My fashion fast | Hannah Betts

This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

In 1992, Amnesty held its first Oxford lectures. Jacques Derrida, smouldering hotly in his Blake-Carrington-from-Dynasty-hair era, sold out the Sheldonian.

Next day, standing outside Wren’s theatre, a chap who hadn’t secured one of the tickets inquired how deconstruction’s silver fox had been. “Crap?” I replied. A frisson emanated from beside me. For, lo, it was the man himself.

Given that debate had alluded to the issue: “How can there be torture when the self doesn’t exist?” I felt he had little ground for complaint. If a detainee in an Angolan prison cell was being asked to be insouciant about subjectivity, then so could old Jacques.

Still, if one’s going to take the trouble to fabricate a self, one may as well dress it. I’ve been listening to Bella Freud’s podcast, Fashion Neurosis. The Nick Cave couch session is sublime. Heroin addiction, we learn, is a means to maintain routine.

“I look at it as the conservative’s drug,” our hero observes, “in the sense that it requires discipline … So you wake up in the morning and you have to score. And you need to take your drug in the evening. This sets up a weird stabilising process.” These are the life hacks I require.

Now that he’s off the Big H, style provides a similar framework: “A stabilising element in my life is to wake up in the morning and put on a suit, with all its structure and architecture and angles. I don’t like soft clothing. I like to be kind of kept. I think that’s when I can allow the imagination to run completely free, as long as there’s some sort of order around things.” Here is a man who knows himself and how this self functions.

Style-wise, the lull between winter and spring is a time for pondering rather than purchasing: a hibernation period, holding-off and/or palette cleanse. There is a degree of ennui developing around so-called “no-buys”.

Fashion is undoubtedly a source of eco-crise, but bitch-slapping womankind for this feels like another misogynist spin on dissing Eve for donning fig leaves.

Personally, I’m endeavouring to deploy the axiom: “Not everything amazing has to be owned by me” when succumbing to a v-hole (Vinted, a cornucopia engulfingly infinite).

Plus a spot of realism regarding the fact that — for all my devoré and diamanté — I’m only ever going to sport a black polo neck between November and March. A fashion fast also makes a good opportunity to rid yourself of a spot of late-capitalist stuffocation.

In a very Cage-type manner, imposing some keep-it-only-if-I-adore-it scheme upon our wardrobes is the most style-facilitating gesture we can make. In ridding ourselves of redundancy, we pare our dressing back to its core constituents, its expression of an essential (read: entirely inessential) self.

Maximalists will particularly benefit. I’ve been running a rolling shed, and am a sleeker, chicer creature as a result of it. Turns out, less genuinely is more.

Another core style-self generating exercise is to consider one’s staples in terms of the fashion brand to which they most obviously correspond. In my dipso, heel-clacking thirties, I was a (camp, polka-dot) Moschino-esque take on a Chanel kind of gal (bouclé and pearls), with elements of Prada (pencil skirts and twinsets) thrown in.

Twenty years on, dog-walking, fifty-something moi is all things Yves Saint Laurent. That is: mannish jackets, long-legged trews, block-heeled boots, plus rakish neckwear.

Designers take their house codes and transform them into a language, and these languages can be used to articulate your own style, regardless of whether you buy in.

Another means of working out who you are in garb is to put yourself in a couture scenario via a tailor or seamstress. Most recently on my part, this occurred at milliner Victoria Grant’s atelier.

On going bespoke, one is faced with a series of decisions as to the precise shade, size, shape, fit and position in which to wear one’s headpiece: from what scale of mesh to use in its veil, via the degree of sheen to your sequins, to which bauble should perch aloft it.

Not only must one know explicitly what one wants, one must convey this. Strikingly unBritish as it feels to be so exacting, so demanding, these are the questions we should ask ourselves ahead of every garment purchase.

Only imagine how impeccable our wardrobes would be if we did. We, in turn, would become ourselves — our “selves” at the very least.