian instinct—get hot (and not in the sexy way).

I think many people assume that to be an actor or performer you would have to be an extrovert, and they would be wrong. Jung defined extraversion as energy oriented toward the external object—meaning adapting to, reacting to, and seeking friction or validation from the outside world. Introversion is oriented inward toward one’s own center, and that can be true for those we see on center stage. Those in my category of cool don’t seem to be trying to get our attention. I believe that we can’t take our eyes off of them because they are so strongly rooted in themselves. What those researchers mislabeled as extraversion is really just introverted self-possession.

Take Caleb Warren’s research on facial expression. He ran studies testing whether cool actually requires an expressionless face. When shown icons like Michael Jordan or James Dean, subjects consistently rated them as cooler when they were smiling than when they looked impassive. Turns out, the frozen mask is really just a fashion industry reflex, not a real driver of charisma. Kanye West, for instance, famously refuses to smile in photos because he’s convinced it makes him look cooler. A flat affect isn’t depth; it’s just a surface posture.

Jules turned down the compliment of “cool” because the word erased all the work he put into his style. I’d turn it down too because I’m not cool. My internal thermostat is 72 degrees and partly cloudy.

As a college student, I dreamed of writing, and I loved words, but I also loved psychology. In my fantasies, I wanted to be the Southern California version of Dorothy Parker, but at the time, that felt like wishing for a pony or a beach house in Malibu; for the record, I did get the pony. Being a writer didn’t feel accessible or real, even as I kept filling those black-and-white composition notebook pages and reading obsessively—I never dared to say out loud that this was what I wanted. It was in this liminal space—or as my parents described it, the 'what the hell are you going to do with your life' stage—that I became obsessed with text in places other than books. Not even full paragraphs, but captions: a few words, occasionally a sentence.

In loving literature, I had already had the experience over and over of being transported into another world by a book, but never by just three words or a sentence.

I. The Sweater with a Job: Projection and the Ego-Ideal

It started, I think, in the 1990s with a J.Crew catalog. Or maybe Banana Republic. Before then, they had seemed like catalogs for East Coast college life filled with stripes of cotton and sturdy slabs of wool—rugby shirts, khaki shorts, and anonymous, smiling faces with Colgate smiles that always seemed to be laughing at a joke that we weren’t in on. Then one day a new catalog arrived that changed everything. In this version of the catalog, the models seemed to be replaced by “real people.” They were still effortlessly stylish and model-attractive, but beside each garment was their name and a profession.

In the updated version of the catalog, a cream cable-knit was no longer just clothing; it was Janet the Museum Curator’s sweater. Or Anna the Architect’s cardigan, and I wanted to be like Anna—young, beautiful, with a successful career and her own apartment in the same building Bob Newhart lived in on his show overlooking the Gold Coast(this was all a fantasy I constructed for her). I had never wanted what the nameless models in a Nantucket photo shoot had worn; none of those images had elicited any Walter Mitty-like dreams in me.

In Jungian terms, adding names and the idea that these models were real people with real jobs turned ordinary objects into symbols. A sign points to something known, i.e., a sweater is wool designed to keep you warm. A symbol points to something that words can’t capture, even though, for me, it was the words that changed the symbol. Janet, the Museum Curator, wasn’t just a model; she was a container for my projection. Sitting in my bedroom in my parents’ house with a completely unformed future, I was doing what psychoanalysis calls projecting the ego-ideal: attaching my own unlived potential onto someone else’s sweater.

In wanting Janet’s cardigan, even though I didn’t need another sweater, I was trying on an archetype of professionalism and success, imagining what it would be like to wear the confident posture of a young woman responsible for upcoming exhibitions at the Field Museum and who had encyclopedia-like knowledge of dinosaurs (the catalog didn’t mention any of those details; I filled in the blanks). In my post-adolescent fugue of what came next for me, those captions were like a menu of lives I might live that chats with my college counselor never offered.

II. Framing the Smog: Anima Mundi on the Highway

The second lesson in the power of words came to me thanks to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. MOCA ran a billboard campaign across L.A. Instead of displaying a painting or a photo of an upcoming exhibition, which would seem the obvious choice for trying to get people to your museum, the billboards featured museum plaques that contained only the words describing the exact physical space where the billboard stood.

The billboards described the sun-baked concrete, the crawl of traffic on the 405 freeway, and the haze of smog at the location where they stood. These billboards framed the location as if it were art that Larry Gagosian might sell in his gallery. MOCA’s intent for this campaign was to democratize art—to show that beauty and meaning weren’t reserved for elite institutions but that it was everywhere if you stopped to look.

I was obsessed with these signs and sought them like easter eggs throughout SoCal. Even though I didn’t have the psychological language to explain why they hit so hard on some level, I got that these billboards were a kind of revolution in perspective: a reminder that meaning isn’t quarantined inside sterile museums, but alive right on the streets of L.A. James Hillman, one of my intellectual heroes, talked about Anima Mundi—the soul of the world—and how modern life tends to lock soul strictly inside the human head and treat our physical surroundings as dead matter: just concrete, asphalt, and exhaust. Fine art is usually housed in quiet museums, with admission fees and security guards telling you not to get too close. Those billboards, which some saw as uninteresting text, flipped the script by hanging the gallery frame right over the overpass between the Santa Monica Freeway and 110. Those signs didn’t just invite us to visit a museum; they invited us to see that the museum was already everywhere, stretching across the entire city.

III. The Joke We’re Both In On: The Protective Frame

My third micro-narrative arrived thanks to Barneys New York, in the form of Jean-Philippe Delhomme’s illustrations.

Fancy-pants retail on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills thrives on consciously creating an environment of exclusivity and intimidation; see Pretty Woman if you need a reminder. The general vibe of those stores is designed to make the uninitiated feel small, triggering what psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut recognized as the anxiety of unworthiness. Enter Jean-Philippe Delhomme’s illustrations for Barneys. His naive, warm artwork paired with single-line captions took direct aim at the absurdities and defense mechanisms of the fashion elite. That line of text became a kind of psychological holding environment, creating a humorous protective frame around those of us who felt we didn’t belong. Through these ads, Barneys’s NY invited you in, and you were no longer the outsider unwelcome at an exclusive club. By laughing at what the fashion world took so seriously, the campaign broke down the walls of elitism, turning snotty salespeople into part of the joke—even if the store was still full of them.

IV. Giving Speech to the Image

What made these three campaigns so exciting for me, and what stays with me all these years later, is that explicit text was a training-wheels program for my future career in seeing text in absolutely everything, even when no words are there.

Every piece of clothing hanging in our closet, every person we see passing on the street, and every corner of a road has multiple narratives, with or without captions. A jacket with frayed hems tells a story of years lived—or if it is brand new, that fraying is a story of wanting to buy history and an experience we haven’t lived.

The printed text in these three ah-ha moments for me didn’t invent the story. It made explicit what was previously mute. These images, for me, awoke the awareness that the text of an image, even when there are no words, is made of stories waiting for an observer to read them.

V. The Psychological Turn

When I was lying on my Laura Ashley-covered twin bed and flipping through catalogs, or staring up at freeway billboards in rush-hour traffic, I was lit up by Depth psychology’s foundational question: What is the story behind this?

One of the things I love about Depth psychology is its refusal to accept the surface as the whole truth. When looking at a psychological symptom —much like Janet’s J.Crew cable-knit sweater or a sign above a congested freeway interchange —it is never just what it appears to be; there is always a story underneath, even if it’s not conscious.

In my work as a Depth therapist, when a client brings in symptoms, defenses, or a crisis, I am never just looking at the surface. I listen and look for the story underneath: What is here that isn’t being named? Whether reacting to a catalog, an ad, or a client’s presenting issue, the drive is always the same—to see what lies below the surface.

VI. Reading the Room

When I am standing in my closet and I see that Zara plaid with 2015 shoulder pads. My first impulse is to ask what the hell I was thinking or why I haven’t donated it; I’ll ask who I was trying to be when I bought it. Who did I think I’d become for the low-low price of $69.99? Once I answer that, I will ask the more practical questions about whether I will keep it in my closet.

Sometimes, looking for the subtext works as a psyche-soothing tool. How would MOCA describe the moment when I’m stuck in my car waiting for shoppers to meander across the parking lot, pushing carts stacked high with paper towels, mums, and rotisserie chickens? To transform impatience, I mentally slap on a tiny white museum plaque over the windshield and turn the chaos into art.

Or when I am in a bougie boutique intentionally engineered to make me feel like I’m “not enough”—hoping I’ll buy something to cure that feeling—or sitting in a doctor’s office waiting room plastered with murals of friendly squirrels and playful monkeys that act as a kind of visual Valium, the caption is always there even when it isn’t visible. Every object and location has a subtext, if we just take the time to look for it.

Sézane pulled a total pirouette of their brand recently, and the internet is in a full-on meltdown over it. Instead of dissecting the new clothes, I want to pull back the Parisian red velvet curtains on ideas on the why of this shift and why it might feel so upsetting to some, all from a Jungian lens. When a brand abruptly swaps its core mythos, it triggers something deep in our collective psyche—and that’s precisely where depth psychology comes in.

The Initial Assessment: Fantasy as Merchandise

I am going to talk about the brand as if it were a person, not a metaphor, because frankly I believe that is what brands do. If we sat in on a Sézane meeting, or any brand, I’d bet they’re doing exactly what I’m doing here: building a storyline for a main character and what their customer’s hopes and dreams are. Brands know they aren’t selling you a blouse; they are selling you a fiction to fall in love with, a version of yourself you might become if you buy the merchandise.

When I am working with a client, I want to know something about her history, her childhood, and her birth before we dive into what is going on in the present. In Sézane’s case, that means taking us to Paris, where “she” was born. And though I know the business was literally born in Paris, France, I believe the Paris Sézane was born in as a brand is the kind of Parisian fantasy that exists only in the mind of the non-French, just as there is an America that exists only for those who have been here. I like to call it the Amélie Syndrome after the 2001 film: Amélie, or, if you prefer a more timely reference, the Emily in Paris syndrome, depending on your generation.

This is the Paris where French girls don’t get fat, and everyone is impossibly chic, and the taps run with rosé, and one doesn’t walk down the street without a baguette tucked snugly under one’s arm. This Paris is idealized and romantic with an ever-present soundtrack of “La Vie en Rose”, not the Paris that has frustrations, bureaucracy, and bus driver strikes. It is this idealized Paris, the Amélie/Emily Paris, that I saw in the old iteration of Sézane. Each time I went to their website and saw their eyelet and delicate blouses, I would think of the Amélie archetype: I imagined the Sézane girl of old biking to the market, collar slightly undone, a petite ruffle peeking out from a fuzzy baby blue cardigan sweater that reads as casual and carefree—no makeup except maybe one cherry lipstick she bought for a wedding a few years ago that she attended in the south of France that occasionally doubles as blush on special occasions and is sometimes haphazardly dotted on her lips before she covers them with the French equivalent of ChapStick. No mascara, no eyeliner, and nothing that reads as effort.

To my mind, that was the old version of Sézane, the one that unconsciously signaled a romantic Parisian life and effortlessness for the cost of a $160 cardigan. I haven’t done a deep dive into how many other countries are in love with “effortless,” but we Americans love love love the fantasy of chic effortlessness. I believe that the American version of effortless is a compensation for a country that works and works and works, with only two-week vacations and no months of August off. We worship at the altar of those who wake up at 5 a.m., who go to the gym, gulp down a smoothie to get to the next thing to cross off our to-do list. And so we crave the Parisian fantasy of long lunches, longer vacations, and Saturdays spent sauntering down the Seine.

Sézane, like every other brand, is selling a lifestyle, a fantasy, a psychological POV. They know it, and sometimes we know it, and sometimes we get hoodwinked by the fantasy, and so we buy the sweater, buy the jacket, and are disappointed when we don’t get the life that we imagine came with it.

Last month, Sézane said Au Revoir to the French girl fantasy. Gone was the delicate femininity of the “French girl,” and in its place, in the form of Sézane, are high collars and structured shoulders. In my fantasy, the updated Sézane is Amélie after she’s met the guy, gotten married, and moved out of her tiny apartment with the crooked floorboards, the weird neighbors, and the charming markets, and into a chic and very adult apartment on the other side of town with easy access to a Carrefour. Amélie, aka Sezane #2, has a husband, kids, and a job designing restaurant aesthetics, and she contributes regularly to the French equivalent of a 401(k). No more bikes, except on holidays or the trikes she buys for her kids. She takes the metro to work, maybe even drives an SUV that has French Cheerios and Goldfish ground into its floorboards. She’s not a dreamer anymore. She’s a liver, someone who lives instead of imagining, trading possibility for reality.

A large part of the internet had a conniption fit about the birth of Sézane #2. One commenter described the new Sézane as “luxury Zara with higher prices.” Others swore off the brand entirely. The scope and scale of the outrage over a change in the aesthetic suggest there may be more to this than sadness over a beloved brand. In this case, or any case, when outrage is BIG, you have to wonder whether it is only about the clothing and consider what the clothes were being asked to do and what their customers had associated with them. I understand and empathize, as I had my own hissy fit back when Abercrombie and Fitch went from an upscale retailer to whatever it became ( I don’t know because the smell of the cologne stopped me from ever entering).

Clinician Countertransference: My Own Paris

In analytic therapeutic work, it matters for the clinician to know their own countertransference, the beliefs and history that could color how they see a client. So before I go further, let me put mine on la table.

My first fantasy version of Paris came through Audrey Hepburn in the film Funny Face, in black capri pants, a Sartre-loving beatnik style, rejecting fashion even as the editor of Vogue tries to push her into “Think Pink.” After that, I found the film Sabrina: a young girl with a broken heart all because the cad didn’t know she existed. Sabrina left Long Island, New York, and went to Paris to attend culinary school. She learned to crack some eggs into a fabulous omelet before she returned home with real skills and real confidence, some fabulous clothes, and, if I remember right, a French poodle, but she remained the girl, still wanting Mr. Unavailable.

After Audrey Hepburn introduced me to Paris, I went looking for anything that supported the French fiction I found in those films. I found a book called French Chic: How to Dress as a French Woman by Susan Summers and read it like it was scripture, figuring out which version of French I was going to live out in my home near the California coast. The version I chose was most definitely not the ingenue in dainty florals, sweet dresses with ruffles, ballet flats, and soft cardigans tied around their waists. The archetype I chose was a woman in what looked like a men’s-wear simple round-neck sweater over a black leather skirt, worn with high heels that would make walking the cobblestone streets of Rue Cler impossible. I craved that contradiction of masculine meets femininity, which read to me as sexier and more confident than the sweetness or softness of the “French girl”. My longed-for Paris was always closer to Carine Roitfeld than to Amélie. The red lip I wanted was a strong red, not a smudge but a statement that would leave a mark, and the eye was a heavy, definite, and deliberately kohl-lined look with piles and piles of smoky YSL mascara for extra Ooh-la-la.

I was never a Sézane #1 customer. Sometimes I visited their website, hoping to find something that scratched my francophile itch. It was usually in the summer, when I needed a vacation. I’d scan their website for something, anything that I wanted. I put one of their eyelet blouses in my cart, unconsciously imagining that maybe I could be that kind of girl who was spending the summer in the South of France and not a middle-aged woman who was on a coffee break.

Maturity Meets the Cart

When I heard the backlash over the new Sézane, I immediately went to their new site, and as soon as I got there, I felt something I had never felt at Sézane #1 before: maturity. These clothes were for women walking to work, not biking freely through the fourth arrondissement. I saw a lot of things I liked, added them to my cart, asked to be notified when items were back in stock, and made an actual purchase. And I will tell you, as soon as I saw the gorgeous coats that are made for city life, I found myself wishing I lived in NYC or Chicago so I could buy one. Nothing about these coats made me think of Paris. Instead, I found myself in a big-city USA fantasy, where something so architecturally inspired would make sense. Did I buy one anyway? You bet your bagel, I did. The dream doesn’t need to be true to inspire a purchase, whether it is the dream of NYC or the dream of Paris.

As I looked at the differences between Sézane #1 and Sézane #2, I wanted to know even more about its parent. The brand’s founder, Morgane Sézalort, is a highly successful 41-year-old businesswoman and mother who started her business at 18 by shopping flea markets in Paris and photographing herself with her finds; everything she bought sold out—that education and experience led to a billion-dollar business. Today, she describes her 20 years running the brand as “going to school.” “I’m now 41, and since turning 40, I have seen a real shift in myself. Everything has become clearer, and now I’m ready to put this new perspective into Sézane that feels more intentional and a reflection of me growing up.” This information about Morgane only strengthens my sense of the psychological changes in Sézane one and two.

From Maiden to Queen

I can see how it would be psychologically stunting and inauthentic for a 41-year-old woman to keep designing based on the eye of her 18-year-old self. I mean, can you imagine continuing to dress, think, or work in the same way you did at 18? However, the people who loved that original version, whether they’re 18 or just love the aesthetic of the French girl, were never going to love seeing the brand grow up, even though it is completely understandable for it to do so.

In Jungian terms, the desire to stay girl is the archetype of the Puella Aeterna—the eternal girl, the female Peter Pan. She isn't a child in years, but psychologically she stays on the sidelines, hovering over life rather than wading into it. Puellas are always on the edge of moving into life, just not yet. She is connected to the myth of Persephone, a girl gathering flowers in a meadow, still fully her mother’s daughter, before anything has claimed her. I see, or project, the old Sézane, if she were a person, as this kind of Persephone.

Something has to happen to the Puella for her to change, just like the ordeal that transformed Persephone on her unexpected trip to the underworld that took her from maiden to Queen. Even though she likely would have stayed happily in the meadow, it was through this mishap that she became the brand manager, aka Queen, for Hades.

Building a billion-dollar empire starting at age 18, raising three kids, navigating a private equity acquisition—that's a lot of life. An ordeal or two is guaranteed. And those ordeals likely changed not just her but also the archetype of her brand, going from maiden to Queen.

The bigger pattern: enantiodromia

There's a Jungian term for what's happening at Sézane: enantiodromia. Put simply, when a cultural trend runs as far as it possibly can in one direction, its exact opposite inevitably rushes in to balance it. The "maiden” or the “French girl” trend’s opposite is going to show up, and in this case it is a Sézane #2 of maturity and structure.

I believe that enantiodromia is not just happening at Sézane, but I expect clothes overall to get more serious, sober, and structured as a compensation for the soft-girl aesthetic, in silhouettes that suggest tailoring and structure, driven by a sudden cultural craving for containment instead of mere 'vibes'—we want armor instead of delicacy, safety instead of whimsy. And a generation of women who came up in the soft-girl aesthetic era are aging into real adult life, families, companies, authority, and discovering that the old trends no longer fit the shape of their lives. Sézane isn’t causing any of this, but if you're looking for this cultural and stylistic change, it is right there on Sézane.com.

My pull toward structure, minimalism, and anti-frou-frou aesthetics is why I loved Carine Roitfeld’s style and never considered the ingenue for inspiration, which is exactly the bias I mentioned before I began my analysis. People who dislike Sézane #2 might be reacting to all the things I love about it: the new Sézane reads closer to Rowe or Toteme than to the old florals, and at a much more purse-friendly price. Of course, believing a pumpkin colored coat offers armor, boundaries, or a fixed identity is just as much of a fantasy as the 'French girl' ever was. And, speaking of fantasies, Morgane, Sézane #1, Sézane #2, should you want to talk about this, I have an opening on Wednesday at 4.

I spent this past weekend doing very little besides writing. I just kept writing, deleting, and writing and then deleting whole paragraphs and starting over, trying to get the thing to hold still long enough for it to have a shape. There were necessary ball-throwing breaks for my Doodle. However, I didn't drink my coffee. It sits here by my side, sad and cold and mostly unconsumed, because I wanted to unpack why we use the word taste to explain what we like and the science, psychology, and philosophy of why we do that. It was going to be called The Mouth in Your Closet: The Truth About Taste. Now, at 3:40 p.m. on Sunday, it is called done; I am calling time of death on an article that the more I worked on it, the worse it got. I managed to turn a Substack article into something that read like part of a PhD dissertation, and the more I tried to make my ideas clear, the more philosophers, psychologists, and evolutionary theories snuck in until it was unsalvageable unless I considered going back to get a doctorate.

But I didn’t do all that work to get nothing out of it. I am going to give you the bullet points of the essay that turned into 8000 words and then keep moving on.

1. Baltasar Gracián, a Spanish Jesuit, was the first to coin the phrase “ buen gusto,” which means good taste. And in his writing, he connected moral and aesthetic choices the way a tongue sorts flavors.

2. Philosophers in France took up the phrase and translated it into “le gout” when talking about clothing and style at the same time that the court of Versailles began to use clothes as signals of status

3. The English started using “good taste” when David Hume and Immanuel Kant wrote about it and embraced the metaphor of taste for aesthetics because they believed our responses to beauty, style, and food are immediate and reflexive.

4. Tongues have 10,000 taste buds

5. The reason we use taste to describe our aesthetic choice is that the mouth’s reaction to food is reflexive and non-cognitive

6. Our instant rejection of bitter food is evolutionary, not personal

7. Plato, the guy who everyone credits with Western aesthetics, never once linked beauty to taste,

Okay, now that we got that out of the way, I want to share the why of why I spent two days on the topic. What motivated my research is that Taste is all over my fashion feed. Is your taste good or bad, how do you get it, and who has it? I felt bad because the other senses never get any attention when it comes to aesthetics, and I didn’t understand why we were all so hung up on describing our style with something that happens with the mouth. Something about how the word is used in the fashion world felt like a verdict, and I wanted to know why. Yes, it is a word with double meanings, but part of me knew that wasn’t always the case, and I wanted to know where that came from.

After my deep dive, I understand much better why taste became the primary sense: it is non-cognitive and reflexive, and with exposure to new things, one's taste can change over time. How? The same way you would, just as you would with a kid or a reluctant adult: you want to encourage many tries before you write off coffee, dark chocolate, or kale forever.

As I was wrestling with Kant and Hume and assorted other philosophers whose names don’t need space here, I started to see why I was so interested: because taste, like those systems, promises you’ll be eventually finished figuring yourself out. What I don’t like about taste is what I don’t like about over-identifying with the enneagram or astrology or typology or anything that locks you in and says, “You are this, and only this,” and initially taste leaned that way for me. I’m a therapist, so I hear this kind of certainty about identity all the time. This is just who I am; I will always be this way; I’ll never change this. I see this in my work all the time: someone hands me a label, a type, a diagnosis, and treats it like a life sentence. As if you could figure out your taste at one point in your life and then you have it done, complete and fixed. That doesn’t fit with my personal or professional psychology. I don’t believe it when clients tell me, “this is who I am, and change isn’t possible.” Change is always possible.

I remember, in picture-perfect detail the moment a friend told me she was upset with herself because she hadn’t found her one true hairstyle and color, and that she should have it all figured out by now and not keep changing things. Since this was before I met Botox, I'm confident my face gave her a horrified expression. I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and yell so loud she couldn’t brush off the guidance and say” The time to make final decisions about who you are and what you like is never.” I didn’t say it, and knowing my audience, it wouldn’t make any difference if I did. And, for the record, she was 28 at the time. I still think about her, all these years later, and I wonder if her haircut and color are exactly as they were in 1996. And if they aren’t, does she see herself as a failure for continuing to evolve?

And I guess that's why I rarely read articles about taste: I don’t want people telling me what are the absolutes of good or bad style; I want to keep deciding for myself. I don’t like the idea of learning any system or rules about the ten things never to wear after 40 or fashion mistakes you could make this fall. No, thank you.

So what I fear about the limitation in taste is that, without new experiences, without doing or trying something you never would have before, we can become the equivalent of those people whose whole personality is what they won’t eat. I know a man well into his 40s, a real human, not a composite I am making up to make a point, who has never ever ever eaten a fruit or vegetable, never. Look, I try not to be judgmental, but even I have limits. I pushed back when he told me this and asked if his mother had ever encouraged him to try a carrot or a piece of banana, and he told me she hadn’t. I felt sad for him and wondered where else he had these hard-and-fast rules. I will tell you that every time I see him, he is wearing heavy slacks and a white shirt, and he started this long before uniform dressing became the cool thing that the tech bros did. The connection is too big not to notice. I think about what would happen if he tried a carrot at 25, and maybe a khaki pant. Would it be freedom or would it be a threat to the only system he’s ever trusted?

One of the stories my mother used to tell about me as a toddler that I loved was around beets. I sat in my high chair, and my mother introduced me to this new food. I accepted the bright red fruit happily, maybe thinking it was whatever that purple sweet thing she had given me before, maybe a plum. But as the flavor of the beet hit my mouth, my mother says that a big smile overtook my face and that I began to smile even more and chew at the same time, and then when the beets were the right consistency, I then sprayed them out of my mouth like a fountain at the Bellagio. I got beet juice on the floor, the walls, the countertops, and on her. There are a lot of things I like about that story, but what I want to tell you is that at some point I went from beet hater to beet lover; now, if I see beets on the menu, I am definitely ordering them. I share this to remind us not to decide so firmly and cling so tightly, and maybe instead of saying “I haven’t liked beets in the past, but I am willing to try beets again.” I tried the trick on myself with beer. I did that when I moved to a town that is famous for beer. I hadn’t had a beer since I was in my 20’s, I had told myself I didnt like beer, but I decided to see if my taste buds had been updated and so I had a beer—-while it wasn’t horrible I haven’t had another one since, but should the occasion arise I am not going to respond with “no, I dont like beer.”

I think this mindset of learning what you love, what your style is, what kind of taste you have can be a prison instead of a paradise of self-knowledge. Every day you, me, all of us are changing in so many ways that we don’t even recognize, and so to make categorical decisions (damn Kant was part of the essay that died) about I like this, and I don’t like that it isn’t necessarily about taste but maybe more about certainty. We allow ourselves exposure to all kinds of styles, colors, foods, and hairstyles, and we don't let our taste get stagnant.

As I wrote the essay you will never read, I came to see all the ways I lock myself into the safety of neutrals, shapes, and silhouettes that I know work on me. I love how neutrals are non-challenging to my sartorial taste buds, like non-challenging foods: mashed potatoes, rice, and cereal. Sure, they are good, but so is espresso, a kale salad, and bitter dark chocolate. My fashion taste buds have very little in that bitter or challenging section. I don’t know what I am going to do about it today; I can imagine being willing to try things I would have previously said are “not me”. I am going to let myself see what orange and pink look like on me, since they are one of my favorite color combinations. I will not let what feels reflexive be my style; that doesn’t mean I am going to throw out my mashed potatoes-and-rice clothes, but taste only evolves when you're willing to try things. What’s your beet? The things you decided you hated once, and now it is a fixed part of your personality?

The science says a child needs to try something between eight and fifteen times, and sometimes up to 20 or 30 times, and that parents often give up on food exposure after four times. As an adult, it can take up to 8 exposures before it becomes something we like. Okay, if you, I, and everyone on fashion Substack is talking about developing your taste, you need multiple exposures before you say you don’t like corduroy. I use that example because I had corduroy pants in 8th grade and I remember hating how they felt and the noise they made. (Um, but lady, I am not talking to you, but to me; you aren’t in the 8th grade anymore. Maybe you won’t like it, but might it be a fun psychological and taste-expanding experience to at least try them—I don’t have to buy them, just try them to see how I might expand my taste buds). I still haven’t bought the corduroy pants. Baby steps.

I do have some sad news: as we age, we lose many of our taste buds; things don't taste the same. I am very unhappy about this, but there is nothing I can do. Somewhere in my mouth right now, a taste bud that used to recoil at Swiss chard is quietly dying, and I will never know which one or when. But I refuse to let my clothing taste buds die by staying safe and predictable, certain that I already know my opinion about everything. I imagine that if we let ourselves be open to trying clothes, art, books, or music we are sure we won’t like, we might end up finding something akin to dark chocolate that we end up liking.

I ended up giving taste advice even though I am against taste advice; I just hope it isn’t taste advice that feels like those rule-based guides that say “this is good taste” and “this is bad taste.” Let me know in the comments if you are getting what I am putting down, or if this essay is also a sign I need sleep, a coffee, a shower, and a meal.—I am good either way.

My taste isn’t finished. And neither is yours.

Subscribe now

Buy me a cup of coffee

There’s no archaeological record of the two guys you are about to meet, no cave paintings, no field notes. But that doesn’t make it untrue, and the truth of it can show up in what we buy and wear and drive.

Somewhere, a long time before Bleecker Street, before brand names, before money was a thing, something like this happened. Meet Gary. Gary was a lousy hunter. He couldn’t catch a chicken if it sat in his lap. Then there was Hank: the hunter everyone in the village loved because he brought home enough meat to feed the tribe for a week. Gary wanted to be like Hank, but no matter how many e-courses in “10 Steps to Be the Biggest and Baddest Hunter in the Tribe” he took, he always came home empty-handed. Gary wanted so much to be like Hank, and when all of his attempts at greatness failed, he came up with a plan to raise his social status and, hopefully, woo potential mates.

What Gary noticed was that Hank turned the teeth, tusks, and hides of the creatures he caught into jewelry, both as a spiritual act of reverence for the animal, to take on their power in future hunts, and to continually signal his prowess to the group as a great catch. Lacking a street vendor on Bleecker Street that sold warrior wear, Gary became humanity’s very first manufacturer of dupes. Using shells, rocks, and carved branches, he fashioned accessories that mimicked the spoils of a grand hunt. To the people in his community who didn’t know any better, the well-done faux tusk dupes signaled dominance, and they were impressed. But Gary knew he was a subpar hunter, and so did Hank. When Gary felt that admiration from others and heard those admiring Cro-Magnon coos from his cohort, he didn’t feel powerful. In fact, any admiration he got made him feel worse. He felt like a fraud, getting zero sense of self from his power-dressing move. The greater the outfit of achievement Gary wore, the worse he felt.

Fast-forward thousands of years and nothing much has changed, just the accessories. We may have heard about the weight of carrying a bag bought off Bleecker Street, knowing that $25 “Hermès” is a fake. Wearing it, even if people look on with admiration because they lack the eye to spot the obvious counterfeit, we know, and that knowledge directly impacts how we feel about ourselves. Carrying a fake, or copying someone else’s style to signal belonging somewhere we secretly doubt we do, splits us in two: the who we look like and the who we feel like. Psychology has a name for the two halves: the False Self, the part of us that adapts, reads the room, and feigns whatever is necessary to try and feel safe, and the True Self, the part that just registers what’s actually going on underneath the performance. Having said that, neither one of these selves is a reliable narrator. The True Self isn’t automatically right just because it feels certain that we are a no-goodnik who could never learn to hunt: that certainty can be an old wound talking, not a fact. The False Self isn’t automatically lying either: the confidence we’re putting on before we’ve fully grown into it isn’t always a con; sometimes it’s just trying on a new way of being, a legit version of fake it till you make it. The split creates a gap we can feel: how we see ourselves versus how we’re perceived. The bigger the discrepancy, the worse it feels. When Gary put on his counterfeit tusks, his True Self said, “this isn’t you,” and his False Self answered, “maybe not, but maybe it will get me the prestige and partner I seek.”

We don’t need a fake designer bag to do what Gary did. It is possible to do the same thing with a closet full of completely real, fully authenticated designer pieces that The RealReal would be happy to sell for us. If we buy something real, not because we actually love it, but as armor of belonging, the genuineness of the handbag doesn’t protect us from feeling like a fraud. That is, if the bag’s real, but the relationship to it isn’t, meaning we’re using it to claim something about ourselves we don’t actually believe. In that case, we can hold the legitimate designer original and still feel like we’re wearing Gary’s carved wooden wanna-be tusk, a token of power standing in for the part of us that doesn’t feel aligned with it. Even a quiet luxury item, something like a Loro Piana baseball cap that’s label-less, can be an attempt to say “I know the code, if you know, you know,” while everyone else who knows the code can see us as members of the tribe, even while we feel like big old fakey fakers underneath.

I’ve never consciously bought one of the current-day versions of Gary’s counterfeits, but what I have done is use designer goods to signal something, to elevate an outfit or my self-concept and signal “I belong here.” The Gucci loafers and Hermès belt that now hang in my closet like relics used to provide exactly that: hey, maybe the rest of this outfit is boring, and I look basic, but I have these accoutrements to prove that my outfit of black pants and a black silk blouse isn’t as boring as it appears and I absolutely belong here. The symbols said, “See, I am stylish,” even when there wasn’t a lot of style in my outfit. I would often pull out these designer goods, legitimate and authentic brands I bought and paid for, when I was going into rooms where I felt less than, and I would even sometimes think of them as a metaphorical keycard that got me into the Delta lounge of life.

Looking at my own use of stuff to signal belonging, I feel some of the shame Gary likely felt when someone saw that his boar teeth were actually made of stone, the same shame felt by centuries of others who’ve tried to use some sartorial substitute to belong. I don’t understand where my “I don’t belong here” comes from, but maybe I do. My father had a sense of inferiority for not having a college degree, even though he was smarter than many people I know who have PhDs. That insecurity was in him, and it seemed, to this therapist’s and daughter’s eye, to be compensated for with, “See, I wear Bruno Magli and Ferragamo shoes and Armani suits and drive a Mercedes.” These were real, legitimate items, but like Gary, I’m not sure they gave him the real sense of belonging he was hoping for. I know how disappointing it can be for those who achieve those material milestones and still feel like they’re not part of the club.

Imposter syndrome shows up almost anywhere status and belonging are in question: it’s what happens when we wear something part of us doesn’t believe is really ours yet, and that can be a job or a relationship, not just clothes. Clothes don’t fix the feeling of not belonging. Dress like a wolf while we still feel like a sheep, and the costume won’t transform us. Paradoxically, it can add to the self-perception that we don’t belong. Every compliment reminds us how far we’ve wandered from the flock. And it doesn’t take a costume to feel like an imposter. Imposter syndrome can show up in jeans and a T-shirt, without a single logo, just because some part of us isn’t convinced we belong in the room, the job, or wherever else we’ve decided we don’t deserve to be.

To understand why Gary’s faux tusks, a counterfeit Hermès bag, and even a real designer suit can all deflate us the same way, let me bring in psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut and his idea of Self Psychology. Kohut believed we rely on things outside ourselves, what he called Self Objects. We use Self Objects to do work our own psyche can’t manage on its own. When we get dressed, we’re often trying to meet two of these selfobject needs at once: twinship, the craving to look around a room and feel like we belong there, and the ego ideal, the pull toward becoming the person we’re aiming to be.

We can see how Gary tried to twin himself with Hank, and we can also see that his accessory choices are about wanting so much to be a mighty hunter, and to be appreciated the way Hank was. Gary also wanted a mate, and he believed that what was going to get him the cave women of his dreams was a metaphorical Mr. T-like medallion. If Gary had gone to therapy with Kohut, which would have required some serious time travel, Kohut would’ve diagnosed an inauthentic aesthetic, which led to self-fragmentation. “Gary,” Kohut would say, “when the group admires your curated style, but you know deep down you’re playing dress-up, the compliment can’t actually reach you. It just bounces off the costume, and the costume, unlike you, doesn’t need it to land.” Gary, understandably not having a lot of psychological insight, might have looked at Kohut and grunted confusedly. Let me make this simpler for Gary: The thing you are trying to wear to feel better is making you feel worse. Gary would have nodded affirmatively at Kohut’s interpretation.

Gary’s dynamic, my dad’s, mine, and probably plenty of others besides, is basically what “dupe culture” and “quiet luxury” are built on now. The message behind these trends isn’t just about accessibility, which would be great if it were. When it’s costumes, cars, watches, etc. worn to achieve status we haven’t actually earned, that’s where things start to go cattywampus. Retailers, influencers, marketers, and social media tell us in a myriad of ways that we can hack our way into belonging, that if we just wear the right uniform we can transform through consumption. But if what we really want from the dupe is status, not just style, we’re likely to end up feeling worse and not better. The bigger the gap between what we actually believe about ourselves and what our clothes are broadcasting, the worse the feeling gets. Thinking we only got welcomed into the room, or the relationship, by pulling off some trick with luxury or wardrobe leaves us feeling more alone inside than we did before.

I don’t know exactly why I have stopped wearing my designer-labeled stuff the way I used to. Is it psychological growth that made it all seem terribly unappealing, or is it that logos have just generally lost their luster? Maybe a little of both. Or maybe it was watching too much of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City that made labels read as ick. My once-beloved Louis Vuitton and Gucci goods now seem ego-dystonic (meaning something that is “not me”), so they sit in my closet like artifacts of another version of me and another time.

And for Hank, he never needed the tusks to feel like a hunter. He just was one. And maybe if Gary wanted hunting skills, he should have spent his time learning from Hank instead of trying to look like him. If he wanted a relationship, maybe he could have worked on discovering other parts of himself that made him a good mate. I’ll give Gary a break: there was no therapy in his day.

I believe that before we buy something, or put it on, it’s worth checking in on the why of it. Would I still want this if nobody else ever saw me in it? And when I put it on, does it make me feel more myself, or am I trying to signal to someone something I don’t yet believe about me?

A prehistoric forest and a shopping mall aren’t as far apart as they seem; people do what people do. We want to belong, feel secure, matter to someone, and be loved. All of that shows up in the clothes we wear, the cars we drive, and the bone necklaces or handbags we carry.

Buy me a cup of coffee

I live in a town without a lot of chain women’s wear stores where I can walk in with a specific goal and likely find the thing I’m looking for. As an ex-Angeleno, I’m used to having multiple malls where almost anything I could dream up might be just a horrific freeway drive away. There is the Topanga Mall (lunch at Neiman’s, solely for the popovers with strawberry jam and chicken broth) or the sprawl of South Coast Plaza, a mall so big I had to photograph where I parked, because the thought of finding my way back felt like something out of the Odyssey. Here, in my Gilmore Girls-vibe Oregon town, it’s a very different scenario. Hiking shoes, fishing lures, camping gear, and bikes are all available in mind-boggling variety. However, when seeking a sundress or a blouse, or at least the kind I am looking for, the hunting grounds are scant. I’m not complaining so much as giving you the lay of the retail land. I made the choice; no one forced me to move here. I happily traded proximity to the Century City mall for small-town life, mountains, no freeways, and four hiking trails a stone’s throw from my house.

My chain retail options now include J.Jill, Lululemon, Athleta, American Eagle, Macy’s, and a Banana Republic so empty it conjures the feeling of walking into a bougie art gallery in New York City and being the only person there looking at art you have no interest in buying. We’ve recently had a Madewell open. I had been longing for its arrival ever since we arrived last October. I was counting down the days to its opening the way I might have anticipated a Mark Rothko show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, back when I still had a 310 area code. In my California life, Madewell wasn’t on my radar. Here in Oregon, I was so excited about its opening that I went on the day its doors opened.

And we also have an Anthropologie.

There is a Saturday morning thing that sometimes happens to me. After a workout, I get overtaken with a retail itch. This usually is after I've got the ubiquitous post-workout iced and caffeinated beverage in hand and mouth, and it's had time to hit my brain's dopamine center just enough to ask for one more small hit, in the form of a small dose of retail therapy. I am not looking for anything big, just a little something as you might do when you aren't really hungry but you still check the pantry to see if there happens to be any Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies left. Some days that means a visit to Sephora, seeking a new lipstick as the cherry on top of my latte. Other days I'll find myself remembering my dearth of blouses and start craving one the way you'd suddenly crave Pad Thai. I hear my brain saying, "Take me to Anthropologie. I want a cute top to spice things up," and that's when I break a vow, the vow you don't know I've made.

This is when I walk into our local Anthropologie. For this to mean anything, there’s something you have to know. I am about as far from an Anthropologie customer as it gets. I’d bet their website has some alert go off every time I show up, which is the same confusion Talbots employees used to have when I walked in wearing a Helmut Lang dress. I am, however, the parent of a mini goldendoodle, which on some level makes me exactly their target audience. Anthropologie sells an enormous amount of golden doodle merch, and I’ve been sucked into that store more than once to buy something proclaiming my devotion to the breed. I bought the golden doodle baseball cap. I bought the sweater, emblazoned with a dog that looks similar enough to mine that it motivated me to spend $165 for something that feels completely inconsistent with my style. “Fuck it, if people think you’re a person who wears a dog sweater, you’re not; you’re a person who has a golden doodle, and this is you saying you love her. Who cares what people think? And maybe you will only wear it at home,” I say, trying to reassure myself. And once I came uncomfortably close to buying a golden doodle lamp they were selling, and only didn’t because I found the same thing was being sold at Walmart. Knowing there was a dupe where one could buy toothpaste and toilet paper was enough to talk me out of canine illumination.

But beyond the canine merch, I am not an Anthropologie person. To my mind, Anthropologie is for gals who are Gen Y, millennial, or some generation I’m not hip enough to name, women who do yoga, call themselves “girlies,” have opinions about ceremonial versus non-ceremonial grade matcha, can identify any Kardashian with 100% accuracy, and at least dabble in boho home design. What I’m really saying with that list is that the average Anthropologie shopper is decades younger than I am. I haven’t done any actual market research on who their target customer is. But whoever their target demographic is, I’m not her. I appreciate what the store is. I just know it’s not for me. Heinz Kohut, the father of Self-Psychology, said that we seek people and environments that mirror our self-concept. I am here to say that what Anthropolgie mirrors is that I don’t belong there and that I feel like I am a thousand years old. On the other end of the spectrum, going into Eileen Fisher works as youthing experience for me and gives me the illusion of being twenty years younger than I am in a way that Botox never could.

So, on the days I’ve described, when my brain is chasing dopamine after a workout and a double espresso, and last week I bought a new Westman Atelier English rose lipstick that did nothing to make me look like Princess Katherine, I’ll find myself breaking my own rule and walking into Anthropologie. I walk in knowing exactly the grail I seek: a cute top that isn’t another menswear-style striped shirt, or another silk blouse in the same silhouette, the kind that makes my closet look like a uniform locker rather than belonging to a person who writes about clothing. On these Saturday mornings, my brain is seeking something with a hint of whimsy, something slightly feminine, i.e., something that isn’t really “me” (whatever that means).

Upon entering Anthropologie, I’m always met with an effusive greeting from a friendly twenty-something. I reject any help, not knowing how to describe what it is that I want, and instead begin my Heroine’s Journey search on my own. Within moments, I see an assortment of outfits that say “not me.” I head with an unreasonable amount of hope to the racks and see shirts that look cute from a side angle. But when I pull one off the hanger and look at it head-on, it’s cropped. I make a face like a Warner Bros. cartoon wolf spotting an attractive rabbit, eyes dramatically popping out of my head, as if to announce to anyone nearby: Don’t worry, I know, this isn’t for me. I repeat this behavior with three or four more blouses before landing on the same conclusion I reach every trip: this store is not for me, this store is too young, it’s not my style. Other styles that actually cover a midriff may technically exist somewhere in the store, but cropped is all I see. I do two full laps through the entire store looking for the one item I might walk out with, like I’m on some kind of shopping Easter egg hunt and if I just search hard enough, the Easter rabbit will have left something behind for me specifically. Eventually I leave the store empty-handed and swear off the store once again.

What I’m looking for simply doesn’t live at Anthropologie. It might not exist in my zip code. That’s when I remember I have retail amnesia: I forget this every single time, walk into Anthropologie expecting something different, and end up more annoyed with myself than with the store. Freud would call my retail amnesia a repetition compulsion, which is something I have written about before. It’s our human urge to return to the scene of a minor disappointment, holding out hope that this time we can rewrite the ending and force the outcome to be different.

Anthropologie is a store built for the girlies, not for a Gen X latchkey kid who grew up dancing to the Go-Go’s and the Pet Shop Boys in a world before computers and cell phones. What Anthropologie has to offer me at this stage of life is goldendoodle merch and jeans. They carry Mother and Paige jeans, both of which I’ve happily bought there and wear a lot. The tops and dresses are for girls who know who Charli XCX is, who’ve probably watched Love Island, and who have no idea who Max Headroom is.

Maybe what I am doing here is writing this as a letter to my future self, a cure for my retail amnesia, reminding myself in essay form: don’t go into Anthropologie looking for what it can’t give you. Take what it actually has to offer, and don’t ask for more than that. It’s not Anthropologie’s fault. The store has a demographic, and it isn’t me, and there’s no reason to be mad at the store for that, and I’m genuinely not. I’m not mad at J.Jill either, for not selling a single thing I want, but at least with J.Jill I know not to go in. The problem in my relationship with Anthropologie is a me problem, not a them problem, which I know because I’ve spent too much time thinking about how many crop tops they carry.

Looking back, I think a few different parts of me walk into Anthropologie together. One part is hopeful, chasing that post-workout, post-espresso dopamine, holding onto the magical thinking that this time will be different and that I will leave with a blouse and a spring in my step. Another part, which is unconscious until I cross the threshold, is feeling alienated by the crop tops and the Gen Z energy, using that “not me” reaction to reassert who she is: I don’t fit in here, and I don’t need to.

It is unlikely you would expect Melanie Klein, a psychoanalyst who wrote about how infants experience a caregiver, to appear in this essay (or maybe not, if you have been here before). Melanie wrote about how infants experience a caregiver in two extremes. There’s the Good Breast, the one that provides food, comfort, warmth, and nurturing. And there’s the Bad Breast: the version that disappoints by being late to respond, or empty. A baby can’t hold those two ideas as the same person, so it splits its mom in two. One mother exists when she’s the Good Breast, and a different mother entirely when she’s the Bad Breast. Klein called that early, split-apart stage the paranoid-schizoid position. Melanie believed that growing up means bringing those two mothers back into one, which is what she called the depressive position.

With Anthropologie, I do a retail version of what Melanie says we do with Mom. Great jeans, and it’s the Good Store. When I find denim that fits perfectly, it’s the Good Store—and in some psychoanalytic irony: the two best pairs in my closet are literally made by a brand called Mother, which I think Melanie would appreciate. So I walk into this temple of Bad Mother crop tops feeling alienated, and yet I walk out with a bag filled with the Good Mother jeans that are made by Mother. And when there is nothing but crop tops, it’s the Bad Store that I want nothing to do with, ever, ever, ever again (notice the toddler tantrum language there), which Klein would call splitting. Swearing off Anthropologie for good always seems like it should have been easy. I’ve done it, probably ten times. And yet I keep going back, because I have, in fact, gotten good things (the good mother) from it: three pairs of jeans in my closet (two of them literally Mother jeans) that I love and wear often. Instead of appreciating what Anthropologie has actually given me, I keep focusing on what it hasn’t. The psychological growth here would be to admit that Anthropologie is genuinely good at jeans and, for me, useless at tops, and that neither of these facts erases the other.

Melanie Klein’s splitting shows up in all kinds of places, not just with moms and stores. When we want something from our partner, our lover, a friend, and we don’t get it, we can split them in two the way we did with mom when we got no milk or the way I do at Anthropologie. We go back to that person anyway, expecting that this time will be different. When it isn’t, we get angry at the person, or the store, instead of noticing the pattern and seeing what’s actually available. I see clients do this all the time, so I share this milk-seeking vignette: So you walk into a Home Depot and ask the guy in the orange apron if they carry milk. He looks at you like you have three heads. You explain, nicely, that you really need milk. He tells you, again, that they don’t sell milk. It doesn’t matter how many times you visit or how nicely you ask. Anthropologie is my Home Depot.

Splitting doesn’t only run one direction. Just as often it goes the other way: we idealize something so completely that the bad becomes invisible. Maybe you have a boss who is great in a crisis and then chronically overworks you the rest of the time, and you, to survive the situation, only remember the moments of support. Or you have a partner who is incredible at birthdays and holidays and then is emotionally absent the other 361 days, and to tolerate this you remember the fa-la-la version and the present he gave you last year as a way to press the other days deep down into your unconscious.

What I tell clients on either side of splitting: not everyone gets to be your everything. What we have to do in relationships is what I did with Anthropologie: look at what’s actually there instead of swearing the whole thing off because it isn’t everything at once. No one store, and no one person, was ever built to provide everything we need. We need lots of people, places, and things to meet our varied needs.

Melanie, if she were here, would probably not love having her theory used for my relationship with retail, but that doesn’t mean I am using her theory incorrectly. So next time I am entering Anthropologie, I am going to remind myself that the good breast and the bad breast are here, as are Mother jeans.

And, note to self: stop buying shirts that you see as feminine because you are never going to wear them anyway (but that is another essay).

So, what’s your Anthropologie? Where do you seek milk where there are only screwdrivers?

Buy me a coffee

I wrote my first book, The Next Happy: Letting Go of the Life You Planned and Finding a New Way Forward, because after a soul-crushing infertility journey that didn’t lead to the desired goal, I did what any desperate person would do: I went straight to the bookstore. It was the place that I had gone to when I was trying to conceive and found endless books promising me that “anything is possible” and others that promised they would tell me “how to get through the hell of IVF and bring home the baby of your dreams.” I was desperately in need of a book that told me what to do now, but at the time no such book existed. I needed help navigating the exhaustion of what seemed like well-meaning people asking things like, “But did you try this special tea?” or “Have you considered adopting?” and how not to hit them in the head and/or unleash a long list of everything I tried and that I was still very much babyless. What I needed was someone, in book form, to tell me, one day you will be happy again. When I finally made it to the other side of my grief, I wrote the book I had needed. And happily, it turns out to be a book that others needed too.

When I wrote my second book, An Invitation to Self-Care, it was for an entirely different reason. I was really bad at self-care, I mean really-really-really bad. I was so bad that I used to joke that child protective services would have stepped in and taken me away if I were a child in my own custody. I was the person who wouldn’t go to the bathroom when my bladder was actively demanding I go. Why? Because I was in the middle of answering an email. I would put off getting a glass of water for three hours because I had an article to write for Psychology Today. If I was cold, I wouldn’t bother grabbing a sweater if doing so required inconveniencing someone else.

I definitely didn’t write about self-care as an expert; I wrote it because I needed to learn to do something that I was lousy at. Having since re-read my book multiple times, I’ve actually learned a lot from myself. And still, I’ve had a deeply complicated and almost ambivalent relationship with An Invitation to Self-Care ever since it hit the shelves because when I hear the word “self-care” thrown around in modern Instagram parlance, I feel something that the kids call the icks. Annoyingly, the Instagram version of self-care seemed to ignore the work of boundary setting, confronting defenses, challenging self-talk, and honoring core needs. Self-care was turned into something soft and fluffy: a face mask and a morning with matcha.

During my infertility journey, I did some deep analytical work with a woman named Gilda. Gilda was a Jungian analyst who worked out of her magical, otherworldly home in the Pacific Palisades. She was a legendary figure in the Jungian community, and she was a tough cookie. A constant companion in our work together was her dog, a relentless Pug. He would come over to my chair when I arrived and demanded endless affection, which I would happily give. Looking back, there were plenty of times I petted that Pug to avoid my grief and verbalizing the terror I had of being childless not by choice. The dog was a furry defense mechanism and one that I used in every session.

Gilda, being Gilda, called me on it with not even the tiniest bit of Carl Rogers-like softness in her tone. This was not Glinda the Good Witch offering gentle coos of support. This was a seasoned depth analyst telling me: “You need to be able to say no to the dog,” she’d bark. “You need to be able to have a boundary. You’ve got to learn to say no!” I would whimper out a sad and soggy, “No, down.” Her look told me what the dog and I already knew; I hadn’t meant it. Learn to say fucking no to the dog and hold a boundary for your own psychological container. I gave weak, half-hearted attempts to please her, even as I really just wanted to please her dog. (In a similar vein, years later, I once confessed to another analyst that I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning because my cat was sleeping soundly on my chest. That analyst looked at me flatly before saying: “Get up. The cat will find another comfortable place to sit.”)

Despite my initial resistance, Gilda’s boundary-enforcing interventions finally did the trick, and I got good at “no means no.” Thanks to her, I developed pretty impressive boundaries, and I can say “down” and actually mean it. Many of my clients credit me with helping them master the art of boundaries in ways they never thought possible. For that, I owe an eternal debt of gratitude to Gilda and her persistent pug.

As I learned boundaries in Gilda’s living room, I remember being struck by the undeniable difference between her front and back yards. Her front yard was lovely and welcoming. But her private backyard felt entirely different; it's where all the energy was. The backyard was a hidden sanctuary shielded from public view, and the difference in the two spaces was undeniable. Looking at her multiple-personality gardens sparked a theory in me that I’ve carried ever since: perhaps introverts naturally focus more on their backyards, prioritizing the private space over the public-facing front porch. The theory sounded right to me, so I held onto it.

My husband and I live in a cute Craftsman home in the mountains of Oregon; we are surrounded by an impressive assortment of towering trees. The house is split into two distinct outdoor worlds, not unlike Gilda’s. Our front yard has a gated and shaded patio. Our private back patio has dramatic mountain views, lit by blaring sunlight and the kind of outdoor furniture you could easily sleep on for hours should you be inclined (or reclined).

The first time I saw our house, my energy was drawn to the front porch. I pictured myself sitting out there on fall mornings with a cup of coffee, using it as a reading room and writing office. The introvert in me, surprisingly, preferred the idea of the front patio over the back. In my defense, as a fair-skinned, easily sunburned person, I will always choose shade over blinding sun. Direct sunlight feels like an assault and shade feels like home. However, the reality didn’t match the fantasy. I rarely sit out front. Instead, I sit in the back where the sun blares because even if it is less comfy, it is more private—and privacy always wins the day.

Which brings us, finally, to the clothes. I love a robe. I have a special affinity for a thick, heavy, white terrycloth robe that makes bath towels unnecessary. I passively let the robe hug away the water droplets and wrap me in the illusion of being in a five-star suite at a luxury hotel.

I am happy to spend money on those oversized terrycloth robes because, in my mind, they’re doing work. I went into actual, genuine mourning years ago when Brooks Brothers officially stopped manufacturing my absolute favorite, perfectly weighted terry robe. It was a retail tragedy, and I will never forgive Brooks Brothers for it. The current robe feels like the Brooks Brothers robe’s malnourished and scrawny cousin that I tolerate only out of necessity. Because the terry robe does its “work” of serving as a wearable towel, I maintain it with a good deal of care. Thanks to a three-step ritual of Spray ‘n Wash, bleach, and OxiClean, it stays white, bright, and immaculate.

I also own a completely different category of robes whose job description is more vague. These robes are thinner and sort of flouncy. These flimsier robes have prints that carry subtle themes of faraway lands. One of the robes is covered in vintage maps and romantic images of France. Another is a breezy, blue-and-white chinoiserie pattern. Yes, these robes have a practical job: they allow me to get coffee, put the dog out, and feed the birds, yet I am aware that another garment could do its job.

Last week Allison Bornstein mentioned in a Substack note that she had bought a vintage, silk Donna Karan robe as a new addition to her collection. As soon as I read those words, I was hit by an irrational envy. I found myself imagining a massive robe collection hanging in her Brooklyn apartment, and I found myself wanting at least one of them. Her collection, I projected, was not for the eye of the Other, nor were they functional in any way that my psyche recognizes. Her silky robes were not for utilitarian purposes, at least in my version of things, and to be able to do that appeals almost as much as the robe.

However, for me, typing the words “a curated collection of beautiful silk robes” makes my inner critic recoil in horror. It feels as if I’ve just announced to the world that I want to buy a solid-gold Bentley to drive to Erewhon where I will buy caviar, quail eggs, and $400 melons. There is an immediate moral defense mounted in my psyche against any desire that is purely for myself and carries no utilitarian purpose or obvious witness.

I allowed myself, just a moment, to imagine what it would be like to be that kind of person, a person like Allison, who could own something that had no purpose or witness other than pleasure. To take that envy and transfer it into buying such a robe might be harder for me than telling Gilda’s pug “no,” or demanding my cat get off my lap.

And then, this morning, this happened: I was sitting on our back patio (the sunny one, the one I supposedly don’t like as much as the front porch) sipping my morning espresso. I was wearing my thin, breezy chinoiserie robe when my husband walked out, took one look at my left side, and asked: “What happened to your robe?” It’s a hole, I explained. But the truth is that it isn’t so much a hole as it is a complete and absolute deconstruction of what was once a robe. To call this thing a robe might be akin to calling a caterpillar a butterfly. The side seam has completely collapsed. And yet, day after day, I continue to put it on, and I wear this thing on the back porch.

Why do I keep wearing this as it is instead of taking direct inspiration from Allison and hunt down a silk robe for myself or at least getting the flimsy robe fixed? It is not about money. I am more than happy to buy beautiful clothes for my outer life. I will happily invest in outfits for client sessions, or Alo for Pilates or sundresses for trips. But investing money in something exclusively for my own private pleasure? Something that has no job to perform and no audience to impress? That is where my psychic brakes have a total hissy fit.

What I am really revealing through my refusal to buy a robe solely for beauty is that even after decades of therapy, writing books, and coaching others, I am still prioritizing how I present myself to the external world over my own internal experience. It is embarrassing to admit, even to myself. But I have a hunch that I am not the only woman who suffers from this split personality of generosity versus deprivation.

Staying wrapped in a rapidly disintegrating robe is signaling something specific to my psyche: It’s just for you, and you don’t matter. Eek. That’s horrible to think, and even worse to write down for all to see. With that insight, the messed-up robe becomes a badge of self-denial.

However, when a clothing purchase is intended for the outer world, it passes through my sensors without any alarms going off because they are functional and they are for interacting with others. Those purchases silently say: I need this to look professional for my clients; I need this to look appropriate for dinner. It is the same reason my heavy terrycloth robes get a pass from my inner critic. That three-pound robe is earning its keep. The robe has a job, and it does it. But a desire that serves absolutely no external purpose and no physical task? That sets off a whole bunch of danger sirens in my psyche.

If you trace this back, the developmental psychology behind it isn't hard to figure out. As children, if we get the message that our needs are not going to be consistently met or responded to, those unfulfilled needs don’t simply disappear. Instead, our minds find a way to make an unbearable situation one we can manage. When we do this, we are accidentally normalizing deprivation. We adapt to these childhood experiences by internalizing the belief that having needs is unsafe or futile. The really sad thing is that long after the original conditions have passed, the old strategies stick around.

Now that this essay is almost done, I am going to throw the sad and ripped-up robe away in the name of self-care. Next, I am going to dare to publish this essay, and then, and only then, will I begin to shop for a real silk robe of my own. Maybe I will find one with a grand crane embroidered across the back, made of silk that feels cool and comforting against my skin. Or maybe, like Allison, I will find a vintage Donna Karan one. And then, once I get used to that one, I might buy another, just because it brings me joy to look at it hanging on the back of the door.

Subscribe now

Buy me a cup of coffee

Every December, kids all over the Western world go through the same ritual: they sit down and write their letter to Santa. Dear Santa, I was very good this year, and I want stuff. That’s basically the nature of this epistolary genre. It was likely the best letter we ever wrote until love letters came along. The first part was letting Santa know how good you’d been all year, and then you came in for the ask, kind of as one does in an annual review at work. The second part was the wish list. Your source for the wants came from commercials, the Toys “R” Us catalog, a trip to the mall, something a friend had, and/or a dress that Marcia Brady wore once. Some of the wanting you could trace, if I asked you: “Janet Stephenson has a Barbie Dreamhouse, and I want one too.” Some of it you couldn’t remember the source; you just knew you wanted it. And it goes without saying, nobody ever put socks or underwear on that list; this was about want and not need. Everything on the list was stuff you were sure, sure, would make you happy the second you tore off the wrapping paper.

Every year, until I aged out of it, the Barbie Dreamhouse was on my Christmas wish list. However, I never got one. I got the Barbie United Airlines airplane, the Jeep that Barbie and Midge drove to the beach, the pink convertible sports car Barbie went on dates with Ken in, even the giant Barbie head you could do the hair and makeup on. And here’s the thing: I don’t actually remember being happy with any of the significant collection of Barbie accoutrement I’d amassed. What I remember is that every Christmas morning, after opening the gifts, I felt the grief of another Christmas without the Dreamhouse. The story I built underneath not getting it, the one I didn’t know I was building at the time, was that I wasn’t good enough, or loved. Those beliefs had enough evidence behind them (not Dreamhouse evidence, but the kind of evidence that took me to Al-Anon) that they eventually landed me in actual therapy, although once I got there I never once brought up Barbie’s multilevel apartment as an issue of any significance, because frankly it wasn’t.

Some part of me kept the two things filed together, though. Even now, a trip to Target and seeing the updated version of Barbie’s Palace of Girl-Power-Independence, or whatever they’re calling the towering plastic condo this year, brings the same old ache back when I see a cart stacked with one. My gut reaction is always the same: these girls are loved. All my friends, I told myself, with Dreamhouses had mothers who showed up for pickup, who arranged playdates, who baked cookies, and who didn’t drink too much or torch the brisket over one too many Stolis. Their fathers taught them to ride bikes, took them to the zoo, and didn’t threaten to leave their mother for the crime of comforting a kid after a nightmare.

The truth, at the end of it, is that getting the Dreamhouse wouldn’t have gotten me the childhood I wanted. It wouldn’t have fixed anything. And yet some little-girl part of me still wanted it anyway, even knowing that, because what I really wanted from the Dreamhouse would never have given me what I wanted. I know I am not alone in this, wanting a thing because of what I imagine having it will make me feel.

We all carry around some version of an Amazon cart full of longing. Some of the things are the socks and underwear of life: you need clothes so you don’t freeze or get arrested, a bed, a phone, the basic scaffolding of a life. But that’s not really what I’m talking about when I’m talking about desire. And this desire can show up even in wanting to be a minimalist; that too is a desire, and a desire with meaning.

The non-essential stuff holds the promise of a feeling, a transformation, belonging, and/or an experience we don’t currently have access to. Or it tells the world, or convinces the world, and maybe ourselves, that we are something, through the acquisition. The gold Rolex. The pink Prada bag. The black Amex, the red sports car, whatever your color-coded fixation happens to be, these speak to something underneath language: ego, psyche, the unconscious. We use desire and longing as building blocks of an identity, to say something about ourselves without having to say it out loud. And many times, when we actually get the thing, it fails to deliver the change or the state we were hoping it would.

Somewhere, we know this, and yet the wanting continues. We know that whatever psychological itch is underneath the wanting doesn’t always get scratched by the buying. “But this time it will be different,” and it often isn’t. That’s what eBay listings and garage sales and the donation bin at Goodwill really are, little museums of desire that didn’t deliver. Even when we get a thin noodling of awareness that there’s something more we want from the pasta maker that’s been sitting in our Williams-Sonoma cart for months (something more than a mere desire for fresh pasta), it’s an unusual person who actually stops to look at what possessed them to buy one more item destined for the appliance graveyard that is the pantry (says the woman who almost bought a Ninja margarita maker). If you push someone on why they want something, you’ll get the practical reasons first. Push past those, and you’ll usually land on I don’t know, I just want it. But why? I ask myself this constantly. I’m a therapist, and why has always been my favorite word that starts with W (only second to Wolfhounds). I’m obsessed with understanding the motivation behind desire, and as a therapist, I ask that question a lot. Answering the why of a desire can take you on a surprising exploration of your deepest wounds, insecurities, wishes, and doubts, and lead you to real self-awareness about what you actually want, the kind the pasta maker can’t touch.

In my practice, I heard some version of this why-seeking almost weekly: a patient walks in having already run their physical symptoms through Google. Ringing in my ears, my left nostril itches, I’ve got yellow polka dots on my tongue, what does that mean? As I am not a physician, I don’t have the answer, and so they turn to Dr. Google and WebMD to make meaning of their suffering the way the ancient Greeks turned to the Delphic Oracle. Sometimes they get a good answer: it’s the flu, drink fluids and rest. Sometimes it’s strep throat, and they’d better get to a doctor. And other times it sends them down a genuine rabbit hole, and I advise them to stay away from the internet and get to a real MD. But what I never hear is people telling me they Googled their desperate longing for a pair of marabou slippers as a psychological symptom; nope, that’s just a want, why try to figure out what that’s about?

When someone announces I absolutely need a new phone, a Toteme sweater, or a new set of dishes, the interrogation stops. People rarely reach for meaning there or try to discover the why; it’s just “I want it.” Only it’s not the end of the story. We don’t want stuff just because we want it. We want it for a reason. There’s a real psychological significance to this longing, and most of us have never been given the taxonomy to explore it.

There’s a whole narrative of meaning-making inside our desires, one that’s easy enough to access if we take the time to unpack it. Underneath the obsessive pining for one particular Prada purse is an unconscious knowing: we build identity through the objects we long for, not just the ones we own. The mall was never just a place where a developer put a bunch of stores. It’s one big psychological need-filling mecca. Shopping, and the wanting that drives it, is an inherently psychological act even as it’s also a financial one. Pinterest works the same way. It’s less a digital shopping list than the Pantheon of desire, a whole identity under construction in a public space. We share our wants with friends, family, even strangers, because on some level we understand that having the thing was never the point. A board full of saved images is really just a way of saying “I am already this because I want it,” or “if I have this, I will be this,” or “I will feel this.” What we buy, and what we say we want, is a way of telling the world that this desire matters and that we want it seen; only most of the time we don’t actually know what it is we truly desire. The French writer, Arsène Houssaye, said back in the 1800s: “Tell me what you love, and I’ll tell you who you are.”

As a Psychodynamic psychotherapist, part of my training was learning to read the symbols that show up in a client’s nighttime dreams. Some schools of therapy take this seriously; others think it’s nonsense. I can tell you, dreams are NOT nonsense. But how to get to the meaning of them on your own can be tricky, as we are too close to the image to be objective. And after almost thirty years of sitting with people’s dreams, what I know for certain is that a dream dictionary is never the answer, and it will never, ever, ever tell you what your dream means. Dreams are too specific to the dreamer for that. One person’s snake is phallic. Another’s is pure terror. A third’s is about shedding an old version of themselves. While a fourth is about the Garden of Eden. Someone dreaming they’re on a mountain top might be working through how they’re scaling new heights in waking life; someone else might be getting a message that they are inflated and need grounding. There’s no universal key. One size never fits all. The same is true, I’d argue, for dreaming about a sewing machine, or a pair of white jeans. These longings resist a one-line interpretation in the way dream images do. If most of psychology already dismisses dreams as too subjective to study seriously, it holds our longing for objects in even lower regard, treats it as beneath consideration, and I believe that’s a terrible mistake.

My graduate thesis was on clothing in the therapy room. “The Genesis of Shame: The Fig Leaf of Fashion and Its Place in Psychotherapy.” I spent a full year looking at something my field barely glances at. Half the Intro to Counseling textbooks tell a new clinician to pay attention to how a client dresses, and then just... stop there, with no guidance on what that attention is supposed to be looking for. So I built the guidance myself, in thesis form. For a year, I studied what people were communicating, often without meaning to, through what they wore into a session: the client who lived permanently in white, the one who dressed provocatively every week without fail, the one whose clothes never matched the weather outside. I used the Eden myth as a way in: the birth of shame as the birth of the superego, the moment we become aware of being seen, and the reach for a fig leaf, for clothing, as the oldest compensation there is. So often, the identity someone was constructing, and wearing into session, was really a map of what they were hiding, or what they desperately wanted someone to notice.

After a year of studying the topic and writing about it, I found myself wondering why therapists don't ask about desire. Why isn't there serious exploration of what we dream of having, and who we'd become if we had it? Why do the dreams of the night get taken so seriously in my field, while daydreams of desire are treated as psychologically insignificant? Since the field doesn't ask, I'm asking. I'm asking my clients, and I'm asking therapists to start asking these questions too. And today, I am asking you.

The closest I ever got to hearing someone in my field ask about what we want was at a lecture by the archetypal psychologist James Hillman. Out of nowhere, just as I was about to ask him something else entirely, he said, “It is important to ask your clients who they have crushes on.” I could easily write a four-thousand-word essay on that sentence alone, but I’ll just say this: it’s the closest I’ve heard anyone in my profession come to treating that kind of longing and desire as a real source of understanding a client. I took his counsel and applied it clinically. What didn’t occur to me at the time was to bring it together with my thesis, to ask not just who we crush on, but what we long for in stuff, in objects, in clothes, and what that tells us that maybe nothing else will.

In any inquiry, I like to sit with the specific words a client chooses, or the words that show up in a dream, and trace them etymologically and mythologically. So, what the heck is a desire, anyway, and why is it even worth exploring? The word desire comes from Latin. De implies negation, absence. Sidus means “star.” So, etymologically, to desire is to feel a lack of stars. I could sit with that sentence for a long time and feel awe, and wonder, and also something close to grief, that most of us have no idea that when we’re feeling desire, we’re feeling the absence of stars.

So this essay is me looking at the stars we wish upon when we desire, and at the shape of that absence, and at what it means to want something that speaks to an absence of the luminosity of stars. And I’m doing it in context, because according to analytic psychology, that’s the best way to understand the dreamer.

The desires themselves can be anything: skincare, supplements, home goods, clothes, candles, cars, which may look like you’re only looking at stuff, and not just stars. But all desire, high or low, carries meaning and a subtext. Under the desire for a designer bag can sit the desire to be loved, to be seen, to belong, to feel important, secure, confident. Sharing these wants with others, with a therapist, with a friend, can feel like the emotional equivalent of letting someone into your underwear drawer, your bedside table, or your diary. There is no way I would admit to my own therapist that I wanted another Chanel bag; I’d rather tell him about the dream in which I slept with him. There’s a whole cluster of vulnerability and frailty living inside our desires, and that’s exactly why they can be hard to share, and that difficulty is telling. It means there’s more in the want than we give it credit for, even when we write it off as superficial or materialistic. There’s meaning in every desire, and a story underneath it, and what we’re actually reaching for is rarely the thing itself. It’s acceptance, love, belonging, validation, status, none of which you can pick up at the mall.

One wouldn’t think that saying out loud that you want La Mer face cream is particularly vulnerable, but it is, not because of the cream— rather what is under the desire. It’s extremely vulnerable, and not merely because I’m waiting for gentle readers to tell me that La Mer is the same thing as Nivea, for hundreds of dollars less, and that I could have a comparable or better product for a better price. There remains in me, and in many others who have a bathroom filled with potions and lotions, the hope, both conscious and unconscious, that there exist pumpkins that can turn into coaches that will take us to the ball, where we will, with the right object, transform from the uninvited to the princess who will be loved, beautiful, and dance all night long, in glass shoes that never cause blisters.

In exploring my La Mer longing and looking at what I truly want from it, I can see the moisturizer is never going to deliver. Going beneath the surface of my skincare splurge, what I really want is to be a woman unscathed by time—to become immortal (not really, but also sort of), or at least look like it. By buying into the scientific promises La Mer makes about its magical elixir, I’d be purchasing $225 worth of denial of death that even Ernest Becker couldn’t cure: making a cash offering to Aphrodite in hopes she’ll grant me firmer skin, let me pass for 40, and protect me from loss and suffering. Thanks to my inquiry of “why?”, the La Mer is no longer in my cart—and a humble jar of CeraVe now happily lives on my shelf.

In my free time, when I want to watch something but don’t want to follow a narrative, I mostly watch street-fashion videos, no words, just music and fashionable people walking down a street. I’m especially fond of the Stockholm and Milan channels. I watch them to relax, the same way some people enjoy watching a fish tank. That habit led YouTube to suggest two favorite channels: a Paris channel, Not So Blonde, where the host stops people on the street and asks about their outfits, and occasionally what’s in their handbag. I like hearing about the clothes, sure, but I love the handbag question, discovering what’s hidden, and being let into the secret self. And I especially loved it when she’d ask people, “What’s on your wish list?” That was the question that made me set down whatever chore I was avoiding and actually pay attention. But I kept noticing the follow-up she never asked, the question I wanted uncovered: And why do you want it?

Soon enough, YouTube ran me out of those and started suggesting Johnny Agnello’s Starlink videos, where he stops people in New York and asks them about their outfits, and then, which I liked even more, a follow-up question about a goal or a dream they’re chasing. Watching him, I had even more questions I wanted answered. Questions about desire. For one fleeting moment, I pictured myself going to Paris or New York, with a camera person and an unreasonable amount of extraverted energy, asking strangers what they wanted and why they wanted it. I started collecting the questions I’d ask. I even had a few friends fill out the list, half-considering turning it into a book. But I’m bringing it to you first: the questions I would ask strangers on the street if I had a YouTube channel, and am instead asking you.

Before you buy:

• What’s on your wish list?

• What birthed the desire? Where did it come from?

• Who do you think you’ll be once you have it?

• What do you imagine you’ll feel once you own it?

• What qualities or characteristics do you associate with the object?

• Is there a way to feel or express those same qualities without the object?

After you acquire it:

• What did you actually feel when you got it?

• Did it give you what you wanted, emotionally?

• How long did the feeling last once you had it?

• Did getting it make you want another object?

• What do you want now that you have it?

My intention in asking these questions isn’t to eliminate desire, mine or yours. It’s to build curiosity and awareness about why you want what you want, and to see whether the object is actually the source of the feeling, or just a stand-in for something more directly available to you. I know this can look like an attempt to talk people out of wanting things, but I promise it isn’t. I like living in the material world, and I enjoy stuff. I’m trying to find out whether the object really is the source of the desire, or whether what’s underneath it is something you could reach more directly.

My hope is that when people sit with these questions, they either decide, on their own, that they actually want something else, and go get that instead, or they get the original thing with a lot more awareness of what it's really for. Life is more meaningful in having desires, even if they’re unfulfilled, including a car, a cape, a caftan, or a trip to Cairo. I’m not some anti-materialist trying to shut desire down; I just want to bring consciousness and curiosity to our wish-lists. I hope that these questions let you enjoy the object more, or get the underlying desire more directly. Because if what you actually want is to feel safe and secure, a leather jacket will only get you so far. It’ll keep you warm, but it will not make you the Fonz. But if you know that what you actually want from a piece of lingerie is to embrace your sexuality, rather than it being an unconscious impulse, you can buy it fully aware of what you’re doing, and probably enjoy it more, not less.

The podcaster Marie Forleo once talked about why marketers must understand consumer motivation. She used the example of buying a garlic press: on the surface it’s a kitchen tool, but what she’s really buying, she says, is the memory of cooking for people she loves and the pleasure of hearing them ask for seconds. What Marie is telling would-be marketers is that we are never buying what we’re buying. There’s always some other motivation underneath the purchase. She wants marketers to understand that, because it lets them do a better job at trying to sell us, since, according to Marie, what they’re actually selling is a memory, or the feeling of being loved and connected, or the like.

Which brings me back to the Dreamhouse and to Santa and to the stars we’ve been wishing on since we were seven years old with a crayon, a list and a dream. Barbie having an apartment with the elevator was not what I really wanted. Neither was the margarita maker, or the $225 jar of NASA sea kelp cream. The point was the stars we felt we were missing. Marie Forleo says we’re never buying what we think we’re buying. I’d go one further: we’re rarely desiring the thing in itself. We want to be loved, safe, secure, seen, valued, and to belong. Instead, we click buy and get a tracking number that tells us when, hopefully, that feeling we were seeking will arrive.

In 1996, the Spice Girls asked the question that started it all, you know the song. Now I'm asking in a new 2026 way: tell me what you want from the want, what you really really want.

Today I’m not talking about any of those categories. I’m talking about clothes, or things more broadly, that you like, admire, respect, and don’t want anyway. These things tell you about you as much as what you want does.

Liking and wanting seem synonymous. You like a sweater, so you want to own it, or wear it: I like this, so I want it. But you can love something completely and never want it. And, conversely, you can want something you don’t even particularly like. These sound like contradictions, but they’re not. Kent Berridge, who studies reward centers in the brain, found that liking and wanting run on separate circuitry in the brain, capable of firing independently. Usually they cooperate: you like a song, so you want to hear it again. But not always. I sometimes catch myself humming “I’m Too Sexy” while actively hating that it’s stuck in my head.

Now to the relationship between taste and identity. There’s a sentence I’ve said probably a hundred times, standing in a museum, in front of something I first saw in slides in my Art History 101 class, a work that’s clearly a masterpiece: I like it, but I wouldn’t want to own it. Standing in front of Guernica, or a Goya, nobody needs it explained to them why I don’t want a portrait of war, death, and decay hanging over my dining table. I can admire it and have zero desire to live with it, and none of that diminishes my awe or appreciation.

What feels different about clothing and art is that owning the Goya was never actually on the table, so declining it is less a decision than an intellectual exercise. I’ve said similar things about clothes before, but rejecting something that’s actually available and accessible feels different. At least it does to me, emotionally, practically, and psychologically. MoMA doesn’t expect you to leave with a Rothko under your arm, hence the security guards. The department store, conversely, wants us to leave with something. Something we paid for.

Last weekend I watched Sofia Coppola’s documentary on Marc Jacobs, for two reasons: Lost in Translation is one of my favorite films, and I operate under an unspoken personal mandate to watch any documentary that so much as brushes against fashion. I would watch a documentary about Pendleton knits. I would watch one on the cultural significance of Wet Seal and Charlotte Russe.

Before we go further: I was never a Marc Jacobs person. Before I watched the documentary, it hadn’t even occurred to me to ask why. I just wasn’t. (I did own the mouse ballet flats, but that was pure cute, and at the time, “whimsy” was something I used against my own very serious aesthetic, as if to communicate: I am both an intellect and a goof.) I was never a heroin-chic girl, never a grunge girl, not even as I played Kurt Cobain on repeat. I was preppy. Loafers-and-a-collar preppy, tailored-not-torn preppy. Which means the very era that made Marc Jacobs’s name, his ‘92 grunge era of flannel and slip dresses is the era I was dressing in direct opposition to. I wasn’t rejecting his work in a vacuum. I was rejecting the aesthetic because it was incongruent with my self-concept.

Then, in the documentary, I watched Marc talk through his references for an upcoming show, and found I loved nearly all of them. Alex Katz, whose flat multiplicity of black dresses and direct gaze in portraiture form inspired the season we see him build, is one of my favorite painters; if money were no object, I’d own one. The set design for Marc’s upcoming show is an homage to Robert Therrien’s Under the Table (1994), a sculpture I love and have walked beneath at the Broad many times. The way he uses scale to rewrite meaning tickles something in me that’s really a psychological issue: how we make something big or small determines both the meaning and the impact.

Watching Marc talk about his influences, I realized he’s one of the great magpies of contemporary fashion, and I mean that as sincere, high praise (Marc, should you ever happen to read this, please hear my admiration). Magpies don’t just collect shiny things; they build a nest out of what shouldn’t belong together, and something entirely novel comes out of it, which is a profoundly Jungian thing to do. In one collection he pulls Alex Katz’s flat, deadpan portraits and Elizabeth Taylor’s baroque jacket from an old photo, the structure of YSL, the anarchy of Vivienne Westwood’s punk-rock aesthetic, and the bouffants, mirrored gowns, and glamour of Diana Ross and the Supremes. What he’s doing is closer to what a good psychoanalyst does with a dream than to mood-boarding: taking fragments that have no business sharing a sentence and finding the logic that, to the ego, feels incongruent. By bringing them together, the references stop being references and become entirely his.

All this to say: there’s overlap in what Marc loves and what I love, and in the way he works with references and the way I work with a client’s dream. And yet his clothes are not for me. They weren’t in the ‘90s, and they aren’t now. The documentary made me curious about that difference, and got me thinking, so here we are.

Liking Is Not Wanting

I've always sorted clothes with a kind of daisy-pulling ritual, which is ironic, since Daisy is one of his signature perfumes: I love this, I love this not, as though clothing choices were binary in that way. A custom Chanel couture gown isn't for me in any practical sense, but with Jeff Bezos money, I can picture myself in one. The wanting is there; what makes it inaccessible is purely economics. That's an external barrier and not a psychological one.

But looking at Marc’s collection in the documentary, I became aware of a different category. Liking, and still not wanting it, and this time it isn’t about price, or “it doesn’t fit my lifestyle,” or climate, or any of the usual reasons a like doesn’t turn into a buy. I appreciate his designs intellectually, more so now, post-documentary, but I cannot picture wearing them even in the fantasy version of my life, the one where I’m Upper East Side old money and the sales staff at Bergdorf’s know my name and send me birthday gifts because of how much commission I earn them. But Marc, I’m sorry to say: no amount of money unlocks the want. I’d attend the lecture you give on the history of how you create your work. I’d fly to see the archive of your work shown as art in a museum. What I would not do, at any budget, is wear the clothes. And none of this, Marc, is a you problem.

What I’m saying is that I’m loving the ideas behind the clothes completely, and the object those ideas produced is getting the museum verdict, except here, “own” means “wear,” which isn’t something you do with a painting.

Liking something and wanting something are not the same experience, and wanting tracks “who I think I am, how I want to be, and who I don’t want to be,” while liking tracks something else. With Marc Jacobs, my liking comes not from the object itself but from what’s underneath it intellectually, the way someone with some grounding in art history looks at a Pollock or a Picasso and recognizes it as something important, while someone without that education might see it as “something my preschooler could do.” Understanding the story behind something can make you like it, revere it, without ever wanting it. A painting only ever asks you to look. A piece of clothing asks is this you every single time you put it on, because your body is the wall it hangs on, and a wall that close leaves no room for "not you." And for me, faced with the idea of wearing one of Marc’s enormously oversized suits, the answer is no, however much I respect the ideas and the magpie ingenuity that created it.

Let me say this simply: Marc, I love the thinking behind the collection. I don’t want to wear it. Loving the concepts, the creativity, the sheer magpie-ness of the design, that’s where the love stops. And conversely, there’s a person who loves Marc’s giant handbag and oversized suit purely on instinct, no backstory required, and wears it for the thing itself. They’re saying: I like this, I will wear this. Now, this isn’t to say there’s no psychological story in their liking it. Of course there is. It's just never the object doing the psychological work, which is the whole premise of all of my writing. The story belongs to the individual who bought it and wears it.

That museum sentence from the very beginning- I like it, but I wouldn’t want to own it, turns out to have the same answer everywhere I've gone looking for it in my own life. Underneath the liking-versus-wanting question, the real answer keeps coming back to the same thing: permanence. So why won’t Marc’s designs find their way into my closet? I value being taken seriously (here’s the part where a psychoanalyst would start asking about my childhood). I don’t mind being noticed; I like being noticed. But I need the noticing to be for the values I hold and want to be associated with. I don’t want my clothes winking with irony at anyone, and I don’t want them identified with a particular moment in time, either. I want timeless and enduring. I want my clothes to communicate object constancy and continuity, because those are values I hold well beyond dress. So it’s my psychology that makes Marc a no for me.

Which is why classics do something for me that trend pieces never will. A classic endures on purpose: it offers shapes, proportions, and color combinations that mostly transcend obvious date identification. A trend, by contrast, announces: this is of this time. It’s transitory by design, and transitory, on my body, doesn’t read as fun. It reads as unstable, and I crave psychological security roughly the way other people crave sugar. Clothes designed to look dated in eighteen months are an object lesson in impermanence. New ideas, new art, I love; that feels safe. I’m not stuck in classicism when it comes to art. But I don’t want the avant-garde garment near my body, because on my body they become ego-dystonic, conflicting with myself, or the self I want to be, rather than simply being something I dislike.

My commitment to things that endure shows up in other places than my closet. It took me a year to choose pillows for our living room sofas. Not because I couldn't find anything I liked. Because I wanted something that would still be right in fifteen years. Liking took an afternoon. But finding something I wanted took twelve months. That's proof, again, that they're not running on the same circuit. The pillows and the Marc Jacobs suit are the same problem located in different departments. Both are about refusing to commit my body, or my home, to anything I might have to update later. For me, "I like this," in clothes or home goods, almost always comes with a promise of enduring. This is what Ernest Becker was describing in The Denial of Death: the immortality projects we build, consciously or not, to convince ourselves some part of us will hold up against time. A pillow that will still look right in fifteen years, and a suit I’m willing to be photographed in a decade from now, offer that same illusion of stylistic immortality.

And so, here’s my why. I can actively love ideas and art that are unstable, ironic, temporary, transitory, structurally unresolved, evidence of a certain time or period, as long as they stay ideas. I can love these things without becoming them. Proximity to my body is what changes the deal: it starts to feel like merging with something I can only safely love as a concept, one that would otherwise go against my values and identity. Which is all to say: knowing the why behind “I like it, but I’d never wear it” can tell you a whole lot about shadow aspects of yourself worth bringing into the light.

Once you know to look for it, “I like it, but I would never want it” shows up in homes, in jobs, and even in people, anywhere choosing something becomes a commitment. You can respect someone completely: their mind, their discipline, the argument they make simply by existing the way they do, and still never once think they’d be a good idea for you. I’ve done this with entire careers, too. I can imagine why someone would want to work in advertising, and I also know the reality of it is not for me.

The same split shows up outside my closet. I love postmodern architecture, all glass, not a curtain in sight, and yet I am, functionally, a human vampire who needs blackout curtains and has the privacy requirements of Gloria Swanson, and could never live inside that much visibility. I admire the glass house completely. I recognize myself in it not at all. I could spend an analytic hour on why I’m drawn to a house I will never own. It’s not just an architectural preference. It’s a window (pun intended) into my psyche: “I want to be seen, but I don’t want to be seen.”

Most of the time we don't notice the gap between liking and not wanting, because it seems like nothing but taste, and not a psychological moment. It is a psychological moment. So here's what I'd ask you to do with your own version of it.

A Question Worth Asking Yourself

The next time you catch yourself saying, out loud or just to yourself: I love that, but I’d never wear it. I admire her, I could never be her. I love those shoes, just not for me. Don’t let the sentence end there. Push it one step further: if you did have it, wore it, became it, who would you be standing inside that new version of yourself? Not what would you look like. Who would you be? And why is that version something you want close to you?

Then ask the question underneath that one: what about that person doesn’t match the one you already are, or already believe yourself to be? Sometimes the answer tells you something you already know about yourself. Sometimes it’s less obvious: the person standing in the thing you admire is bolder, or more visible, or less careful than you currently let yourself be, and the admiration has been trying to tell you about something you want, or something you’re afraid of, with “not for me” serving as a guard around a self-concept that might not be serving you.

Either way, the exercise isn’t saying you have to buy the thing now that you know. I know the existential issues that have me choosing Ralph Lauren over Marc Jacobs, but knowing the issue allows me to address it without changing the way I dress. For some, this insight might be the catalyst for moving from “I like it, not for me” to “I like it, I’m going to take it.” This essay certainly isn’t making a case for buying the blazer, wearing the miniskirt, or moving into the glass house. Plenty of things are correctly outside our reach, our era, our values, and should stay there. But knowing which is which, whether you’re declining something because it genuinely isn’t you, or because becoming the person who wants it would cost you a story about yourself you’re not ready to give up, is the difference between a preference and a piece of self-knowledge you might not discover any other way.

Marc 🌼 and Sofia, if you’re somehow reading this: thank you, sincerely, for making a documentary good enough to send me down a rabbit hole of self-knowledge.

Archimedes, famously, had his big philosophical aha moment in a bathtub. Mine happened at a Ralphs, the Southern California grocery store that has nothing in common with Ralph Lauren other than the obvious. I was in the produce aisle, and I saw my friend calmly removing grapes from a pre-packaged bag, as if she were doing nothing wrong, pulling out exactly the bunches she wanted and leaving the rest to rest in the bag. I ran over to stop her before security stepped in. “You can’t do this,” I whispered, standing next to the melons so as not to draw attention to her transgression. “Yes, I can,” she said, with the casual confidence of a person who has never faced consequences for this action. “No. You have to buy the whole bag; you can’t just take what you want.” She waved me off the way you’d shoo a fly away.

Determined to save her from a life of grape-related crime, I did what any reasonable anxious adult does when her entire worldview is under threat: I found the produce manager and asked, “So, I’m curious,” doing my best impression of someone who was not currently spiraling, “can someone remove grapes from the pre-bagged package and just buy what they want?” “Yep,” he said, unloading avocados, blissfully unaware he was about to end an era of my psychological life. And I stood there, in the kind of awe and total re-evaluation of reality that people usually only report after an ayahuasca ceremony. There was no rule. I had invented one and was now trying to enforce my invented rule on a friend who just didn’t want a big bag of grapes; she just wanted what she wanted.

If you’ve seen Father of the Bride, the Steve Martin version, you might understand my panic. George Banks gets arrested, actual handcuffs, actual jail cell, for opening a package of hot dog buns to match the count to his hot dogs. Nina has to come bail him out. So let the record show the difference between unbagging grapes and rearranging hot dog buns, in case anyone’s feeling bold at the store this week: leave the buns alone.

That aha moment brought me a lot more than an opinion about grapes. I had invented a rule out of nowhere and defended it like it was an absolute fact, and if I am doing that about grapes, what else am I doing right now that isn’t actually necessary? What other rules am I living under that are exactly as invented as the grapes?

That questioning made me think about all the things you believe about life, about yourself, with certainty, the ones that feel like facts, that can be wrong. Not wrong in some abstract, philosophical sense. Wrong the way I was wrong, standing there defending a produce rule that had never once existed, to a woman who had never once broken it. Certainty isn’t evidence; it is just a feeling, and feelings are terrible judges of whether a rule was ever real. And this doesn’t stop at grocery store rules. It applies just as much to the rules you’ve made up about who you are and how you got that way, the story you tell about your own origin, your own limits, your own name. That story feels like a fact because you’ve told it for so long, not because anyone ever checked the seal on it. The only way to find out is to do the thing you’ve never done, the thing my friend did without a second thought, and question the assumption before you spend one more year organizing your life around it.

So what do grapes have to do with Ralph Lauren? Ralph Lauren is a take the grapes out of the bag guy. There are rules about fashion, about how you’re supposed to go about becoming somebody in it, and he ignored basically all of them. “I’m going to be a major fashion designer.” But he didn’t go to design school, and he can’t cut a pattern or even draw. Every fact about him said he wasn’t cut out to become one of the most prominent designers in America. But Ralph didn’t accept the rules about who’s allowed to do what, or what you’re supposed to have already done before you’re allowed to try.

I’m a depth psychotherapist, and I have a confession that will get me kicked out of the wellness space and keep me off Gwyneth’s podcast forever: I hate the word authenticity. Not because I don’t believe in a self; rather, I believe in at least forty of them, all yours, all real, and some of them you haven’t even met yet.

Walt Whitman said it poetically. Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes. He wasn’t confessing to a flaw. He was refusing the idea that a self has to resolve into a consistent story to count as real. The multitudes aren’t merely a metaphor. Somewhere in you is the potential for mastery in something you’ve never studied, the version who isn’t afraid of the thing you’ve built your whole personality around avoiding.

Before we go any deeper into Ralph, I want to explain my clinical opinion about authenticity and identity. Carl Jung and I both believe we were all born with access to every archetype, every affect, every possible way of organizing a personality. Yes, you have temperaments and inherited sensitivities, but you still have access to all the other ways of being. But you may not believe that; you might believe the bio of your life. You were given a name. Your name is Sally. You were told what you were like. You’re sensitive; you’re like your father. You’re the responsible one. You’re not really a risk-taker. You’re annoying. You’re athletic. Said once, that’s just an observation. Repeated four hundred times in a year, it becomes identity. Every repetition of how someone else sees you gets filed as I am this. Everything that gets ignored, that nobody ever repeats back to you, gets filed under not me.

So when a book, a self-help podcast, or your own girlfriend tells you to “just be authentic,” what they usually mean is: consult the identity you already have as the only reliable reference, i.e., be your true self.

The Case Against Authenticity

Every claim about who you really are is a sealed bag of grapes. Obviously not literally, but it’s the metaphor I am going with. Somebody metaphorically sealed it at some point; nobody ever checked whether the seal meant anything, and by the time you noticed it, you’re standing at the register buying the traits, talents, and identities other people told you were yours, and nothing new was allowed in the cart or could be taken out.

The authenticity premise assumes there’s a single, finished and complete self waiting to be excavated, and that anything incongruent with it is inauthentic. But depth psychology says the opposite: your psyche isn’t fixed. You have access to parts of yourself that you haven’t met or opened to yet, if you’re willing to open the bag. And, yes, I’m aware I’m wearing out the grape metaphor.

“Just be yourself” sounds like permission, but functionally it’s a prison. It tells you that the version of you you’ve already met, the one you’ve been identifying with for years, is the true and correct one, and anything outside it is false. Nobody asks a shy person to defend staying shy. “It’s just how I am,” she says, timidly, and everyone nods, because the timid explanation matches her timid identity.

Self-help makes several specific claims that I am challenging.

The first is that there’s a true self underneath, and your job is to find it. This is limiting because it makes you stop digging the moment you find a self, mistaking a rest stop for the destination.

The second is that authenticity means saying what you really feel, no filter, as if what the ego has to say is always valuable and, for the record, the ego has lots of erroneous ideas and opinions. This idea ranks the raw over the refined for no good reason and turns appropriate self-management into a betrayal of your soul. This is a problem.

The third, and the most seductive, is that you were authentic as a child, before the world corrupted you. A question many in the self-help space ask is “what did you love as a child?” as if that is a signifier of what you should do as an adult. This idea forgets that a child’s personality isn’t a finished self either.

Underneath all three: authenticity self-help audits your past and calls the audit a complete picture of who you really are. It has no instrument for anything you haven’t tried yet or parts you have yet to discover or integrate.

Enter Ralph Lipshitz

You know him as Ralph Lauren, and you might have something with its iconic branding in your closet right now. Ralph renamed himself as a teenager, decades before he sold a single Polo shirt. He was the son of a house painter from the Bronx, in a Jewish immigrant household with exactly zero horses, boats, or grandfathers named Hollis Richard Lauren III. Nothing about him was Hamptons. Ralph wasn’t swanning around the Upper East Side, and he was no cowboy roaming the West. And yet he built an empire on cowboys and cattle ranches and polo fields and stately manors on Madison Avenue. A lot of the fashion world has spent decades calling this akin to cosplay. They are wrong. What Ralph is: a man who refused to limit his identity, or his aesthetic choices, to whatever was technically “authentic” to his birth certificate. He didn’t write what he knew; rather, he wrote what he wanted to know, and then he became qualified to write it.

Lauren did, with his career, what my friend did with a bag of fruit. He refused to be contained by whatever his birth certificate said he was. All names are fictions to begin with, so why not write a better one if the one you were handed doesn’t match who you want to be? Ask Black Mamba or Sasha Fierce. And if names aren’t real to start with, if my name, Tracey, is just a fiction my parents gave me, what exactly stops me from writing a new one? And why would that fiction be any less real than the original fiction?

Growing up in the Bronx, in a neighborhood where the other kids wore motorcycle jackets and their hair like Marlon Brando, Ralph favored tweed. He chose an aesthetic that wasn’t “him,” years before he sold a single tie, decades before Bloomingdale’s gave him a shop-in-shop, with absolutely nothing to back it up except that he liked it and decided to wear it anyway. He wasn’t dressing to match an identity he’d already earned. He was dressing for an identity that didn’t match his birth certificate or his circumstances. The clothes came first, and by committing to that new identity, so did the freedom to break other rules. When asked how a Jewish kid from the Bronx ended up defining American preppy, his answer was never about class or money. “It has to do with dreams”

Ralph looked at the whole American dream, the Gatsby lawn, the Marlboro Man, the Nantucket boathouse, and decided none of it was gate-kept, and built a costume department for each of these dreams. Depth psychology doesn’t recognize property lines around the psyche like that, and neither, as it turns out, did Lauren. Lipshitz didn’t fake being Lauren; rather, he individuated into him, on purpose. By his own account, he pitched his boss on a new kind of necktie early in his career and was told the world wasn’t ready for Ralph Lauren yet, and instead of seeing that as a failure, he took it as a compliment.

Ralph’s passion for the identity he invented for himself was, I’d say, authentic to him, just not in the way the word usually gets used. That desire was genuinely, unmistakably his, even though it was about as far as you could get from the facts of his birth. He chose the identity before it made any sense to claim it. The self-help version of authenticity only recognizes what you already know about yourself, as if that were an unchangeable truth with no capacity for change. It has no interest in what you love, who you want to become, or the things you’d like to learn if you have decided they’re not authentically you. If Ralph Lipshitz had sat in my therapeutic office, I would not have diagnosed him with a delusional disorder or grandiosity for constructing a new identity; I’d have called it individuation.

Coco Chanel did the same thing a generation earlier. She also wasn’t to the manner born. Her mother was a laundress. She was abandoned at a convent when her mother died. And, like Ralph, she renamed herself, no more Gabrielle but rather she birthed a new identity in Coco. She also invented a father who’d gone off to make his fortune in America, but he hadn’t. She built her empire on jersey, a fabric until then reserved for men’s underwear. She did not let her access to only cheap fabrics stop her from designing. Nor did she let the facts of her life define her. Same move as Ralph: refuse to be limited by your story and make the better story true.

The Photograph That Was Never Taken

Cindy Sherman is one of the most successful and influential artists in contemporary art. Cindy photographed herself as countless women, ingenues, society wives, clowns, aging starlets, creating new identities for each portrait with wigs, prosthetics, and other disguises, and every one of them is still called a self-portrait. And she never put out an undisguised shot of "the real Cindy Sherman" for comparison in her shows.

I was obsessed with her work long before I’d studied Jung enough to see what she was doing, before I had any language for what I was actually responding to. Her images say, visually, that identity is a construction, and it’s an easy thing to believe about Sherman specifically; wigs and clown noses make it obvious. It would be easy to call those the fake ones and assume your own quiet, unstaged self is the real deal by comparison, that your self is real, and so any changes or additions are somehow not authentic; I don’t buy it. The attachment we have to who we think we are, the constant cherry-picking (to bring in a new fruit) of which traits you keep and which ones you leave in the bag, is a construction too.

I had my own attempt at asking this question through art. As an undergraduate, I had a short-lived foray into attempting to create conceptual art. I made a series of photographs of women stepping onto scales. The whole point of the work was watching a woman turn to something entirely outside herself, a number, a man-made device with no opinion and no memory, for clarity on who she actually was. I didn’t have the psychological vocabulary yet for what I was photographing. I just knew there was something worth documenting in that sad moment of seeing someone hand over their “I am ” to a device that says “You are a number”.

Persona Is Not a Lie. Persona Is Structural.

Jung’s word for the mask you present to the world was never meant to be a straitjacket. Persona is Latin for the mask an actor wore so the voice could carry to the back row. Jung didn’t believe in one true self. He believed we can, and should, have many personas, and that the problem is when a persona gets glued on and we stop believing we have any other options. Even “authenticity” and your supposedly true self is a persona, one you might be very attached to. There are others you haven’t tried on yet, or aren’t conscious of, and could eventually integrate into your life.

Psychologists have a name for the mechanism that Lauren utilized, and it’s not “fake it till you make it”; rather, it’s called enclothed cognition, from a study by Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky. They found clothes only change how you think and act when two things happen at once: you’re actually wearing the thing, and it means something to you. In one experiment, they gave everyone the same white coat. Told half the group it was a doctor’s coat, the other half it was a painter’s coat, then had everyone do a task where you spot small differences while ignoring distractions. The “doctor” group made way fewer mistakes, even though it was, again, the identical coat. Just wearing it wasn’t enough. Just believing you were doctor-adjacent wasn’t enough either. You needed both on your body and in your head, at the same time. Ralph didn’t just put on tweed and become Ralph Lauren. He loaded the tweed with actual meaning, a whole imagined identity and life that came with it, and that combination, the object plus the meaning, is what installed the identity before there was any evidence for it. And that trick isn’t reserved for Ralph; it’s available to all of us.

I am arguing that Ralph Lauren isn’t just a fashion icon; I believe his life and career amount to a fifty-year exercise in persona-as-tool rather than persona-as-cage. He built a costume for a self he wanted access to, put it on, and it worked, not because it was “true,” but because trying it on made it true, the way acting confident in a room eventually stops being acting, and eventually, with persistent action, the feeling catches up. If you mistake your current bio for the entire self, you’ll spend your life policing yourself back into it every time you feel a pull toward something wider, a color you’d “never wear,” an aesthetic you find embarrassing precisely because it’s unfamiliar, a passion your current “identity” has already told you that you’re not up to.

“I Am Shy” Is Not a Diagnosis; It’s a Sentence Structure

I am shy. I could never. I don’t have marketing ability. I don’t have rhythm. I’m uncoordinated. I couldn’t even sew on a button. I could never be a designer. Notice the grammar of these sentences. They cling to the present tense, I am, and don’t notice that the verb is to be, and that in calcifying this one moment, you’ve made the current version of you the only version of you. You’ve promoted a temporary condition to a permanent identity.

Meet Carol Dweck. If you haven’t read her, please do. She researched fixed versus growth mindset. Fixed mindset says talent, skill, and ability are quantities you either have or don’t, so every challenge becomes a referendum on which one you are. In her studies, kids praised for being “smart” performed worse on subsequent hard problems than kids praised for their effort, because “smart” is an identity you have to protect by never risking it, while “worked hard” is just a process you can keep doing.

Dweck’s framework explains why “I am shy” is fixed-mindset language. It’s not a description of a trait; it’s guarding old evidence, every experience you carry from a room where someone said Oh, she’s the quiet one, until enough exposure turned it into identity. Ralph Lipshitz could have said, “I’m a house painter’s kid. I don’t have the polo-club vibe; that’s something you’re born into. I could never.” Instead, he chose a growth mindset. He said “I don’t have that yet,” and he literally put the costume on, the persona, until it became so entirely him that now, decades later, you see a certain style and just say, “That’s so Ralph!”

Two Sentences That Changed My Life

This isn’t just Ralph’s trick. Someone else said a few sentences about who I was, long before the evidence existed, and instead of correcting them, I let the identity in, even though I had zero evidence for it yet.

The first happened in my twenties, standing in line at McDonald’s with a friend. This friend was super smart, Northwestern University, Greek classics smart. I loved how our conversations were always quick, witty, and thought-provoking, and that she had the same kind of vocabulary I did, the kind others had accused me of being pretentious for using. On that life-changing day, inside the golden arches, waiting for our Happy Meals, my friend said, “I don’t understand why you didn’t go to college; you’re so smart.” I was, at the time, a voracious reader of Jung and Freud, reading philosophy for kicks, and I still hadn’t claimed that identity for myself. My parents had decided, the day I got a D in math, that I wasn’t cut out for college, and I believed them. I’d taken on their identity, until, in that McDonald’s line, I was handed a new one. Because I trusted her, my name changed right there. I am smart. I am a person who should go to college. That sentence, that moment, took me to college, then grad school, then a transcript with nothing but 4.0s. I don’t say that to brag about grades. I say it because one person, picking me out of my own bag of grapes, which had told me for years I was a quitter who didn’t have what it took academically, handed me a different persona and a different mindset before I’d even eaten my first fry.

The second happened in a classroom at UCLA, in a writing course. I loved writing, reading, words, all of it. I did not believe I could be a writer, though I wrote for fun anyway. My teacher was the author Jamie Cat Callan. If you’re ever going to have a writing teacher, it should be her. When I sat in her class in Anderson Hall, I genuinely could not write, not really. A guy in the workshop told me as much: “This isn’t a short story.” He wasn’t wrong. Jamie, with her red lipsticked smile, her plaid skirt, her particular warmth, and her effusive certainty, told me she believed I could write. I don’t remember her exact words anymore, only their effect, which was that I kept going. She handed me an identity I had zero evidence for yet, and having it, I started doing things I’d never have done otherwise. If she’d stuck to authenticity, to the actual truth of where my writing stood that semester, she’d have had nothing to say to me. Instead, she named something further out, and the naming is what kept me at the desk long enough for it to become true. Without the way Jamie saw me, there’s a real chance none of this exists at all. Because of that one sentence, I went on to write for newspapers, Psychology Today, and HuffPost; publish short stories; and publish two books, the first of which was nominated for best psychology book of the year—and I even got one delicious handwritten rejection letter from The New Yorker. I share this to say: one person believing in you and giving you a new name can change your life if you let it.

Whitman said we contain multitudes. Jung gave the multitudes a structure: archetype, persona, shadow, a warehouse rather than a locked drawer. Dweck gave us the mechanism by which we seal ourselves off from most of it, treat a trait as a verdict, and stop before we start. Ralph Lipshitz and Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel both built one on a fake biography. My friend at McDonald’s and Jamie in that classroom did the same thing to me from the other direction: no authenticity audit, no consultation of the evidence, just a name handed to me before I’d earned it.

If you only take away one thing from this essay, let it be this: you are not one true self limited like a sealed bag of grapes. There is a big, ridiculous warehouse of options that exist beyond however you identify today, and you are, right now, one sentence away from a version of yourself with no track record at all. As Amy Cuddy, the Harvard psychologist, puts it: “Don’t fake it till you make it. Fake it till you become it.”

Somewhere out there is a bag of grapes with your name on it. Go check the seal. Toss what you don't want. Keep what you do. Nobody's stopping you but you.

Some phrases live in my head, thanks to my mother’s repetitions— judgments about people’s looks, dress, and bodies, repeated so often they calcified into my psyche, undoubtedly ideas that she had learned from those before her. Some of them still come to mind out of pure reflex, decades later, no belief in them required: I’ll see someone who would have triggered one of her predictable judgments, and some other part of me answers back automatically, the way hearing “peace be with you” always trigggers “and also with you” out of you before you’ve decided to, a reflex as strong as a doctor’s hammer knee-tap. (You Catholics and Episcopalians know exactly what I’m talking about.) Most of them I still can’t say out loud, except to my husband, and when I do, his eyes grow large. An example: When my mother would see men with protruding ears, she would say, “This means his mother hadn’t loved him enough to press them down against his skull until they were back in the right place.” She actually believed this. Another one of her favorites was reserved for any woman who dared not to surrender completely to grey hair and muumuus the moment she turned fifty. Eyebrow raised, whispered to me with a side eye, out would come the judgment: “mutton dressed as lamb.” Five syllables, and she’d taken down a woman’s entire aesthetic, using livestock imagery. And even though I’m occasionally haunted by her unwelcome and absurd mantras, I realized I hadn’t heard this one outside my own head for years, thankfully, and not just because my mother passed, but because, somehow, the phrase itself fell out of fashion.

I don’t hear people comparing women to mutton anymore; maybe it ended with her generation. But the concept lives on, even though over-the-hill farm animals aren’t the go-to way to identify a woman who dresses in current styles anymore. Today, it seems to surface in two forms. The one we do to ourselves: “Is this too young for me?”, asked while standing in a fitting room, holding something a twenty-five-year-old might wear, one hand already halfway back to the hanger. Our hope is no, and our fear is yes. And when we ask it, are we actually asking: a) do we want the honest answer, b) do we want to be lied to, c) do we want the entire premise of the question challenged, or d) too young for what? The other version is the one we ask rhetorically of someone else, when we see a woman of a certain age who dares to look fabulous in short shorts.

The internet, meanwhile, has professionalized my mother’s judgment into content that’s much kinder: What to Wear This Summer If You’re Over 50, How to Wear the Trends for Your Age, 10 Things To Never Wear In Middle Age: thousands of listicles cheerfully doing the policing so my mother doesn’t have to, God rest her animal-loving soul. A lot of these viral videos are just my mother’s mantra, monetized with ad revenue and an Instagram account. I do smell some mutton dressed as lamb in a lot of the content, even if it isn’t said.

Where this starts for me

I’m a psychodynamic psychotherapist, which means I have the honor to do professionally with strangers what I’ve spent decades doing in my own analysis: unpacking the past to see how it’s shaping the present, and helping people live lives that aren’t limited by what was. Here is the story I told my analyst, Gordon, sitting in his second-floor office in Santa Monica, on a couch that I am sure had heard much worse stories.

It was the 1970s, and my parents were the oldest parents of kids at my elementary school by a wide margin: my mother was 41 when I was born, my father 50, and it was not the cool, Anne-Hathaway-having-a-baby-at-forty thing it is now, but a freakish anomaly. My classmates, being the little darlings that young kids can be, looked for any difference to use as a weapon. Standing in the lunch line, they’d ask: “Are those your grandparents? They’re so old. I bet they’re going to die soon.” Cute, huh? Maybe it sounds like nothing now, just a sticks-and-stones moment. At the time, it was crushing, humiliating, and, worse, convincing. They got me thinking about death in third grade, which is when you should be thinking about recess.

Gordon would say, gently, “That sounds really hard,” tilting his head with the empathic gaze of Carl Rogers, even though he was a Jungian. That quiet acknowledgment opened the door to more of the sad story: my primary wound of primary school was that my parents wouldn’t tell me their age. I asked them every day, right alongside “how do babies get made?” Neither one ever got an answer. Things got worse when my mother stopped coloring her hair in third grade. I begged her to go back to hiding the grey, partly to stop the kids at school from saying she’d die soon, partly to stop believing it myself. So, to youthify her, I told my classmates my mother was pregnant. My teacher caught wind of it and congratulated my mother on the spot at the open house. After that, my mother went back to being old, and I went back to being a soon-to-be orphan.

This was Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death, showing up in third grade even though his books never made it into the curriculum. It seemed, at the time, like a simple aesthetic ask: wanting my mom to pick up some Nice ‘n Easy by Clairol at the market when she stopped for lamb chops. But a child who can’t yet metabolize mortality finds a stand-in she can do something about: her mother’s hair. Color the grey, manage the symbol that signifies loss, and the unmanageable thing underneath it, that your parents will die, can stay out of view a while longer.

Here’s some irony that adds to all of this: my maiden name, the name my “old” parents shared, was Young. It did not feel funny at the time. Between genetics and a good amount of childhood trauma, I started going grey at fourteen. By fifteen, my mother caved and took me to a salon to cover it, even as she stayed committed to her own. By eighteen, I was nearly 100 percent grey, but my name was Young, and I was dyeing my hair to keep it that way. Two women in one household: the fifteen-year-old coloring her hair, and the fifty-something mother not coloring hers, and we both shared a surname that mocked us.

In a full-circle turn, I started infertility treatment in my late thirties and kept trying into my early forties. By then, I wasn’t worried a hypothetical child would call me old; times had changed. Twenty-one IUIs, four rounds of IVF, more embryo transfers than I care to itemize, and I never had that child. There’s a strange thing about being childless-not-by-choice: it gave me the illusion of still having youth, even while I was painfully aware I was running out of time. For me, it created a kind of illusion of arrested aging, having missed the developmental milestone all my peers easily hopped over. I wasn’t young anymore, neither in name nor in age. And yet, somehow, without the role of mother to step into, I got to keep an illusion of being Persephone, since I was never going to be a Demeter.

The fence between two yards

Why does any of this belong in an essay about “mutton dressed as lamb”? Because that description was never about clothes. It’s about territory: the clothing equivalent of a fence between two yards, except the fence is invisible and only one neighbor is allowed to build it. Psychologically, “age-appropriate dressing” is not so much an aesthetic rule as it is a boundary. Historically, youth has been treated as a scarce resource, and femininity was one of the few domains where women were allowed to compete for it. So when an older woman dresses in a way that reads as young, bright, tight, sequined, bare, and sexy, she isn’t just breaking a style rule. She’s suspected of trespassing: a sheep eating grass that isn’t hers and maybe eyeing a ram that isn’t hers either. The cruelty of the word “mutton,” meat that is past its prime, sold cheap, chewy, and there is not enough mint jelly in the entire world to make it palatable, tells you this was never really about taste. Such a whispered insult is filled not just with judgment but also with resentment.

Who’s actually saying it, and to whom

The mutton phrase was never used by men, at least not that I ever heard. Instead, it traveled mother to daughter, friend to friend, stranger to stranger, woman to woman, self to self, which means the policing isn’t only patriarchy. It’s internalized patriarchy: women doing the guard shift for free. Sexuality has long been treated as a currency of the young, and nobody wants to get voted off the island for overstaying her welcome in that economy. But at a moment when women hold more graduate degrees and earn more than at any point in history, it’s worth asking why we’re all still holding this boundary.

Carl Jung would call this a shadow transaction. What a woman isn’t allowed to want out loud vitality, visibility, being seen, being desired, being sexual—she manages by locating it in another woman and disapproving of it there instead. Disapproval is more tolerable to the ego than grief. It’s easier to say “that’s too young for her” than to say “I miss being looked at, and I don’t know where that longing is supposed to go now that I’ve been quietly uninvited from feeling it.”

Which brings us back to the question we ask ourselves, not what my mother said, but its updated descendant, animal-free and catchier: is this too young for me? It’s rarely actually about the garment. Underneath it: Am I still allowed to be seen? Does this make me look like I want sexual attention? We’re pre-checking for a verdict we might otherwise hand out to someone else because we assume the code applies to us too. And underneath that: “tell me I’m not disappearing. Tell me I can still be sexual without the capacity to reproduce.” None of this is about the wrap dress with a plunging neckline, even though the dress is what gets blamed.

This is Michel Foucault’s watchtower: a prison designed so inmates internalize the sense of being watched so completely that the watchman becomes unnecessary; they police themselves, permanently, for free. “Is this too young for me?” is that same self-policing system at work. The mother, the culture, and the YouTube video have all been internalized, and the woman in the dressing room is asking a question about so much more than the garment.

A better question than “too young”

The problem with “Is this too young for me?” is that it can only be answered with a yes or no. There are many better options I’d like to bring into the dressing room and into our psyche: Is this who I am today, or who I want to be tomorrow? Does this feel good? Am I wearing this for myself, or for someone else’s approval? I could generate a hundred better questions than the one we default to. The stupid question assumes clothing isn’t allowed to be aspirational without being fraudulent, and it applies that standard to exactly one gender.

At sixteen, it never occurred to me to ask whether a garment was “young,” though to be fair, I was shopping in Nordstrom’s Brass Plum section, not the designer section where mature and sexy workwear lived. I dressed to fit in, to show identity, to differentiate myself from my parents, to be like my peers, and for Dan to think I looked cute. Now that I’m “not young,” I dress because I like the clothes, and if there’s an audience, it’s definitely not men. Most women I know dress for the female gaze, which has stronger opinions and sharper eyes than the male one, and can have genuinely terrible taste. I once told my partner early in our relationship that every item he suggested for me looked a little too much like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, before her shopping spree, and that I dress like her “after.”

My own reasons for getting dressed have shifted at least three times over: fitting in, then impressing a boyfriend, then finally just myself, and I’m only one woman. Multiply that by every woman standing in every dressing room, and the range of motives gets even wider than mine. Take something as ordinary as a pair of shorts; the same pair of hot pink shorts on an assortment of different women of different ages could mean wildly different things: “They’re what everyone else is wearing,” “I hope John sees me in them and thinks I’m cute,” “I love the way they look,” “I don’t know, they were just the first thing I grabbed,” “If not now, when?” These are all different intentions wearing the same fabric. And, be honest: as you read this, did you already have an idea about which woman gets to wear them? It’s rarely the shorts that determine whether they fit someone (and I’m not talking about size).

Is this who I am today, or who I want to be tomorrow, isn’t only a question for women accused of dressing too young. It’s just as valid for a lamb as for the (ick) mutton (I only say this word to stick with the bad metaphor). It’s a good question for a twenty-six-year-old borrowing her mother’s blouse or wearing the latest trends, and it’s the same question that could and should be brought to a fifty-eight-year-old in sequins. All demographics should have a wardrobe of questions that isn’t about youth: Is this comfort borrowed from an earlier, safer self? Is this grief for a version of me I miss? Does this outfit speak to who I am or who I want to be? Do I feel great in this? Age doesn’t grant or revoke the right to ask more interesting questions than “old.”

The online version is the same anxiety, monetized

Some “Dress for your age” content takes the old mutton wound and calls it style advice. It offers the relief of a rule, and rules feel safe even when the safety is basically an arbitrary straitjacket. If a YouTuber or an Instagram influencer can tell you exactly how much skin, sparkle, or hemline is age-appropriate, you no longer have to sit with the much scarier, unstructured question of what you actually want to look like, unsupervised. I believe such content isn’t selling outfits but selling containment for anxiety and handing the anxiety over to authorities.

I believe the real charge behind the mutton line is a defense against a woman’s vitality. The question “Am I too old for this?” doesn’t stay in the dressing room. It escapes and starts asking about everything else: too old to run for office, too old for grad school, too old to learn to tango, etc., etc. I’ve heard thirty-year-olds borrow these lines: I’m too old for love, I’m too old to start over. I’d like to bring another farm animal to the table: bullshit, all of it. You’re too old when you’re dead.

Notice what’s missing: there is no “ram dressed as lamb”

I have never once heard a man called muttony. Not my father, not anyone. There’s no think-piece titled What Not to Wear If You’re a Man Over 50. A sixty-year-old man in a t-shirt, board shorts, and Vans reads as aging well, confident even, and it’s very possibly the exact outfit he wore at fifteen, twenty, or thirty, with zero judgment from himself or other men. Why? Men were never asked to trade youth for currency in the first place. A woman’s social value was historically tied to youth and fertility: visible, dated, with a posted expiration, like a carton of milk. A man’s value was allowed to accrue instead: money, status, gravitas, “he’s grown into himself.” Silver fox, with no sell-by date. Is it in part because men can still have children late in life without heroic interventions? Do you hear me, Alec Baldwin, David Letterman, and Kelsey Grammer?

Policing shows up when a resource is scarce and contested, and youthful female desirability has always been treated as exactly that kind of resource, hence the gatekeepers. Male maturity was never rationed that way, so no comparable vocabulary of shame ever needed to evolve to protect it, and a man dressing “younger” rarely reads as hunger the way it does on a woman. Male dress was never coded as a bid for desirability to begin with, so there’s no cruelty or cattiness on standby for a man in shorts, a t-shirt, and Vans at fifty. So if men aren’t being punished, what exactly is all this gatekeeping protecting?

What the vocabulary can’t name

Mutton implies she’s dressing to attract and exists to shame her out of trying. Cougar implies she’s hunting and exists to disparage the threat until it’s laughable instead of real. Every animal in the zoo of shaming assumes the same underlying want, because sexual relevance is the stand-in for “still fully alive.” And if we’re signaling sexuality and vitality at forty, are we read as a threat, as if some evolutionary impulse to mate unconsciously seeks out rivals and wants them gone? This needs to be said: the desire to wear a body-con dress and heels isn’t always about wanting to be desired. It can be about wanting to still be a subject: an agent, someone things are still happening to, not just around, or it can be just that you feel good in it. There might be no audience at all. Don’t worry, girls, we really don’t want your man; we want so much more than that: to be visible, to be seen, and to express ourselves.

And now back to me: I spent my childhood terrified that my parents were about to die. I was nearly fully grey by eighteen, decades ahead of when that’s the norm for most people. I never had children, so I never got the child-shaped proof of continuity everyone assumes is the default one. And I never think “is this too young?” when I try something on. I ask plenty of other questions, some kind and some not, but too young? Nope, never. Perhaps my identification with my maiden name, having grey hair at fourteen, and not having kids has interrupted that question from ever appearing in my life, and I can tell you it’s a wonderful thing not to have that in my personal pantheon of self-critique.

The rest of the zoo isn’t evenly distributed either

When my mother grew older, she no longer just whispered about other women trying to stay youthful in a miniskirt. She took to calling herself “the old bat.” It became something she embraced and laughed about, in the way people narrate their own decline before anyone else can get there first. This is where the zoo animals of women find themselves again. For women: old bat, old crow, old hen, old biddy (literally just another way to say hen). While men get old goat, old dog (said with a wink, that assumes it’s charming), silver fox, wolf, and stud. One of these things is not like the others. The male animals stay in the virile-and-tolerated portion of the zoo of aging. Goat and wolf are lecherous, sure, but lecherous has far too long been treated as comic, faintly impressive, and a rascal’s badge. “Silver fox” isn’t an insult at all and has even found a modern update in “zaddy.” All the male “animals” are allowed desire; the females are put out to pasture and forbidden a miniskirt.

From mutton to cougar: when prey stops asking permission

“Mutton dressed as lamb” at least kept the older woman in the category of a prey animal, sure, improperly costumed prey, and still trying to pass as harmless and young, but prey all the same. The “cougar” does something different. This label moves her out of prey entirely and makes her the hunter. And a woman who hunts men isn’t committing a fashion violation anymore, even as she might be mocked for her aesthetic. The label says that she, by daring to be sexy at sixty, is a threat to the whole food chain.

And there’s an unspoken, and perhaps unconscious, rule about being female under all of this. So much of how a culture marks a woman’s passage through age runs through motherhood’s checkpoints: a first child, a teenager, a wedding, a grandchild, each one a stamp confirming you’ve arrived at the next station. Without those stamps, the interior clock doesn’t reset the same way. Nobody ever handed me the paperwork for “mother of the bride” or “grandmother energy,” so the felt sense underneath the AARP card, for me, just stays remarkably, stubbornly young even as the numbers say otherwise. There are real advantages to that particular kind of disorientation, and you don’t have to be childless to claim them.

One story, not five

Now let’s line up the whole zoo of judgment and see that it tells a single story. Mutton is still prey, just improperly dressed. The bat skips prey altogether and becomes something fearful and dangerous. Cougar makes her the hunter. And running underneath all three is the one animal that was never invented: the ram dressed as lamb, the old goat gone wrong, the male grotesque. It doesn’t exist because it was never needed; male sexuality was never told it came with a timer the way women’s supposedly does. Only one side of this species was ever asked to justify its own aging.

Which is why we, as women, should be asking better questions than “is this too young for me?”, since it was never really about the outfit anyway. Instead, let’s abandon the barnyard comparison and ask of an outfit: is this who I am today, or who I want to be tomorrow, and does this reflect something from the past, or is there another reason?

When I see the bodycon dress I bought at thirty, I put it on, and I skip the “is this too...” question and ask the more interesting ones instead: Do I love this? Do I feel good in it? Does it reflect who I am? I refuse to check my own hemline against an arbitrary rule about age, and I go outside.

My maiden name was Young. The name belongs only to my past now, as does my youth, but the thing underneath it doesn’t: the right to keep becoming something, to keep being vital and alive and okay with wanting and dreaming and seeking and being desired and even being sexual. I’m keeping all of that. If you see me and think mutton, fine, that says more about you than it does about how I look in this dress. But this woman is dressed as exactly who I am, and she’s done respecting a fence that was only ever built to keep her in.

A note to my mother, though sadly she’s not here to read this:

Dear Mom, I’m sorry for the times I begged you to keep dyeing your hair. I was a kid, and I was scared, and I didn’t want you to die. I wish the mutton line had never made it into your head at all, and that you’d felt free to dress exactly how you wanted, always. Love, Me

There is a novel that never got written. Here is the premise: a psychiatric hospital where patients, in the name of occupational therapy, make clothing that they sell in the village. The people who buy and wear these garments absorb the mental illness of the makers. Chaos, naturally, ensues. When I was first visited by this idea, I had not yet become a therapist and had no idea what Jung might say about it or why my psyche wouldn’t let go of it. I didn’t know at the time that I was one of the villagers.

Today, I have some thoughts.

Carl Jung called the impulse behind this fictional premise something real: participation mystique. He borrowed the concept from the French anthropologist Lévy-Bruhl, who spent his career documenting the human tendency to feel psychically merged with objects, places, and other people. This is not, according to Lévy-Bruhl, pathology. Participation mystique is ancient, wired-in, and the reason your grandmother’s brooch feels like her rather than merely like metal with a clasp. Objects carry what we cannot help feeling is already in them. The pre-owned garment in your Poshmark cart is not just a blazer; it is an object that lived a life with another person, traveled in her suitcase, went to her job, absorbed the weather of her existence, and arrived in your cart carrying all of that whether either of you requested it or not.

The rumination of my ideas about this novel did not spring from psychological or philosophical study, however. The roots of these ideas entered initially, and perhaps entirely unconsciously, through my grandmother.

My grandmother was a woman of devout Baptist faith and a fierce and comprehensive list of superstitions, which is the affectionate way of saying she had developed, over the course of her life, a complete and internally consistent cosmological system organized entirely around the avoidance of catastrophe. Black cats required immediate evasive action, specifically crossing the street before any possibility of an intersection. Ladders could not be walked under without threats of imminent and unpredictable danger. Sidewalk cracks carried consequences she described with startling orthopedic specificity, consequences that would manifest in my mother’s skeleton with the inevitability of cause and effect. She transmitted these rules with the intensity of someone who has personally witnessed what happens when you do not follow them, and as a child, I found them simultaneously alarming and completely convincing. When someone you love treats the invisible world as absolutely real, the invisible world becomes real, not as a considered philosophical position but somatically, in the body, reflexively, in the place below language where logic arrives too late to be useful.

The specific superstitions did not transfer. Black cats, I am fine with. I feel no urge to walk under ladders, but also no fear. The number thirteen produces a mild discomfort that intellectual understanding has done nothing whatsoever to resolve. What transferred was something beneath the superstitions themselves: the worldview that generated them, the embodied and inherited understanding that the material world is not merely material, that objects and spaces and thresholds carry meaning that exceeds their objective reality. The black cat was never the actual danger. The danger was an invisible record-keeping apparatus that tracked violations and issued consequences with an Old Testament thoroughness. The universe, in her view, was paying close attention and taking detailed notes, and you had better behave accordingly.

I cannot entirely explain the connection between my grandmother and Billy Bob Thornton, and I have decided that knowing there is one will have to be enough. Billy Bob has a well-documented fear of antique furniture serious enough to influence his hotel choices when period armoires are involved, and my grandmother feared the number 13. When I first heard of Billy Bob’s phobia, my initial response was the same as most people’s: a grown man, afraid of chairs and early American armoires. My response to his hotel requirements has softened considerably with time.

Because what is antique furniture if not the most aggressively haunted category of objects imaginable? An eighteenth-century armoire has been in the psychic proximity of generations of strangers, has witnessed history, births and deaths and arguments that permanently rerouted lives, and has held other people’s clothes, which are themselves vessels of other people’s existences. Billy Bob Thornton was not being irrational. He may have been responding to something most of us paper over with the word charming and a weekend project of painting over its past. My grandmother, for her part, would have slept peacefully in that hotel room while simultaneously warning Billy Bob about an oncoming black cat on the sidewalk below. In the time before my secondhand clothing anxiety, I would have described them both as eccentric.

The ick around secondhand arrived later in life for me. I will admit that I often didn’t love the smell of vintage shops, the dust maybe, and in my defense, I do have allergies. My concern was not about germs, which is the most common explanation for such a reluctance, and dare I say, phobia, and never about potential bedbugs. Instead, I think about who wore this, what was happening in their life when they wore it, and whether the biography of this garment aligns with mine or carries a frequency that will interfere with my own. My rational mind knows exactly how this sounds.

A person who worries about the psychic residue on Poshmark sweaters, who invokes Jung whenever she shops, who sort of inherited a grandmother’s superstitious certainty that the invisible world is keeping records: this sounds, in a culture that has decided the only defensible relationship with objects is a transactional one, like neuroticism with a lot of thought behind it. Buy it, use it, discard it, and under no circumstances ask where it came from or think too carefully about whose hands were on it first, or so our culture instructs us. My psyche, it turns out, missed that memo.

That said, consider what not noticing the provenance of our things actually requires, and the quantity of deliberate, practiced, culturally enforced dissociation necessary to hold a garment that spent years against another person’s skin and feel absolutely nothing about it. That is not a natural state; it is a trained one, trained in the service of an economy that needs us to see products rather than people, objects rather than histories, things rather than the human beings on the other end of every transaction.

The obvious solution, of course, is to buy new. Sidestep the whole haunted armoire or blazer problem by acquiring things that have never belonged to anyone else, never absorbed anyone else’s life, never been pressed against a life you know nothing about. It is a reasonable impulse, but it is also not a real one. There is no item of clothing devoid of others’ history. Not the boutique purchase that feels like a considered ethical choice because it costs enough to seem considered. Nor the designer dress made by someone who is very much not the designer and whose name you will never know, in a workroom you will never see, or what they felt about their work. The multiple hands that made it brought everything they were going through to their work. The energy of the making is in the seams, whether you acknowledge it or not. Buying new does not solve the problem; it just makes the denial more expensive.

At Zara, standing among the $39.99 blazers and the fluorescent lighting and the pop music too contemporary for me to identify, my mind goes immediately to who cut and sewed and packaged and hung each piece, what their collective morning looked like the day they interacted with it, and whether they had air conditioning and medical insurance. With no answers, the blazer goes back on the rack. This is not about virtue; many items in my wardrobe demonstrate that I do not always consider the source, but once you begin to see the hands behind what you consume, the unseeing becomes an active choice rather than a default. The garment ceases to be a garment and becomes a ledger. The price on the tag stops being the cost and starts being what they are charging you, which is not the same thing.

Depth psychology would say that where my particular anxiety started and where this essay started are the same place, which Jungians would call not a coincidence and many would call a thread best left unpulled. I would argue that most threads worth pulling lead somewhere unexpected: not to a stranger’s sweater on Poshmark, but to a childhood, a family business, a grandmother with black cat concerns, and the psychological inheritance that arrives not in a will but in the way you learned to see the world before you had language to describe what you were seeing.

I once read an article that found that people who perceive facial patterns in inanimate objects, in wood grain, light fixtures, and the shadow a lamp throws on a wall, have elevated rates of neuroticism. I resented this study immediately and on behalf of myself and everyone who has ever seen a face in a light fixture. Faces appear in things constantly, if you are looking for them, and this has never felt like a malfunction of my psyche; rather, it feels like attention. A refusal to accept that the world is less animate and less interested in us than the rationalists would prefer. It feels like the perceptual equipment you would want in a depth psychotherapist, someone whose professional usefulness depends on seeing what others have agreed not to see, feeling what others have trained themselves not to feel, and following threads that most people, quite sensibly, leave alone. The study, in other words, was measuring the shadow while declining to account for the gift.

My parents were in the fashion business. This sounds glamorous, but it was complicated in ways that took years and two sessions a week with a Jungian analyst in Santa Monica to unpack. What it meant psychologically is that clothing was never neutral in my house, and a sweater was never just a sweater. It was either me or it was them. My parents sold trends; I wanted classics, the kind of piece that looks exactly right in a photograph from twenty years ago and will look exactly right in one taken twenty years from now. They worked in an industry organized around five seasons a year, around the engineered obsolescence of trends. I chose neutrals, clean lines, classic shapes, and quality that I tell myself will grow better with age. These were not merely aesthetic differences; they were arguments about identity, about permanence versus disposability, about whether the self is something that endures or something that requires constant updating to remain relevant, conducted entirely, as the most important arguments often are, through clothing. My father literally said to me, “I will give you the Volvo if you get out of that horrid green sweater.” I got the Volvo.

Accepting their critique of my clothing meant accepting their authority over me. And so the battlegrounds were drawn in knits, denim, and poly-cotton blends. My wardrobe declared: this is mine, this is me, this is where I end, and you begin. Clothing was how I attempted to declare my own identity, which means it has never been merely functional.

Which means that for me, the novel about psychiatric patients whose pathology traveled through their clothing was never about psychiatric patients. It was a myth the unconscious revisited for decades because it housed something true: the lived experience of feeling infiltrated by someone else’s psychology through what I wore. That experience had already happened, not with clothing bought in a village or with strangers on Poshmark but with the two people who made and clothed and loved me and who occasionally made me feel, through the medium of fabric and aesthetic opinion, like I could easily disappear into their version of who I should become. Rather than examining this clearly, the psyche literalized it. The fear of other people’s clothing arrived as a displacement. I was the villager all along; I just didn’t know it until I started writing this essay.

The framework I needed had been sitting in a 1966 book the whole time. Mary Douglas, the British social anthropologist whose Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo argued that contamination anxiety is never about dirt or germs. It is about matter out of place, things crossing boundaries they were not designed to cross. The secondhand shoe is not frightening because of hygiene; it is frightening because it has been formed by another body, literally shaped by another person’s specific weight and stride and the way the previous owner carried herself through locations you have never visited.

Mary Douglas helps me understand friends I know who will buy anything on The RealReal except shoes, and the friends who will happily haul a stranger’s bookcase home from Facebook Marketplace but would never slide a divorced woman’s wedding ring onto their finger. Shoes are formed by the body in a way blazers are not. A wedding ring is a vow made physical, not jewelry but a promise, and specifically a broken one. These are not objects that have merely been owned by someone else; they have been inhabited. There is a difference, and we feel it reflexively, even if our intellect might decide it is absurd.

The religious historian Mircea Eliade argued that certain objects are not merely inhabited but marked, charged by their presence at moments of rupture: a wedding, a diagnosis, a goodbye that turns out to be final. The blazer someone wore to the custody hearing does not return to neutral afterward. The dress present when that phone call came retains the frequency of that moment in a way no dry cleaning fully addresses. Misfortune is not contagious; that particular bridge has not been crossed, at least not by Eliade, though my grandmother might argue otherwise, but wearing someone else’s worst chapter without so much as a content warning is not an appealing prospect. Nobody wants the wedding dress of a bitter divorce.

The woman who acquires one of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy’s minimalist camel coats at auction is not purchasing late nineties tailoring. She is purchasing proximity, the possibility of transmission, the unconscious hope that something of Carolyn’s might cross the boundary between them through the fabric. The person who buys Elvis’s jacket is not buying vintage clothing; they are buying a relic in the most literal, medieval, and devotional sense of that word. This kind of buying is not consumerism; it is devotion. The mechanism called fear of used clothing and the mechanism of buying to have energetic proximity are two sides of the same sartorial coin. However, when we wear leather, we do not start mooing. When we wear Elvis’s jacket, we do not find ourselves suddenly capable of filling a stadium. Wearing my mother’s ring every single day does not transform me into my mother, at least I hope not. The self is more resilient and boundaried than that.

I live in a home that has likely belonged to at least eight other people, and I have zero anxiety about it. Sleeping inside walls that held other families through their joys, griefs, and disasters. Cooking in kitchens where strangers fell in love and out of it. I feel nothing about this, no residue, no unease, no impulse to sage before unpacking my box of spices that had long ago expired.

Although many people I know do sage before unpacking their things. These are the people who understand, without needing Jung or Lévy-Bruhl or several thousand words of my Substack essay to explain it, that the previous occupants left something behind: a residue of their arguments and their tenderness and their insomnia and their ordinary disappointments that accumulated, over years, into the atmosphere of a life. These people burn the sage and ring the bells, and they are also, for my purposes, making the same argument this essay has been making.

And then there are the people at the other end of the spectrum entirely, who will only live in new construction. Brand new, never occupied, nobody’s grief absorbed into the walls, nobody’s marriage having quietly dissolved in the kitchen. They will pay a premium for this guarantee, drive further, accept less, and forfeit the crown molding and the mature trees, all for the certainty that the house arrives without a biography.

The sage burner, the new construction buyer, and the person anxious about a Poshmark sweater are therefore all conducting identical negotiations with different objects. All three are managing the same thing: the porousness of the self against the weight of other people’s lives, and all three would probably resist that description with considerable energy.

This essay was never about other people’s energy in the abstract; rather, it was always about the singular intimacy of clothing. A house holds your furniture; a sweater holds you. That is a fundamentally different category of object, at least it is for me.

One more thing worth knowing about me, which I think further illuminates the nature of my psyche. Walking out of massages and manicures because I can feel that the person providing the service does not want to be there has happened to me exactly four times, which, coming from someone who gets manicures and pedicures every two weeks, is not an alarming number of walkouts. The clinical term for what happens in a nail salon, with acetone and Modern Family reruns playing on the television as French tips are applied, is projective identification, a psychoanalytic concept with roots in Freud and developed further by Melanie Klein. When a person cannot tolerate a feeling, exhaustion, grief, or the desire to be anywhere else, she unconsciously projects it outward. The person on the receiving end, if her perceptual membrane is thin enough, begins to feel it herself, as her own feeling, arriving apparently from nowhere. This is why I have left a nail salon in tears and abandoned a $450 couples massage at the Maui Waldorf Astoria. This is also why sitting across from someone in a therapy office and knowing what they cannot yet say is possible. In a therapy session, projective identification is a valuable insight; in a massage cabana in Maui, it is an expensive annoyance. Same psychological equipment, same thin membrane, and same inability not to feel what is not being said. The antenna does not turn off at the nail salon.

Every garment has a genesis story, and we will never know it entirely. Not the Goodwill find, not the Zara impulse buy, not the eight-hundred-dollar Row trousers that arrive swaddled in tissue paper and hype. These unspoken stories travel with the fabric, unread, like a letter in a language that might be felt even when it cannot quite be translated.

Which brings us to what actually prompted this essay. Last night I purchased a sweater on Poshmark. Twenty-five dollars, negotiated down from thirty, with a brief guilt about the negotiation that was then set aside, its own small study in selective dissociation. The sweater belongs to someone named JPK169, a username changed to protect their privacy, whose life is entirely unknown to me and whose energy, I imagine, comes with the sweater and has now been the subject of several thousand words.

Here is why.

There is a sweater I love with a particular, irrational, non-negotiable intensity that few garments inspire. It is a weirdly textured hug of a sweater. When I bought it, it felt like a beloved blanket that might belong to a toddler, as if it had been worn for years, already broken in, already soft in exactly the right places, already shaped by a life that felt like mine. Which is, now that this essay has taken shape, not mysterious at all. It is developing holes in the sleeves and the body, in the places where sustained devotion tends to wear things thin, and there will come a day when even someone who has written an entire essay in defense of rejecting worn things will have to acknowledge that what remains is no longer a sweater so much as a thing that was once a sweater.

Underneath all the Jung and the Mary Douglas and the Eliade and my grandmother and her sidewalk cracks lies something important. The sweater I am replacing already felt secondhand when it was new. It felt like a weirdly textured hug from a life already lived, and falling in love with it was falling in love with exactly the quality of the anxiety I was supposedly dreading. The sweater felt inhabited, even pre-loved. It felt like someone had already lived in it, and that quality was what made it feel like home. The anxiety and the love were pointing at the same thing all along.

There is one more consideration that arrived approximately thirty seconds after clicking purchase. JPK169 is anonymous to me, a username, a Poshmark handle, a person-shaped absence in the transaction. But the reverse may not be true; my name was on the shipping label. And JPK169 is a person who owns a computer and presumably knows how to use a search engine, which means there exists, however slim, the possibility that she has Googled her way to this essay and is reading, right now, several thousand words about the psychic residue she may or may not have left on a sweater she sold for twenty-five dollars to someone she will never meet who seems a little neurotic. If that is the case, hello, JPK169. The sweater is already loved. Whatever you were carrying when you wore it, I have decided to receive it as a gift rather than a contamination.

When it arrives, there will be no sage. It will be washed and then worn, and a skill will be deployed that has been recommended to others and personally resisted: deliberate, intentional dissociation from the fact that it once belonged to someone else. Because with enough wear, a new history will accumulate on it. And one day, without the moment of transition being noticed, the sweater will be more mine than JPK169’s.

This is what individuation looks like in practice. Taking what arrives, the inheritance, the history, the weight of other people’s visions of who you should be and what you should wear while being it, and wearing it until it becomes entirely yours. Or finding that it cannot, and then shedding it. A sweater was never just a sweater; it was either me or it was them. And this sweater, after enough use as a second skin, will be unambiguously, irreversibly, holes and all, mine.

JPK169’s sweater arrives Thursday, when it will be fully mine—I am not sure.

Yesterday, my husband and I were sitting at a wine bar on the Deschutes River. It was one of those Pacific Northwest evenings that can’t decide if it’s beautiful or unpleasant—because it was both. The light was extraordinary, the river was doing its thing, the wine was good, and the wind was trying to elevate my hair in ways that mousse could never. I was wearing my everyday sunglasses, which are fine for most purposes and completely useless against wind that has opinions. My eyeballs were losing the argument with some conviction, and we began to plan our departure.

And that’s when she arrived, in my head.

Not a woman at the bar. Rather, a woman from long ago is in the headlines. A woman I hadn’t consciously thought about in years, who materialized the way the unconscious delivers things. Without warning, precisely when you are slightly uncomfortable and your defenses are occupied elsewhere. The image arrived complete with a holographic visor, roller skates, and her complete, theatrical, magnificent refusal to make her face available to the world. But who was she?

I texted my friend (the one I share a brain with regarding all things fashion) and asked her: “Hey, remember the woman involved in that scandal with some L.A. basketball team owner who wore the crazy face-shield sunglasses?” My friend was on a boat in Newport Beach looking at whales and dolphins at the time, so she didn’t answer before I turned to Google and gave it the same prompt.

The answer: V. Stiviano. The woman who dated the Clippers owner. The woman who wore a face-obscuring iridescent visor during one of the biggest NBA scandals in history and told Barbara Walters, simply, that she wore the fly-mask sunglasses because they made it easier to mask her pain.

I was sitting on a riverbank in Oregon with wind in my eyes, and a glass of Pinot, and my psyche sent me her in image form.

The unconscious, I have learned after years of working with it professionally, is not subtle about its deliveries. It is, however, almost always right. It sent me V. Stiviano because something about the wind and the wine and my own inadequate eye coverage had brushed up against a question I apparently needed to think about:

When someone reaches for their sunnies, especially when the sun has nothing to do with it, are they mounting a defense or launching an offense? And do they even know which one they’re doing? This essay is the result.

First, the Rename

At some point, nobody announced it, nobody voted, and sunglasses became sunnies. This matters more than you might think it does. Language doesn’t rename things arbitrarily. When a culture gives something a nickname, it’s because the original name has stopped covering what the thing actually does, and everyone has agreed to pretend otherwise. Sunglasses imply function: protection from the sun. Sunglasses are practical, maybe even medical. The kind of thing that implies a doctor made you read a chart and required a prescription to procure.

Sunnies implies something else entirely. Sunnies are what you grab before you leave the house, the way you grab your water bottle. Sunnies are what the athlete has pushed up on their head during the press conference, what the celebrity has on in the airport, what the fashion person treats as the period at the end of a sentence that would otherwise trail off into a fragment.

Sunnies is the word for an object that has outgrown its original job description and is now doing at least four other things simultaneously, and everyone knows it, and nobody says it out loud.

And Sunnies aren’t glasses; they’re a signal system. A compressed, face-mounted broadcast of identity, status, mood, tribe, and intention. When you choose your sunnies, you are not solely choosing eye protection. You are choosing a message, and the message can run in at least four registers at once:

Who I am: The Celine frames that say you know what year it is and have opinions about it. The vintage Persols that say you discovered something before it came back. The wraparound sports frames that say your body is a project you take seriously. The drugstore pair that says you’re too confident to need the frames to do the work.

What I do: The sunnies as a credential, as a uniform, as a membership card in a category you are either already in or seeking entry to. See, I am an athlete. Or an artist or someone who lunches— or who doesn’t “lunch” but wants to- and so I bought the Quays and not the Celines.

How I feel right now, which I will not be telling you directly: This is the register nobody discusses, and yet is universally used. The sunnies are a real-time emotional weather report, delivered in a format that maintains complete deniability. You cannot be accused of looking sad or tired or indifferent if you are wearing enormous frames that make assessment impossible. The sunnies lie on your behalf, fluently, without being asked to.

They also cover a multitude of things that have nothing to do with emotion and everything to do with the previous evening. The hangover. The 4 am scroll that turned into a 6 am scroll. The weed that was supposed to help you sleep and instead made you very interested in a documentary about deep-sea fish until 2 am.

There is an entire unwritten social contract organized around this. We all know what large sunnies at a Sunday brunch mean. We honor it and say nothing. We are, collectively, decent about it in a way we are not always decent about other things. The sunnies say I showed up, and the terms of my showing up are these frames, and the frames say we have decided not to inspect this further.

Then there is the use of sunglasses that work as a pseudo eye job. Not fatigue from last night, but fatigue from the general accumulation of nights, the ones that left something behind in the skin around the eyes that good lighting helps with, and direct sunlight absolutely does not. The sunnies are a portable, socially acceptable version of the beauty filter. The thing you reach for before the farmers market in a way that has little to do with UV protection and everything to do with not being assessed at 9 am by someone who last saw you at a dinner party where you were lit by candlelight. This is not vanity; this is self-concept management.

Here is the Depth psychology observation: the signal system works in two directions at once. Outward, broadcasting the chosen message, managing the gaze. And inward, confirming the identity you need to inhabit today.

William James (the psychologist, not the basketball player) said we don’t sing because we’re happy; we’re happy because we sing. The action produces the feeling, not the other way around. I have tested this theory in Givenchy and can confirm.

The sunnies can work the same way. You don’t wear the frames because you feel fashionable. You feel fashionable because you’re wearing the frames. This is not self-deception. It is the psyche using the wardrobe as a tool for becoming, not just a record of having already arrived.

But it is also a performance, and performances can be aimed outward, as offense. Or inward, as defense. And the sunnies, maybe more than any other item in the wardrobe, are uniquely capable of functioning as both simultaneously. In the same frames, on the same face, and sometimes in the same afternoon.

The Eyes Are Ungovernable (Which Is the Whole Problem)

It is important to understand why the eyes specifically require this level of strategic management. You can train almost everything else about your face. Voice, posture, the angle of your chin, and what you do with your mouth are all trainable. But the eyes are a different jurisdiction entirely. They look at things you’re pretending not to want. They well up at the Zales commercial. They go flat when someone you’ve stopped loving walks into the room. They sneak out a side eye when a smile would have better served.

Jean Paul Sartre, the French philosopher, had a whole thing about this. He called it the Look, which is the moment you realize someone is watching you and feel yourself flip, without consent, from the person having the experience to the thing being experienced. Subject to object. One moment you are just living in your own head, and the next you exist in someone else’s world, on their terms. This is, he argued, the origin of shame. Not guilt, which is an inside job, but shame, which requires a witness. Shame requires someone to have seen us and for the judgment to be unknowable. We fill in the blank with what we think is wrong with us. This is what our eyes threaten to give away. And the sunnies are, among other things, a witness management system.

Sunnies worn indoors, in the restaurant, in the meeting, in the airport at 6 am, are a preemptive strike against exactly this. Against the moment of being clocked before you’ve consented to be clocked. The theory is that you cannot fully objectify what you cannot fully see. The practice is that people will project onto a blank surface regardless. But the projection lands on glass now, not on eyes, and glass does not flinch, does not dart, does not give anything away. You are still being looked at. You have simply removed yourself from the equation.

This is the defensive function in its purest form. But the asymmetry that protects the wearer also, unavoidably, empowers them. When you can see and not be seen, you don’t just feel safer. You feel, in some quiet but real way, in charge. Which is where we move into offensive territory. (I am aware I am essentially writing about football strategy even though I know nothing about football, but bear with me.)

Subscribe now

A Field Guide to Sunnies as Tactical Gear

You know this person and may have been this person: red-rimmed eyes, indoors, no time for makeup or eye cream, and sunnies performing heroically while the rest of you barely hold it together.

The psychoanalyst Winnicott wrote about the terror of being seen in a state of need by someone who cannot meet it. The adult version of this, which he would recognize immediately, is the person wearing sunnies into a dim restaurant because they would genuinely rather discuss the menu than have a stranger clock that they have been recently, privately, and absolutely emotionally demolished. There are times this is a completely reasonable position. In those circumstances, sunnies say: I am in here, and I am handling it. They say, “You don’t get to know.” That is not a weakness; it is the difference between being vulnerable in the world and letting the world in on something you aren’t yet willing to share.

The shadow side (and there is always a shadow side, as this is a depth psychology Substack) is that the sunnies can become a habit of concealment that outlasts the grief. What started as a temporary arrangement of who-sees-what can become a permanent psychological position. You put them on because you were sad, and then you keep putting them on because you’ve forgotten what your face looks like when it’s undefended.

Then there are the Givenchys.

I own a pair of monster Givenchy frames. Black, formidable, the kind that covers not just my eyes but a meaningful portion of the entire emotional situation. I bought them the day my mother died. I did not know, when I bought them, that my mother was going to die that day.

I have a somewhat freakish eye condition, a recurrent corneal tearing situation that periodically makes itself known with extreme, lights-out pain that makes me think Oedipus was onto something when he pulled out his eyes. That morning, I had gotten myself to my ophthalmologist in Beverly Hills, who is the kind of doctor you find in Beverly Hills: someone who will inject cortisone directly into the glands because you asked him to and then asks if you’d like to freshen your Botox, and whose office is conveniently located next to Saks Fifth Avenue.

I had forgotten my sunglasses. My eyes were in a situation that made this a real problem. So I did what any reasonable person with freshly injected periocular glands and a Beverly Hills Saks forty feet away does. I bought emergency sunnies. They were black, enormous, and Givenchy. (I also bought a bag of Teuscher chocolates, not terribly significant to this essay, but I am going for full transparency.)

Six hours later, my mother died.

For the next several weeks, I wore those glasses everywhere and to everything. In rooms where there was no sun and no conceivable justification.

Now back to the Jungian portion of the program: Jung used alchemy as a framework for psychological transformation, not because he thought you could turn literal lead into gold, but because the alchemical process had the right shape as a model of transformation: something goes in raw, something comes out transformed, but only if the container holds. The container is called, in alchemical language, the vas. And the vas has to be strong enough to bear the heat of whatever is happening inside it.

My Givenchys were my vas. I know how that sounds, and I also know it’s true.

The sunglasses held my grief in the only space where grief that size had any business being in public: behind two pieces of dark glass in a frame that was too expensive, too large, and completely right.

I still have them. I wear them now on the days I am operating on moisturizer, sunscreen, lipstick, and four hours of post-menopausal sleep. The days I need a mask, and as masks aren’t socially acceptable (except the kind that is supposed to hydrate, firm, and moisturize), I reach for these instead.

I wear them not because they’re Givenchy, though they are. I wear them because they were bought on one of the worst mornings of my life and survived the weeks that followed. The glasses carry that association now and offer an illusory promise of strength. In Winnicott’s language, they are a transitional object, something that holds the memory of a difficult crossing so you don’t have to hold it consciously every time. You put them on, and some part of you remembers: the container held. You are still here. And if one needs a mask that says “I am okay even if I am not,” a pair of enormous black Givenchys is, it turns out, a perfectly respectable strategy.

Anna Wintour has worn sunnies at indoor fashion shows for decades. If you believe this is solely about light sensitivity, I have an alligator Hermès Birkin to sell you for a hundred dollars. Her sunnies, I would argue, are a power structure worn on her face.

Designers perform for an unreadable audience. They cannot gauge her approval or displeasure. They perform for the lenses and imagine what’s behind them, which is infinitely more destabilizing than any actual critique. She doesn’t need to surveil them because they surveil themselves.

Michel Foucault, the French philosopher, called this the Panopticon: the prison where inmates could theoretically be watched at any moment and therefore behaved as if they always were. Anna Wintour built a Panopticon out of designer frames, and she has maintained it consistently, without apology, for longer than some of those designers have been alive. Her iconic bob helps, but it’s the glasses that close the deal.

Then along came John Lennon in his little wire-rimmed teashades, covering approximately eleven percent of his face. By any functional measure, his glasses were useless. The lenses were the size of large coins. His cheekbones and temples were exposed. The entire emotional infrastructure of his face was completely and vulnerably available.

So what were they doing, if not hiding? They were framing. They were communicating a particular kind of accessibility. There is a distinction that depth psychology has always understood and fashion criticism less so: the difference between concealment and curation. Jackie O’s enormous frames said: You cannot have all of me. Lennon’s tiny frames seemed to say: here are my eyes, in a circle, which means they are now art and I have nothing to hide.

I don’t think the round shape was accidental. The circle is the oldest symbol of wholeness in human symbolism, what Jung called the mandala, the image the psyche produces when it is trying to integrate itself. Lennon was putting his gaze in a mandala and saying: These eyes see differently. Look through this frame, and you will see Strawberry Fields and Imagine a different kind of world.

Jackie’s glasses said: You cannot have me. Lennon’s said: You can have me, but only the version that lives inside this circle. Both are acts of self-definition. Both are negotiations with visibility, and the only difference is the size of the lens.

Which brings us to the figure who collapsed the distinction entirely.

“It’s easier to mask the pain.”

V. Stiviano said this to Barbara Walters in 2014, explaining the holographic visor she was wearing, iridescent, face-obscuring, Daft Punk-adjacent, during the weeks following the Donald Sterling scandal that destroyed her public reputation and made her one of the most mocked women in America. We don’t know what she felt or what she was seeking. But we know what she said, we know what she wore, and we know the context.

There is a Jungian concept called temenos, a sacred protected space, the kind of container where transformation can occur precisely because the outside world cannot enter. V. Stiviano built her temenos out of chrome and iridescent plastic and wore what looked like joke frames to the grocery store, which is either a contradiction or the whole point.

She claims it was about masking pain, and maybe it was. But the psychology of concealment is rarely simple. We hide our faces for at least two reasons that have nothing to do with each other: to disappear and to be seen differently. The burqa and the masquerade mask share a grammar; so do the sunglasses and the war paint. What we cover, we also announce.

Those glasses, if we can even call them that, were so large, so face-obliterating, that she had to know, on some level, that they were doing more than containing. The lenses were holographic, mirror-finished. She wasn’t just covering her face; she was replacing it with a reflective surface. This is an interesting move psychologically.

When you looked at V. Stiviano during those weeks in 2014, you didn’t see her face. You saw yourself in her lenses. The camera saw itself as it attempted to capture her. Every person who stopped to stare, to photograph, to mock her received their own image back. She had weaponized the gaze by giving it nowhere to land.

Psychologists call this mirroring, the act of reflecting someone’s energy to them rather than absorbing it. Infants do it instinctively, searching the caregiver’s face for information about what they themselves are feeling. What Stiviano did was structurally identical, except inverted: she offered the mirror not to say I see you but to say look at what you’re doing. The visor didn’t hide her affect; rather, it exposed yours.

Her sunglass defense: I am in pain; the mask makes it easier. Offense: Here is your face back, and it looks ridiculous. This is what distinguishes a shield from a weapon. A shield absorbs. A weapon redirects. V. Stiviano showed up to her own public humiliation wearing something that functioned as both, simultaneously, depending on which direction you were standing — and that ambiguity, that refusal to be legible, may have been an incredibly psychologically sophisticated thing to do when dealing with a tabloid catastrophe.

Jackie Kennedy’s sunglasses were a door, firmly closed. V. Stiviano’s visor was a mirror, aggressively held up. Both said: You do not get to see me. Only one of them also said: Now look at yourself.

The culture called Jackie-O iconic. The culture called V. Stiviano crazy. There were other reasons for this, of course, but the frame choices were, for both women, a strategy. The difference was not the psychology. It was the zip code, the diction, and the name of the man they were standing next to.

The Camera in the Frame

In 2023, Meta and Ray-Ban released smart glasses with a 12-megapixel camera built into the frame. They look exactly like regular Ray-Bans, Wayfarers, Headliners, classic silhouettes you’ve seen on a million faces, including Tom Cruise in Risky Business and on your Uncle Fred at the family BBQ. In these frames, there is a small LED light that’s supposed to indicate recording.

Pickup artists are using these glasses to film women without their knowledge. Harvard students demonstrated that the glasses, connected to a facial recognition system, could identify strangers in real time: name, phone number, home address, from a face captured in passing. A woman in London was recorded, the footage uploaded, 40,000 views; the man refused to take it down unless she paid him. The glasses this man wore looked like regular sunnies—but these glasses were dark, and we aren’t talking about the color of the lenses.

I have spent the bulk of this article talking about the psychology of the gaze. About Sartre’s Look. About Jackie’s magnificent refusal, V. Stiviano’s mirror-faced defiance, and John’s openness as expressed in his micro-lenses, and about the ancient terror of being seen without consent and the ingenious ways human beings have tried to manage it. And now someone has put a camera in the sunnies.

The thing people wore for a century to control the gaze has been turned into an instrument for taking, invisibly, without consent, without the subject even knowing it’s happening. The disguise is the design, and the camouflage is the product.

Foucault’s Panopticon has been miniaturized, fashionized, and sold at retail for $379. Ray-Ban and Meta have turned defense into something predatory and offense into something that, in some cases, edges toward criminal. The social contract between seen and seeing isn’t just strained; it has a camera in it.

Jackie’s sunnies were a declaration: I am here; you just don’t get all of me. The camera sunnies say: I am here, and now you are in my phone. The difference between those two sentences is the difference between sovereignty and predation. And it lives, right now, in a Ray-Ban frame you might not be able to distinguish from the one in your own bag.

So. What Are Yours Doing?

Here is what I want you to actually take from this, not the philosophy, not the history, not the technology, but the question that is genuinely yours: When you reach for your sunnies, what direction are they pointing?

Everyone in this essay was negotiating the same fundamental problem: a world that has never stopped wanting to consume them. Their face, their grief, their complexity, their mystery. Their body at a press conference, a basketball game, or a riverbank in Oregon that had an agenda.

Jackie answered it with thirty years of escalating frames and escalating wealth (the size of which grew notably when she went from being a Kennedy to an Onassis). V. Stiviano answered it with a holographic visor and roller skates and the unglamorous honesty of: it hurts, and this makes it easier. Lennon answered it by putting his eyes in a circle and inviting us to see him. Anna Wintour answered it by making her unreadability a structural feature of her brand. I answered it with a pair of emergency Givenchys from Saks Fifth Avenue that became, without my knowing, the container for the worst weeks of my life.

All of us were making a tactical decision about visibility. All of us were deciding, consciously or not, what we were willing to make available to the world, and what we were keeping. The sunnies are not merely a fashion choice; they are a position. They are a declaration, worn on the face, about the terms on which you are present today.

Defense, when you need shelter: I am here, but not available. Offense, when you need power: I see you. You do not see me. Both at once, when life requires it: I am in pain, and I am still standing, and here — even if you can’t see any of it.

The question is not whether to wear the sunnies. The question is whether you still know what they’re doing. Because what began as a container can calcify, without your noticing, into a wall.

Take them off occasionally. Let someone see you squint, or look tired, or tear up at something you didn’t expect. And if the person across from you is wearing Ray-Bans and seems unusually interested in your face, check for the LED light on the frame. If you can’t find one, put on your sunnies and move tables.

You have, I’m willing to bet, bought the same white t-shirt approximately seventeen times. Not the exact same white tee, but a close enough approximation: same weight, same crew neck, same fantasy of effortless simplicity, until your drawer becomes a cotton graveyard, each tee a failed audition for a role only one ghost of a shirt can play. Or I could just be projecting.

It’s not just the tee that you, me, and others are seeking when we buy on repeat. The average American owns seven pairs of jeans and regularly wears four. Three pairs live in the drawer as pure psychological artifacts: the too-small ones held hostage to a former self, the outdated cut kept because letting go feels like an admission, the almost-perfect pair waiting to be replaced by the next almost-perfect pair. We are not building wardrobes, we are building evidence. This is the moment Sigmund Freud would light a cigar and nod knowingly, watching you add another pair of Mother jeans to your cart. He would say nothing, because what could he possibly add? You are compulsively purchasing a garment named Mother. Freud spent forty years building a theoretical framework for this moment, and you just made his case for him for $228 on Revolver.com.

Welcome to the Repetition Compulsion

Freud noticed something disturbing about human beings: we don’t just remember painful experiences, we re-enact them. We return, again and again, to the scene of the original wound. Not because we’re masochists (well, not in a clinical sense) but because somewhere in the psyche lives an incurable optimist who believes that this time the ending will be different. This time, the tee will be perfect and transform the wardrobe and, while we’re at it, possibly the self.

He called this Wiederholungszwang, the compulsion to repeat, and he wrote about it in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which sounds like an adult catalog but is in fact a profound explanation of the human drive toward suffering.

Freud arrived at the idea through his grandson, Ernst, eighteen months old, playing alone in his crib. The boy would throw his favorite toy away, become distressed at its absence, then reel it back on its string, shouting “fort!” (gone) and “da!” (there), only to throw it away again. And again. Freud read this as the child’s attempt to master the disappearance of his mother: re-enacting the loss, exerting symbolic control over it, never quite succeeding. Fort. Da. Gone. There. Gone. There. You, refreshing the Madewell page.

My goldendoodle has seventeen tennis balls and is genuinely delighted by every single one of them. That is not her problem. Her problem is that what she loves even more than any ball is the moment just before she has it: the arc of the throw, the chase, the pure suspended possibility of the not-yet-caught. The instant the ball lands, some essential electricity goes out of the situation. She trots back, drops it at my feet, and looks at me with an expression that says not that this ball has failed her, but that she has just remembered something she already knew. The ball in her mouth was never the point. The point was the flight—and now the flight is over, and so we begin again.

Freud spent years explaining this theoretical framework for exactly this. My dog runs the clinical trial every afternoon in my living room and reaches the same conclusion: the compulsion is not about dissatisfaction with what you have. It is about the irreplaceable feeling of wanting something you don’t have yet. My Doodle is, in this sense, all of us.

Because here is what she understands that we don’t always admit: it is not the tee or the jeans or the black boots you keep buying. It is the moment right before you find out whether this one is the one. The hope is the point. Arrival is always, just slightly, a disappointment, which is why you’re back online three weeks after the UPS driver delivered what were going to be the perfect jeans, already searching again.

There are two kinds of people who engage in the sartorial repetition compulsion.

The first kind has a ghost. Somewhere in the past, there was a garment that worked perfectly, completely, without negotiation. Maybe you were twelve, wearing your father’s oversized flannel, and felt for one afternoon entirely yourself. Perhaps it was the vintage tee from a concert you almost didn’t attend, the one that became the fabric of the best summer of your life. Possibly you can’t even name it, only feel its outline: a rightness, a sense that your outsides finally matched your insides. That garment is gone. It fell apart, or you outgrew it, literally or symbolically. And now you spend $38 at Everlane, and $54 at Madewell, and $22 at Target trying to find it again. You are not shopping. You are searching for what was.

The second kind has a rumor. No ghost, because there was never an original. You have never owned a t-shirt that worked, not a perfect summer, not an afternoon of feeling yourself completely in exactly the right cotton. You came to the search not from loss but from longing, watching your whole adult life as other people seemed to inhabit the simple white tee with an ease that looked, from where you were standing, like effortless grace.

The fashion industry has not helped with this fiction. Every capsule wardrobe guide, every “ten pieces you actually need,” every effortlessly cool person photographed on a cobblestone street holding a coffee and a supermodel gaze insists that the white tee is the foundation, the non-negotiable, the thing upon which everything else is built. And you have stood in dressing rooms across two decades, holding the supposedly universal garment and feeling, every single time, slightly wrong ( yes, this is my experience). And when I get suckered into the promise of another white tee, I feel like a person wearing someone else’s confidence. It doesn’t fit, and neither does the tee.

The white tee as a universal basic is a myth, right up there with Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, no matter how many times it has been repeated. It is universal for a certain body, a certain bearing, a certain unselfconsciousness that is itself a form of privilege. The influencer on the cobblestones may not be wearing a better tee. She may simply be wearing it in a body that has been told, in a thousand ways, that it is the default. My decades-long search was not proof that I was schlumpy, even though that is precisely how I feel every time I put one on.

The compulsion doesn’t always cluster around white tees. It clusters around whatever piece you’ve made foundational, consciously or not. For some people, it’s the red lipstick drawer with eleven almost-right shades, the black boot graveyard, the leather jacket purchased and returned four times. The item varies, the function doesn’t. It’s the piece appointed, without quite realizing it, as the cornerstone of the identity you’re building or defending.

What we are seeking, when we reach for that piece, is the answer to a question far older than fashion: am I, at my core, enough?

Jung called it the Persona, the mask we wear for the world. The statement piece is pure persona, handing you a character to play. The foundational piece is the moment the persona thins and you’re left standing in your own skin, asking something far more terrifying: Is this okay? Am I okay? Am I safe? Am I loved? The endless search is, at its root, a search for the answer to be yes.

Here’s what the fashion world will never say: the basic of the tee don’t just sit at the core of the wardrobe. It sits closest to the body, with no buffer, no armor, no structured jacket standing between the fabric and you. Statement pieces decorate. Basics touch. They rest against skin without distraction, no interesting print to draw the eye elsewhere, no peplum flare to create a silhouette. Just you, the fabric, and the relationship you have with what’s underneath. Kim Kardashian understood this when she named her brand Skims. What she did not account for is that some of us experience the closest-to-the-body garment as closest-to-the-bone exposure, which is why I feel naked in a white tee and have spent forty years trying to solve a problem that was never about the tee.

Many of us are not at peace with our bodies. We have been at war with them, negotiating, managing, and apologizing for them for so long that the garment asked to simply rest there carries an impossible assignment: be comfortable here. The basics don’t just have to fit the body. It has to fit the relationship you have with your body. And for most of us, that relationship is, to put it in the gentlest possible clinical terms, a work in progress that has been in progress for decades. If you cannot find the right one, it may mean you are not looking for something that has anything to do with cotton. The tee cannot heal your feelings about your body, and asking it to is like expecting a good pair of shoes to fix your feelings about running.

Mario Jacoby would say, and I am absolutely certain he would if he had been asked at a Zurich conference about the why of shopping, that you’re not looking for a t-shirt at all. You’re looking for the Garden of Eden.

Jacoby was a senior Jungian analyst, the kind of man who spent his career excavating what human beings actually want underneath what they say they want. His book The Longing for Paradise has nothing to do with fashion and everything to do with longings that cannot be satisfied by anything currently available, including the Everlane Dream Pima Tee and its forty-seven glowing reviews.

His argument: the longing for freedom from conflict and suffering is an eternal human dream, embodied across virtually every culture as the myth of Paradise. He traces it to our earliest experience, held and warm and fed, with no gap between need and fulfillment, no self to defend, no mirror to check. That is Paradise, and we spend the rest of our lives, in ways we would never consciously admit, trying to get back.

Now consider the white tee, and consider also the Latin word mater, which means both mother and matter—the very stuff things are made of. Soft cotton against skin, simple and easy, requiring nothing of you, as your mother did when you were a baby. The fantasy of the perfect white tee is not just about looking good. It is about feeling, for one uncomplicated moment, held. Free from the daily exhausting conflict of deciding who you are and whether that person is acceptable. The perfect tee is the Paradise Project in cotton form, which is why it can never be found at Everlane. Eden is not available for purchase; the fall already happened. If only Adam and Eve had worn a fig leaf tee, the argument would be perfectly punctuated.

There is, of course, a more poetic diagnosis than anything Freud or Jacoby managed, and it came from a man wearing a leather jacket and oversized frames that were absolutely his garment, and nobody else’s.

Bono, yes, that Bono, articulated the entire theoretical framework in 1987, in four minutes and thirty-six seconds.

I have climbed the highest mountains. I have run through the fields. I have scaled these city walls. And I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.

That’s the t-shirt drawer and the eleven almost-right boots. The midnight eBay spiral. The Brunello Cucinelli that was supposed to finally be enough, because it cost more than your first car. That’s Ernst with the toy and my dog with the tennis ball, and every capsule wardrobe flat lay arranged like an offering to a god who keeps not showing up. The Joshua Tree is a quest album about a promised land that keeps receding, and it is, in retrospect, a four-minute-thirty-six-second white tee.

The search is not a problem to be solved. It is a fact of being human, the gap (not found at The Gap) between what we have and what we sense, somewhere in the body, that we were made for.

In the Repetition Compulsion, when you keep buying the same thing because you are, with tremendous determination and absolutely no self-awareness, you might be trying to make fetch happen (see Mean Girls, the movie).

The white tee may not be your garment, maybe it never was. It looks extraordinary on your friend with the long neck and the unselfconscious posture, and that particular quality of not caring that cannot be purchased at any price point, including Brunello Cucinelli. On you( or rather, on me), it goes slightly wrong in a way you cannot diagnose or correct, because the problem is not the tee. You and the tee have fundamentally incompatible personalities. This is not a tragedy; it is information. The tragedy is spending fifteen years and several thousand dollars arguing with the information and ignoring it.

Stand in the dressing room, look with clear eyes, and say it: fetch is not happening. Not today, not in the next size up, not in the slightly more expensive version. Then go find the thing that actually is yours.

And, the next time you’re standing in a dressing room holding a black dress while your mom reminds you, with increasing exasperation, that you already own ten exactly like it, look her dead in the eye and say with complete authority that you are engaging in Wiederholungszwang. She won’t know what it means—but you will.

Self-knowledge doesn’t have to mean self-denial. You are not required to put the dress back as proof that therapy worked. The point of understanding why you do something is not always to stop doing it. Sometimes it’s to do it consciously, with your eyes open, without the low-grade anxiety of a person who suspects they have a problem but would rather not look at it directly. And sometimes understanding tells you to stop, full stop. The point is that you’ll know the difference.

Name the compulsion. Know the ghost you’re chasing. And then, if it’s genuinely yours and not just another round of fetch, buy the damn dress.

Full disclosure: I have never found a white t-shirt that I look good in. Not once. Not in forty years of trying, not at any price point, not in any fabric, not in any cut. I am, by every measure established in this essay, a person who was handed the wrong holy grail and has spent decades arguing with the information.

I presently have a white linen tee from Madewell in my shopping cart.

Wiederholungszwang and all.

What is it that you buy on repeat? What motivates the repurchase? Ghost or rumor? Tell me in the comments.

When I see a tattoo, and it’s mostly women that I notice (I suppose because I can more easily see myself in them), something complicated happens inside me. Wonder and awe. There’s a cartoon character inked on the forearm of a 25-year-old, and I want to pull up a chair and ask her everything. Why this character? What quality does she carry that you wanted on your body? Is she fierce, or funny, or does she transform? Are you borrowing her power, or announcing you already have it? Has she changed you, having her on your body? Is she a hope or a memory or something altogether other? When did you get it? What was happening then? But I go mute, I silence my assorted inquiries as I don’t even know her.

The character who has a permanent home on the arm of this stranger is Hello Kitty. And interestingly, Hello Kitty has no mouth.

This is not a design oversight. Sanrio’s creator made her deliberately, intentionally mute. The official explanation is that she speaks through the heart of whoever is looking at her, reflecting your emotions back rather than expressing her own. She is, in the most precise psychological sense, a projective surface. She means whatever you need her to mean, and she will never contradict you, because she cannot speak. What does it mean to make that permanent? To seal onto your skin the one image that, by design, says nothing, and therefore can say everything? I’ll come back to this.

So Hello Kitty has no mouth, but then again, neither do any of the tattoos, not really. Even the ones with words are not quite speaking. They are pointing. and gesturing toward something that happened, something felt, something wanted — but the story behind the gesture belongs entirely to the person wearing it, and they are under no obligation to tell it. Even the declarations of love, for a person, a place, a lyric in tattoo form, those too don't tell the story I am looking for. And even those worded tattoos unnerve me in a different way. Not because love is untrustworthy, but because forever is a very long time to be right about Metallica.

This is not judgment. I want to be very, very clear about that; It is wonder. It is the kind of genuine psychological curiosity that keeps me up at night and, apparently, writing a Substack called The Material Unconscious.

WE NEVER LEFT THE GARDEN

I once guest lectured at Lake Forest College in Illinois, presenting my graduate thesis: “The Genesis of Shame, the Fig Leaf of Fashion, and Its Place in Psychotherapy.” The premise, which I will never stop finding endlessly rich, is this: Adam and Eve weren’t just covering up in the garden. They were doing what humans have been doing ever since, using clothing simultaneously to hide and to reveal. The irony at the heart of the myth is devastating and perfect. The moment they covered themselves, God knew everything. The very fact that they covered up was their confession.

My thesis argument was that we never left the garden. We are still doing this, every single morning, when we get dressed. We are hiding things we’re ashamed of and signaling things we desperately want seen (and not just physically). Therapy has barely touched this, and fashion has almost entirely ignored it.

The young women in that class were loving the conversation about why we wear what we wear, and somehow, organically, we ended up on tattoos, something I hadn’t written a single word about in my thesis. But they wanted to talk about them. And I, as I always am when it comes to why people put things on their bodies, wanted to learn.

WHY THAT IMAGE?

The question I kept asking, in the gentlest way I know how, was: Why did you choose that tattoo? What does it mean to you?

I ask this the same way I ask it in a depth psychology session when someone brings a dream: why did your psyche choose that image, and not another? Because, as I like to say, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream. The images we are drawn to, in sleep or in ink, are not random. They are dispatches from somewhere deeper than mere preference.

I mean this the same way I mentally ask it when I question the why of how someone is dressed. What are you saying? What are you hiding? Is this a quality you already have and want to amplify, the way someone wears red to a job interview because they feel powerful and want the room to know it? Or is it more like the hermit crab, crawling into a shell that doesn’t belong to it, borrowing the armor, the signal, the story: I am this. I belong here. I am of this tribe.

In Depth psychology, we talk about the persona. Carl Jung’s term for the social mask, the curated self we present to the world. Clothing is its most literal, most democratic expression. A tattoo, though, is something more radical. It’s not a mask, it’s a merger. You’re not wearing the image; you are the image. You’ve collapsed the distance between the symbol and the self.

That is, frankly, extraordinary. And when I think about having a permanent symbol on my own body, I am genuinely terrified— the commitment is too high for me.

FOR THE EYE OF THE OTHER

When someone gets a tattoo on their back, their shoulder blade, or the back of their neck, they will never see it on themselves directly. They are placing a symbol on their body for an audience they cannot join. Which makes it closer to clothing than it might first appear, and also stranger than clothing, because the commitment is permanent and the primary viewer is someone else entirely, which is a different statement than having it hidden on the inside of the wrist.

But even the tattoos you can see, on your forearm, your wrist, your hand, may not primarily be for the self either. They may be for the self you want to become. Or they may need no audience at all, functioning like so much clothing that is seemingly indifferent to being witnessed. But a tattoo that is visible when one is out in the world will be seen, even if it wasn’t intended for that. A tattoo can be a private note to oneself, or it may require the other to complete its psychological function.

Which raises something I find genuinely interesting about how we talk to strangers about tattoos. I would never walk up to someone I just met and ask: What is the psychological significance of wearing a black leather jacket? That would be bizarre, invasive, and presumptuous. And yet people ask about tattoos all the time, with an ease and intimacy that clothing questions never seem to carry. Why is that? Is it something about their permanence that inspires inquiry?

I think it’s because the tattoo announces, by its very existence, that a deliberate, costly, permanent decision was made. The leather jacket could be a habit, an inheritance, something grabbed off a rack without much thought, something borrowed, or soon to be donated. The tattoo cannot be discarded so easily, and its ownership is undeniable. It signals: I chose this, on purpose, forever. That announced intentionality might signal an implicit invitation, even if it isn’t. The person has already declared that this image matters enough to make permanent, so asking about it might feel less intrusive than asking about something they might have barely considered—though that isn’t always a welcome inquiry.

There is also the vulnerability factor, as the tattoo is in the skin, not on it. Asking about it feels intimate. And paradoxically, intimacy is often easier to enter than the apparently trivial question of why someone is wearing what they’re wearing. Fashion questions may feel superficial. Tattoo questions feel deep. Even when they are, at their root, asking the same thing.

OBJECT CONSTANCY

People often tell me I’m stylish. That isn’t something I think about myself. I do see and know that I care, and given that I think obsessively about the psychology of dress and run a publication with the words “material unconscious” in the title, this is perhaps not surprising. But I want to be honest about the limits of self-knowledge, because they’re relevant here.

We can never fully see ourselves. The strange reality is that we can only see ourselves in photographs or mirrors, flat, reversed, two-dimensional approximations. Our own back is perpetually out of sight. This is not just a physical fact; it’s a psychological one. Not only can’t we see our physical self fully, and we also can’t fully see the psychological ways we signal to others. We may think we’re signaling confidence, and we can be signaling anxiety. We think we’re dressed down, and we are dressed for battle. The self we think we’re putting forward and the self others actually receive are often complete strangers to each other.

This is one of the things I love most about depth psychology: it takes the unconscious seriously as an author. You didn’t just grab those clothes. Something in you chose them.

My own style was shaped, as I’ve written about before, by growing up inside the clothing business, five seasons a year, an endless parade of new trends, the relentlessness of it all. I turned, as a survival mechanism, to the classic. The evergreen. The thing that would not demand I keep up with it. What I wanted, through my wardrobe, was what psychoanalysts call object constancy, the comfort of knowing something reliable would be there. Same neutral sweaters, blazers, and jeans, with slight variations, for thirty years.

That craving has a name. It’s a concept from D.W. Winnicott, the British pediatrician turned psychoanalyst, the man who understood what children actually need from the people who raise them. Object constancy is the developmental achievement of being able to hold a loving image of someone even when they’re absent, frustrating, or inconsistent. Infants don’t have it at first. They operate in a world of pure now: you’re here, you’re everything; you’re gone, you’re nowhere. Object constancy develops when enough reliable presence accumulates that the child can carry the relationship internally. The person doesn’t have to be physically there to feel real and safe.

When that early constancy doesn’t come easily, when the environment was chaotic, unpredictable, emotionally unreliable, people find it elsewhere. In rituals. In music that never changes. In a closet that stays the same no matter what the world does. The classic wardrobe isn’t just an aesthetic preference. It’s an internal working model made external. It says: this I can count on. This will not leave me. This will not surprise me in a way I cannot bear.

I understand using clothing as psychological infrastructure, not just intellectually, but in the wardrobe I have quietly built over thirty years.

CLOTHING AS TRANSITIONAL OBJECT

Winnicott gave us something else that matters here: the transitional object.

You know it as the beloved, bedraggled stuffed animal you may still have. The corner of the blanket that had to come everywhere, or tantrums would ensue. The thing the child holds in the gap between self and world, neither fully me nor fully other, but living in a space between. The transitional object lets the child practice being alone without being abandoned. Transitional objects are portable and chosen. And crucially, they can eventually be set down. Their power is partly in their tenuousness. You pick it up every day. Every day, you choose it again.

Clothing is an adult transitional object. It touches your body, and it goes where you go. It can be changed when you change. Every morning, in the ritual of getting dressed, you are negotiating the boundary between your inner world and the outer one: who am I today, and how do I want to meet the world?

For a long time, I thought tattoos were trying to be transitional objects, the ultimate version, the one that could never be lost or left behind. And I thought that was why they terrified me: because they overshoot. They destroy the very quality that makes transitional objects work. The power of the teddy bear is that you keep choosing it. The power of the classic blazer is that you keep reaching for it. The daily re-choosing is the comfort. An already-decided object cannot hold the anxiety of a self that is still becoming, because it refuses to participate in the becoming.

But I’ve been reconsidering this, because I think tattoos may not be transitional objects at all. I think they may belong to an entirely different category of psychic function, one far less about the ego’s need for comfort.

There is also this: clothing is a daily ritual. You put it on, and you take it off. You negotiate who you are every single morning at the closet door. The tattoo was a ritual once, and now it simply is. Tattoos are more like a chosen scar, and I don’t mean that in an aesthetic way, as they can be incredibly beautiful works of art. Scars carry an experience inside them; with scars, we just didn’t choose them.

TALISMAN, VOW, WITNESS MARK

Transitional objects belong to the ego. They are chosen, managed, picked up, and set down. They help the developing child to self-regulate anxiety and practice separation. The teddy bear is fundamentally about soothing. But tattoos don’t feel like soothing ( and not just because of the physical pain of getting one). They feel like something older, more primitive in the best sense of the word, ritualistic, and the stuff of initiation.

Consider: in virtually every culture that has ever practiced body marking, and that is most of them, across most of human history, the function of the mark was never decorative—it was talismanic. The mark was intended to be protective, warding off harm, and in some cultures it was intended to preserve identity against its erasure under pressure, suffering, or time. That history has a dark mirror: the tattoo as branding, as forced mark, as number on an arm. The same gesture of permanence, turned against the person rather than chosen by them. That history matters and belongs in any honest account of what marking the body has meant.

But in its modern, artistic version, the tattoo says something more primal: I exist. This is true. Nothing that happens to me can take this away. It offers permanence as a psychological fact, not just a physical one.

That is not ego-management. It is closer to what Jung would call the Self, the totality of the psyche, conscious and unconscious, the organizing center that is always larger than what you currently know about yourself. The Self doesn’t need soothing. It has intentions the ego hasn’t caught up with yet, and the ego might not know what the Self is trying to express in its symbolic choices.

This would explain something: why the tattooed person so often cannot fully articulate why they chose that image. They just knew. That can sound like impulsivity, but it can also be the Self speaking before the ego has had time to edit.

Which brings me to the second possibility: that tattoos function less like objects and more like vows.

A vow is not chosen daily. It is declared once, and then you live from it. The priest doesn’t re-choose ordination every morning. You don’t get remarried every day. The vow creates a self that then has obligations to itself. It does not merely describe who you are; it participates in making you who you are.

This reframes the permanence entirely. The tattoo may not be saying “I will always love this”. It may be saying something more like: I am now the kind of person who loved this enough to make it permanent. That is a different psychic act. It’s not a prediction about the future. It’s a declaration about the present that reshapes what comes after.

And there is a third possibility, which may be the most human of all: the tattoo as witness mark, perhaps as testimony.

Hikers stack stones not to soothe themselves but to say: I was here. Someone was here. The body, marked, becomes the most reliable archive available, more reliable than memory, more intimate than a journal, impossible to misplace or revise. This happened to me. This mattered. This is true. The body holds the record when the mind might prefer to forget.

Some tattoos are grief. Some are survival. Some are an attempt at making something permanent in a life that, by its nature, feels dangerously impermanent. Some are something the soul required that can’t be explained. The tattoo is not a transitional object, but a monument.

And here I want to stop and say something important, something that applies to every image in this essay and every image you’ve ever put on your body, dreamed about, or reached for in your closet.

In Depth psychology, one of the first things you learn, and keep having to relearn, because the interpretive impulse is powerful and seductive, is that a symbol does not have a single meaning. Not in dreams, not in clothing, not in ink. Jung was unambiguous about this: an image means what it means to the person who carries it. The snake in your dream is not the snake in mine. The red dress is not the same red dress on every body. A cartoon character on one woman’s forearm is reclaimed childhood; on another, it is irony; on another, it is something she can’t fully explain and doesn’t need to, because the image belongs to her, not to interpretation.

This is why I ask, not because I have the answer, but because I know I don’t, and I know that the answer lives somewhere in the person who chose the image, often below the level of conscious articulation. The work is not to decode; it is to stay curious long enough that the image begins to speak for itself.

The most dangerous thing you can do with a symbol, in a dream, in a wardrobe, in a tattoo, is assume you know what it means before you’ve sat with it long enough to let it tell you. And the second most dangerous thing is to assume that because you know what it means for you, you know what it means for anyone else.

I have offered you a talisman, a vow, a witness, or a mark. These are possibilities, not diagnoses. You may read this and think: yes, exactly. Or you may think: that’s not it at all, and here is what it actually is. Both responses are the right ones. Your image belongs to you. My interpretation is just my psyche meeting yours at the border, with curiosity and without an agenda. I will never prioritize my interpretation over yours.

WHAT I HAVE TO ADMIT

I am afraid of tattoos. Not of other people’s tattoos. Of having one of my own. Even of the idea of having one.

I live very much in my head. My wardrobe is careful, considered, controlled. I change it when I change. The person with the tattoo has made a different choice. They let something be decided once and permanently. They trusted that the image they chose, even if they couldn’t fully articulate the reason. They stopped negotiating and simply marked. Coming from my place of fear, I find that impressive.

There’s a book I think about almost every time tattoos come up. Daniel Gilbert’s fantastic Stumbling on Happiness, which isn’t at all about tattoos, but accidentally is. Gilbert has spent his career at Harvard documenting one uncomfortable finding: humans are spectacularly bad at predicting what will make their future selves happy. The self at 25 and the self at 45 are different people with overlapping memories and a shared name.

And yet I am also a person of startling devotion in certain areas of my life. I found the band The Smiths at 14. Thirty-five concerts later, Morrissey’s music still lives in my psyche and my playlists. Tom Ford’s Spanish Pink lipstick was true at 30 and is true today. My closet hasn’t changed its theme in thirty years. I love the Episcopal Church partly because these exact words, on this exact day, have been spoken by generations of people who came before me, and that accumulated constancy speaks to something in my soul I am not entirely able to explain and do not entirely want to.

All of my devotions are chosen continuously. I put on the blazer this morning. I played The Smiths as I got ready for work. Even my marriage is renewed daily through presence and the small, ordinary choices of staying. The commitment is real, but it is enacted through repetition. It lives in time and is always a choice. The tattoo removes time from the equation. You don’t re-choose it; it simply is. The choice was made once, and the future self has no vote.

My psyche finds this the equivalent of being stuck in that dress at Saks, the body-conscious one that locked itself around what my mother called my “swimmer’s shoulders,” which I was convinced I was going to have to ask a sales associate to cut off for me. I stood in the dressing room rehearsing the conversation with a breathless panic. Eventually, I relaxed and went slack, and Houdini’d my way out. Ta-da!

A tattoo offers no such escape. You cannot go slack and wiggle free. And maybe, maybe, that is exactly the point.

WHAT I GENUINELY WANT TO KNOW

So here is what I genuinely want to know, and I am asking, not performing curiosity:

Is the tattoo a talisman, a mark of protection, a declaration that something in you is permanent and cannot be taken? Is it a vow, not a prediction about who you’ll be, but a commitment that shapes who you become? Or is it a witness mark, the body insisting on its own testimony when words aren’t sufficient and memory can’t be trusted?

If any of that is it, if the body is the archive, if the mark is the vow, if the image is doing something that language and clothing and daily ritual cannot do, then I don’t just understand it—I’m in awe of it.

And I’m just going to keep doing mine with a cashmere sweater.

The Material Unconscious is where depth psychology meets your dresser drawer. If this resonated, share it with someone who has a tattoo, or someone who, like me, is impressed and fascinated by the people who do.

Please subscribe if you want to bring your closet to therapy!