Dressing for the Body You Have Now, Not the One You Used to Have or Hope to Have

Most people's wardrobes contain two parallel collections. The clothes they wear now, and the clothes they are keeping for later, for the version of themselves that is ten pounds lighter, or six months younger, or slightly more like the person they have always intended to become. The second collection takes up a significant proportion of available hanging space and is almost never worn. Research by the clothing care brand Persil, published in 2022, found that the average person in the UK wears only about a third of the clothes in their wardrobe regularly. The rest is aspiration, nostalgia, and guilt.

Getting dressed for the body you actually have, right now, as it exists today, is a simpler idea than it sounds and a harder practice than it ought to be. It requires letting go of the aspirational wardrobe, which for many people feels like letting go of the aspiration itself. It is not. Dressing well now is not an act of surrender. It is an act of self-respect, and there is a growing body of research in the field of enclothed cognition, a term coined by researchers Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky in a 2012 paper published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, suggesting that the clothes we wear influence our mood, confidence, and performance in measurable ways.

Getting dressed for the body you have now is not an act of surrender. It is an act of self-respect.

The practical starting point is fit. More than any other variable in dressing, the fit of a garment determines whether it looks good on you, regardless of your size, age, or shape. A well-fitting jacket in an unfashionable colour looks better than a fashionable jacket that pulls across the shoulders or gaps at the waist. The tailoring industry has always known this. Most retail clothing is sized for a statistical average that does not represent most bodies, partly because standardised sizing makes mass production economically viable.

The solution is alterations, which are significantly cheaper than most people assume and more transformative than they expect. A skilled tailor can take in a waist, shorten a hem, narrow a sleeve, or reshape a collar in an afternoon and for less than the cost of a new garment. The clothes you already own, properly fitted, are frequently better than what you would buy to replace them, and the alteration extends the life of something you already have rather than adding to the environmental cost of something new.