I used to be in a toxic relationship with fashion. For years, I believed that every new outfit brought me closer to the version of myself I thought I needed to be. Buy more, become more. Become more, feel more worthy. It felt logical at the time, but the truth is, my insecurities ran much deeper than the pockets on most women’s jeans, and certainly deeper than the pockets of my bank account.

I wasn’t just shopping for clothes. I was shopping for belonging. For identity. For a sense of place in a world that didn’t make room for who I naturally was. And the cruel irony? The further I reached for a manufactured version of myself, the more I erased the real one.

But my story isn’t isolated. It was happening at the exact moment the fashion industry  was shifting from necessity, to expression and art form, to an industry engineered around insecurity.  When retailers realized they could no longer rely on exclusivity and craftsmanship alone, they pivoted to selling aspiration, identity, and the promise of reinvention. Fashion became less about expression and more about escape. The messaging was clear: who you are is never enough, but who you could be is just one purchase away.

I internalized that message long before I could understand it. And like so many of us coming of age during the rise of fast fashion, algorithmic advertising, and hyper-commodified pop culture, I learned to become palatable, I learned to silence parts of myself.

Clothes and fashion are woven into the human identity.  Both are a reflection of the human condition. Both protect us from harmful exposure, but only one was intended to. Fashion, the industry built around our basic need to wear clothing, was also once a medium of expression. Now, it feels like protective armor we hide our real selves behind out of fear of not being accepted. 

And, sure, through this new era fashion industry, clothing is more accessible than ever. But at what cost? Hyper-commercialization and its offspring, consumer overconsumption, has created a disconnect between creativity, ethics, and fashion production that is placing the industry on a downward slope. We’ve traded quality and durability for immediate gratification and disregard craftsmanship over breakneck, unrestrained production, embedding a disposable mentality into the minds of consumers. The fashion industry is now a parasite of corporate greed, fueled by predatory marketing, and feeding off consumer insecurities. Fashion holds a mirror to the human condition, reflecting that this disconnect isn’t exclusive to an industry, but a reflection of emotional and moral neglect that disconnects humanity from itself. 

In the second half of the 19th century, fashion became highly regarded as art when Parisian dressmaker, Charles Frederick Worth, created the first ever couture fashion house. His model of designing two seasonal collections of garments, and showcasing the collections at salon shows laid the foundation for fashion weeks and how fashion designers build their collections to this day.  

Haute Couture, which, in French, translates to high dressmaking, was a means of fashion production exclusively available to royalty, and later, upper middle class elite. Haute Couture is the process of creating garments that are custom fit to its wearer, and hand-made with the highest quality fabrics and materials. It became a legally protected term in 1945, and the primary business model in fashion following the opening of prestigious fashion houses like Chanel, Christian Dior, Saint Laurent, Schiaparelli, Balenciaga, and Givenchy, at the beginning of the 20th century. 

These French fashion houses would release their exclusive, lavish collections twice a year, and design trends trickled down to department store manufacturers to adapt to the mass market in the US. While developed for the “mass market,” the garments being produced and sold in department stores weren’t accessible to most Americans due to regional access, class division, and racial politics. The everyday American family either purchased sewing patterns from publishing companies, like Buttericks, and made their own clothes, or scraped their coins together to save enough money and buy from a mail order catalog like Sears Roebuck or Montgomery Ward. When seams ripped or clothing didn’t fit, most families were equipped with the skills, or had easier access to tools and services to repair their garments or make their own alterations. What we now call, “slow fashion,” prioritizing quality, longevity, and conscious consumption, was just fashion, and it was the standard. By the late 20th century, the forces that upheld craftsmanship were beginning to unravel. A world that was once more slow and intentional, transformed into one that was more fast and unwitting. Quietly at first, fashion transformed with it. 

Policy, globalization, and massive changes to the social order changed our relationship with fashion in the late 80s. The influence of pop music, women gaining more economic freedom, counterculturalism, and the rejection of materialism and excess in the early 90s brought luxury retailers to their knees, as they started to see huge declines in sales, some even closing their doors for good. Out of fear of becoming obsolete, fashion retailers pivoted to a new business model that catered to the everyday consumer.  American brands like Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, and Tommy Hilfiger thrived, centering their product development and marketing efforts to the common American vs. the not-so-common elite. Fashion houses transformed to cult-adjacent brands, selling not just clothes, but self-expression and lifestyle, a commodity anyone with a line of credit could buy. 

As image became more commodified, the demand for more clothes, better styles, and even lower prices intensified. Commercial advertisement deregulation in the 80s and the lift on apparel import quotas in the mid-90s made it even easier for companies to prey on consumer vulnerabilities, exploit overseas labor, and produce at an unprecedented, unethical capacity. To offload this excess supply, demand had to be fabricated. Want had to be manufactured. Identity had to be sold.

The rampant technological advancements of the new millennium ushered in the final boss of fashion. Social media began as a place to connect with friends and share our interests, but quickly morphed into a repository of images telling us who to be, how to look, and what to aspire to. A stimulant designed to hijack our attention and weaken our ability to even recognize ourselves.

While all of this was happening on a global scale, it was also happening inside of me.

I was in 6th grade, only 11 years old, when my own self-erasure began. I was a little Black girl from a working-class town in Maryland who had just moved to an upper-middle-class, predominantly White suburb in Southern California. For the first time in my life, I was the only Black girl in my class, and one of maybe five in my entire school. Growing up, I was a shy kid, and we moved around a lot, but through all the transitions, I never struggled to find my people, and I never felt the need to shed parts of myself just to belong until we were on a different coast. For the first time in my life, I was the minority, the other.

I gradually edged my way into a double bind of identity. One that’s both hyper visible and invisible, a psychological experience that I didn’t even have language for at the time, and can only describe in retrospect.  For me It was like being recognized for my appearance, and at the same time, scrutinized for any sense of individuality. Praised for my strengths, but condemned for my softness. Judged when I was too loud, but disregarded when I was too silent. It was observing how others were fanatic with my culture, but agitated if I took any pride in it or corrected their misunderstandings. And choosing to be around people that were happy to take from my reserve of wisdom, encouragement or solace, but reluctant to reciprocate and restore it, or worse, viewed its restoration as unnecessary. Too visible to be fully myself, and too invisible to be fully recognized. A paradox of identity where I existed loudly in perception, and quiet in my humanity. 

I could feel myself studying a room before I walked into it. Adjusting my tone, my hair, my clothes, my interests, putting in most of my efforts to understand the environment so I could match it, while neglecting any efforts to understand myself. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was becoming the kind of consumer the new fashion system was built for: insecure, impressionable, and desperate for cues on how to fit in. As brands shifted from selling clothes to selling identity, I started to internalize that my own identity would never be considered enough. And so I did what millions of us eventually did, and still do: I tried to buy one.

As the industry doubled down on insecurity-driven marketing, I doubled down on shrinking myself to meet the moment. It was no coincidence that the more fashion pushed out the message that identity could be bought, the more I pushed down the truest parts of my own. By the time I entered my early 20’s, I was fully unraveling into the 2010’s culture of escapism: excessive partying, binging, performative confidence, and toxic situationships that mirrored my lack of self-worth. At the same time, fast fashion retailers and manufacturers were churning out new trends every week, knowing that girls like me, girls with vices that enabled emotional numbness and suppressed authenticity, would buy in. 

By my late 20’s, I was running on empty.  I couldn’t feel anything but pressure, heaviness, and it was starting to become harder to breathe. A response to years of self-suppression, and emotional avoidance, I developed an anxiety disorder, and high-functioning depression. The little girl inside of me that just wanted to be seen, and accepted, without performing, had been fully confined inside a prison of emotions associated with “otherness,” and if I wanted to breathe again, I needed to set her free. 

My habits of consumption weren't random. They were coping mechanisms, survival tactics, I learned from a system that enables emptiness, and low self-worth. And the key to unlocking my freedom wasn’t just confronting the toxic relationship I had with fashion, but confronting the toxic relationship I had with myself. The relationship I formed with myself out of shame, out of feeling inadequate, and unlovable. If I wanted to liberate myself, I needed to remember who I was before I started adjusting to become more palatable. Before I was adultified, against my will, by a system that doesn’t give space for little Black girls to just be little girls. And I also had to forgive myself for who I had to become in order to balance the pressures of hyper visibility and invisibility I had taken on at just 11 years and carried into womanhood. I had to embrace and love every version of my inner world, despite the messages and feedback I was receiving in my outer world. 

Healing is not linear, and I still get those feelings of insecurity and inadequacy. I’m human. Therapy helped me become more emotionally aware and regulated. Consistent, regular exercise helped me release suppressed emotions that had been stored in my body for years, and just slowing down taught me how to inhabit myself again. But I still needed to redirect some of that residual, escapist energy into something productive. I had stopped creating when I became distracted looking for validation, and reconnecting with my creativity was the best way to recondition the behaviors that relied heavily on consumption when I felt triggered. Fashion, consumption, used to be a means of hiding myself, but now it's become one of my favorite forms of expression, personal fulfillment and my vehicle of empowerment. When my life started to become more slow, conscious, and internally motivated, so did my relationship with fashion. The more I go through the continuous process of making clothes,  the more I source for quality vs. quantity, and the more I “touch grass,” the more I appreciate, and the less I want to escape my reality, or consume for consumption’s sake. 

Both clothing and fashion represent our humanity. Clothing represents our basic human needs to be protected from harmful exposure, a physiological means of survival. And when clothing became fashion, it meant self-expression, cultural identity, and art form. It represents our unique human ability to self-actualize, and journey through human progress in a way that connects us to a higher purpose and to each other. There is still potential for redemption, but if we continue leaning heavily into the commercialized version of the industry, and ourselves, we stunt our progress. If fashion is the mirror to the human condition, then perhaps its redemption depends on our own: reclaiming our right to be seen without selling, to belong without disappearing, to express rather than escape, to appreciate without possessing, and to be humans, not commodities. 🖤

Thank you so much for reading! I spend a lot of time researching and pondering to create thoughtful content, consider buying me a coffee, the caffeine keeps me grounded (and sane 🥰).