Dressing badly abroad
Substack's worst fashion diary
I went on an incredible trip this summer. I flew to New York, Boston and Cape Cod and had just the most gorgeous, fantastic, exciting time.
Before I left, I had notions of getting some nice holiday pictures (with me in them). Or at the very least some acceptable pictures with me in them. In which I look nice or acceptable or at least like I had made a conscious choice about what I had put on my body. I planned to take with me, not clothes, but outfits (very different things). In pursuit of outfits I went to the shops and tried on some clothes with which I hoped to construct outfits. I almost had a nervous breakdown in an Urban Outfitters. To put it bluntly, not one item of clothing in the three storey Urban Outfitters Glasgow branch came close to being able to contain my, admittedly arguably ludicrously sized, tits.
Every single item of clothing stocked by Urban Outfitters Glasgow in June 2024 made me look like this woman:
When I tried to put on one dress only to discover it was actually an adult fucking babygrow, I almost spontaneously exploded all over the changing room. Fortunately I managed to contain myself, leaving nary an entrail nor even a tear on any of the ridiculously proportioned clothing. I fear the only reason I managed to avoid tear-staining the clothes was that I have been wearing the same pair of monthly contact lenses for a year and, by this point, my eyeballs are to normal eyeballs what raisins are to grapes.
I made an attempt in a Primark where the only aesthetically acceptable item had a tying mechanism completely beyond my comprehension. Like seriously. Look at this. It’s not on backwards.
Genuinely how is this meant to be tied because surely to christ it’s not like this? Full cleave? Surely not. I waited in a queue of upwards of thirty people to purchase a pair of sunglasses identical to the pair I already own. Deliberately.
I went to Monki. I tried on a skirt. I took it back out and tried it in the smaller size. I hung it back up. I walked around the shop. I tried it on again. I hung it back up. I immediately took it back off the rack and tried it on again. This activity was avidly spectated by all three staff members as, during all this dithering and blithering, I was the sole customer. I bought the skirt. My mother later said it resembled a wrinkled binbag. She also said it was ‘very me.’ It cost me £40 and I’ve kept it and worn it in public.
I went home and fashioned some outfits out of things I already had. A big Hawaiian shirt over a tiny t-shirt. A baggy gingham wrap dress. A shirt tied up into a crop top. A lovely wee summer dress one might wear to a picnic if one was married to a mad man from Mad Men. In the end, I packed a series of oversized t-shirts and some corresponding cycling shorts (standard black, yes, but also an extremely garish bright red — it’s called fashion, look it up). A toddler’s uniform. I committed to that outfit for sixteen days. I took nothing else.
I scroll through other people’s holiday pictures and everyone always looks good, and like they did that deliberately. They’re wearing flowing flowery dresses in Italy. They’re wearing bikinis in Thailand. They’re wearing tiny shorts and stringy tops at a music festival in Glasgow because what is one thing Scottish people will never do? Dress for the weather.
Is it too much to ask that, having gone to the bother of flying across the Atlantic, I might be able to have one picture in which I look even a wee bit sexy? Yes, evidently, it is.
Things are different off camera, let me tell you. As soon as I land on American soil, it becomes immediately apparent that I have contracted some kind of animal magnetism from all the recycled air on the plane. I do always find that American men are a lot more forward than Scottish men, i.e. they approach you in the street! They talk to you on the subway! They ask you out at the Top of the Rock viewing platform — what is this, Sleepless in Seattle? (Unfortunately he had no dead wife or precocious child so I had to say no to my romcom meet-cute on this occasion.) An interesting piece of data I gathered is that if you cut about in an I <3 NY t-shirt (I was deliberately leaning into the cringe, okay?? The red cycling shorts went with that one), men will swarm to you like flies to the overflowing trash can I sat next to while enjoying a lovely coconut bun from a Chinese bun shop. My working hypothesis is that the I <3 NY of it all screams ‘here for a good time, not a long time’ at a pitch that only men in want of a one night stand can hear. Maybe my broad Scottish accent has a similar effect and I’m unfairly generalising American men and their forwardness.
I often think about getting old (the favourable option) or dying (unfavourable, but inevitable). In an ideal scenario, I would like, when I am 80, to be able to look back on my life and say: ‘I had fun, I achieved so much, and I perhaps was not exactly hot but with a bit of effort I could at least come close — and I have evidence to back that up, behold my instagram from 2024.’ But the unfortunate fact of the matter is that hot girls dress like hot girls. Hot girls don’t dress like toddlers.
My travel companion turned out to be so objectively terrible at taking pictures — also, unteachable, cool! — that I can’t bring myself to include one, even for a laugh. You don’t know what I look like irl and I can’t run the risk of you thinking I look like what I look like from the perspective of an iPhone 11 held level with my hairline, 4 inches from my face, angled up. PSA: That is not how you get both a person and a view in a photo.
The moment of realisation that that’s what the trip’s pictures were going to look like, I thanked all the gods, and the urban outfitters, that I had decided to opt for sixteen identical comfortable outfits (if ever a witch transforms me into a cartoon character doomed to wear one outfit on repeat for eternity, I intend to go for comfort over style). Imagine sweeping through the streets of New York in a maxi dress or the Cape Cod winds blowing your mini dress inside out, and still you have no nice pictures. Doesn’t bear thinking about.
So I may not have any hot or sexy or even let’s face it particularly nice pictures of myself in the cities and seasides of America. But what do I have? The memory of a potentially once-in-a-lifetime trip during which I had sixteen incredible days seeing new parts of the world with the people I love most and felt elated at every moment of every day? Ugh. Tragic.
**when I typed the first couple of sentences of this, I fully intended it to be a ‘piece’ about feeling insecure and hating how I look in pictures but, y’know, fuck that**
I liked what this article evolved into! The struggle with clothing is real. My arms are to long. I have a butt, but my pants always want to slide down >.< Maybe its the way I walk, IDK. Comfort over anything though and you managed!
i love love love your writing and humor and struggle w so many of the same things - i want that perfect photo but tbh cameramen are few and far between đŸ˜Ÿ heres to living and having a good time instead of just having the photos to prove that to ourselves!!