Is a Chloë Sévigny-style wardrobe purge the key to maturity? | Eva Wiseman

This spring, when Chloë Sévigny announced that she was going through a closet clearance in New York, several feelings came over me at once, a sort of poisoning. First, obviously, jealousy: a vintage clearance sale is my favorite way to shop, but I couldn't be there in New York to rummage through its shelves, collect its denim chaps, its Prada backpacks , her vintage kilts or her Miu Miu clogs, coming home with a bitch ready to start the rest of my life as an enigmatic ingénue.

Second, too bad. I recognized him in the eyes of the women in the very long queue, documented online. They looked away from the cameras, obviously not wanting to be seen there, waiting, their eyes like those of shitting dogs. Yes, they wanted the clothes, but no, they really didn't want to be seen lacking. It's hard to stay cool when you're trying to buy the clothes you want because someone cooler wore them. The fact of wanting them, of believing them to be imbued with the spirit of Sévigny, profoundly undermines the project of remaining unique, suspicious, necessarily disinterested. But they waited in line anyway, and I kept scrolling, idly wondering what I would have looked like in that Victorian lace blouse with those high-waisted Margiela pants, and how that might have transformed me, improved me. or settle down.

The third was inspiration. The Sévigny closet clearance threw me into crisis. It happens every decade or so: I look in the mirror and realize that I'm not dressing the way I think I'd dress. And I'll look in my wardrobe and realize there's nothing I can stand to wear. My vintage dresses make me look like John Travolta in Hairspray. My heels suddenly become obscene. Rigid denim seems like absolute madness. Everything white is now a sickening gray; anything made of wool is now a buffet of moths. But a new problem for me, as the clothing crisis of this decade arrives, is that there seems to be no longer a reliable place to buy replacements.

I enjoy Vestiaire Collective's wonderful games, that "Maybe This Time" scroll, but there is no reliable place where I can comfortably browse on a Saturday afternoon, languorously fingering sparkly tops and clashing with old selves. Charity shops are now full of Shein pieces of indefinite use, vintage stores are few and far between due to inevitably low stocks, and the high street reminds me how much I miss Topshop. I choose to remember this place, this magical place, through rose-tinted glasses, a pair of which I bought there once for £5.99. In addition to the "basics", which for many of us range from a white T-shirt to a pair of silver shoes from the 1970s, there was always room for the crazy and silly, the sculpted and the dreamers, and you could see all the fashion if you stand near the escalators and turn slowly.

This is the incentive for Sévigny to purge his collection and sell this warehouse of stuff, she said, was in the process of becoming a mother, which struck me as a depressing acknowledgment of the limitations of parenthood from a woman who seems so alive and free. But yes, also, I understand. And I thought maybe I should copy it. I imagined that famous photograph taken from space, where a mountain of discarded clothing is clearly visible, blue against the brown of the earth, and I imagined the same thing in my living room. Can I take it? Real people (rather than Vinted or eBay avatars) sifting through my vintage dresses with their judgmental little hands? Throw away the best pieces of me with a wrinkled nose and a no? Maybe.

Maybe accepting that I'm no longer the person who thought nothing of walking to work in a silk dress 1940s and 3 inch platforms is like giving this dress and platforms. , and leaving space for something new to enter, whether psychic or cotton. Maybe having these old suits hanging there, all deadly, is stopping me from moving forward into adulthood, in corduroy pants and a nice ironed shirt. Of course, I'm not deluding myself for one second that my pile of clothes – a pile of disappointed housewives in muted silver tones, their husbands' secretaries and a drummer whose band had a certain success around the introduction of decimalization – would provoke a negative reaction. queue like at Sévigny, but above all, they are mine, and I loved it...