I gag at the stench of sewage as we squelch over the bedroom carpet and switch my cellphone to camera mode. “Are you ready?” my boyfriend asks me.
Until now, I thought I was. Yesterday, the guy from the council stood with us in what had once been our backyard and was now a mud mountain and told us he was surprised at how calm we were. “Most of the people we see can’t speak because they are in bits,” he said. “The ones that can speak tell us to f... off.”
We don’t tell him to f... off. We say “thank you” when he slaps a yellow sticker on our front door. The insurers have told us a yellow sticker will make it faster to process our claim. We don’t say f... off to the insurers, either. We are struck by how kind they are when they eventually answer the phone after a wait of more than three hours. We are grateful we even had a policy – because we really weren’t sure we did, or what it covered – and half the people in our street, comprised mostly of state house tenants, don’t have any insurance at all. With no cover, despite the warnings from the council blokes about contamination, there were people scrambling to salvage stuff out of their houses until a couple of days ago, when word spread that the neighbours two down from us had wound up in hospital with E coli. So now, our street is a ghost town and everything that was once inside our homes – furniture, carpet, clothes, books, childhood toys – is piled up along the berm. It looks like what it is. A natural disaster.
“Are you ready?” My boyfriend lifts the first box up and I hold the camera poised to take the insurance pics. I steel myself like crazy Tanya in The White Lotus, teetering on her heels on the railings of that super yacht in the final episode. “You got this!”
“Yup. Ready. Open it,” I confirm, but before he can even use the Stanley knife on the sodden cardboard, it disintegrates in his hands and my clothes come tumbling out in a sloppy heap. Until now, I have been pragmatic, almost Buddhist-like, in my insistence that “stuff is just stuff”. Material possessions don’t matter. Now a gasp of grief catches in my throat.
I didn’t know what was inside the box until now. I see my silver Balenciaga boots, the ones I walked through a snowstorm to buy at Selfridges on the day my divorce was finalised, and beside them the ultra-rare Prada bamboo scaffold heels I bought at Fred Segal on my way to an interview with Karl Lagerfeld. There are my Karen Walker denim flares I wore when she and I travelled together to London for Fashion Week, and my fake goatskin coat that looks so real it got me thrown out of a vegan restaurant in Berlin.
I take the photos and leave the clothes on the floor in the filth. As we walk out of the house, for the first time since the flood I cry.
After the flood, we think of things as good luck versus bad luck. Good luck that we all escaped unharmed, including the pets. Bad luck that we were building a walk-in wardrobe, so all our stuff was on the floor when the water rose up from beneath the carpet like something out of The Shining.
‘We have to shop’
“I don’t want to shop yet. It feels too soon,” my boyfriend says. But we’ve been mooching about in the exact same clothes for two weeks now and we have no choice. We have to shop.
And that is when I realise: what the heck am I brooding about? This isn’t a tragedy. It’s an opportunity. How many times in your life do you get a clean slate, an insurance payout, and you are literally forced to go shopping? Suddenly, my nightmare is everyone’s dream scenario. Honestly, who wouldn’t want to ditch all their clothes and start from scratch?
“Ohmygod,” a fashion editor friend says. “If it was me, I’d dress head to toe in cashmere from The Row.”
Good plan. Except The Row’s designs are heinously expensive. A single jumper would probably blow my entire budget. Besides, cashmere comfort dressing sounds a bit like something for my future, in 10 years’ time when I turn 65. I don’t want to slide into demure sophistication too soon. Then again, I’m too old for most of the clothes I used to gravitate to. Quandary: I don’t want to be mutton dressed as lamb, but nor do I want to be mutton dressed as mutton.
I run the current trends up my internal flagpole and see if I can elicit a salute. Boxy, oversized white shirts and crisp denim? Chic, sure, but too mannish. Block bright hues are too jarring and faddish. Definitely nothing floaty or feminine because I recently bleached my hair platinum to hide the rising tide of grey roots, and as a result, I can’t wear prints or florals any more. No animal prints either – at a certain age you’ve got to be Joan Collins or Bet Lynch to make that work.
“I’m thinking I’ll go Einstein,” I tell Karen Walker’s husband, Mikhail Gherman, when I run into him at the supermarket. Einstein famously wore the same outfit every day, with seven matching suits in his wardrobe on daily rotation. The sameness was meant to keep his mind focused on higher thinking rather than worrying about what to wear each day.
“That’s pretty much what I do,” Mikhail says. “I just buy identical jumpers at COS.” Of course he does. Thinking about it now, it’s what all the fashion icons do, too. Karl Lagerfeld never varied his look. Anna Wintour never changed her bob. But I need more stimulation than that.
“I’d go vintage,” a fashion-stylist friend suggests, but I discount this because it’s her job, not mine to sift through the bins at SaveMart to find gold. I lack the time and energy required to turn over endless piles of crap to find one cool-as-hell blouse. I mean, who does that?
Miriama Kamo does that. I see a profile on her in a magazine the next day, all about how she buys only second-hand now to save the planet, and I feel shame that I am not willing to commit myself to this course of action. It is because of people like me that the planet is dying.
Buyer’s guilt
There is huge guilt attached to buying new clothes, and there should be. The fashion industry is responsible for a whopping 8-10% of the global carbon emissions, and up to 85% of textiles produced annually end up as landfill – that’s almost enough dumped clothes to fill the Waitematā Harbour. Then there’s the sweatshop labour and toxic waterways, microplastics polluting our oceans and carcinogenic PFAs. Really, the most environmentally friendly thing any of us could do at this point is never shop for clothes again. But I have been given a hall pass on this because I am currently surviving on a single pair of trackpants and I smell a bit.
Keeping it sustainable, I check offerings on the website of two of fashion’s most conscious names, Maggie Marilyn and Kowtow. But despite their worthy attitudes, I can’t see myself in their designs.
There must be another way to be environmentally mindful. And then I hit upon my solution: cost per wear. Back when I was a fashion editor, I was big on spouting off this theory every time someone called me out over using heinously expensive shoes. In essence, it translates to this: if you buy something you love and you wear it endlessly, it really doesn’t matter how much you paid for it because in the long term, the money you spend is recouped by your usage of the item.
For this theory to work, though, I have to shop with a defined game plan in mind. No random purchases. Every single thing I buy has to be a keeper.
The very first thing I buy is a white board and a copy of Vogue. By the time my boyfriend gets home, I have crafted myself a mood board.
“What exactly is your ‘look’?” the boyfriend asks as he stares at the composite of leather skirts, lingerie bralettes, slutty pointy boots and dirty, sparkly pastel knits strung with tacky jewellery, worn with lace tights and pearls.
“I call it Russian hooker steals oligarch’s credit card and goes to Paris on a spree with Venetia Scott,” I reply. I am inspired by wanting to match my newly purchased puppy, a Russian wolfhound, plus the brassiness of my bleached hair and the current work of Scott, who was my favourite stylist in the grunge era and remains at the top of her game today.
From this day on, I pledge to be a slave to the mood board. Nothing gets bought that doesn’t fit the theme. When I walk into a Zambesi sale a few days later, I go straight past the racks of bargain discounted items and instead grab a full-priced, pale pastel, oversized, puff-sleeved Simone Rocha knit because it matches the board. Likewise, in Kate Sylvester, I buy her full-priced, strappy black lingerie dress, and her 70s-cut tan leather skirt. Both are on my mood board, with the added bonus that Kate’s brand is possibly the most sustainable in New Zealand fashion right now.
In the days that followed the flood, I had no shoes, so I nipped around to Kate’s and borrowed her gumboots along with a pair of her son’s socks, and I really should give them back.
Except, even with a mood board, I can’t figure out what new gumboots to buy. The brand I used to wear was the one all the “it girls” wore – a pair of knee-high green Hunters.
But since 2008, when they ceased to be latex-dipped in Scotland as the company sent its manufacturing to China, it appears the quality has slipped. I had a pair from before the production change and they lasted me a decade without leaking. The post-2008 ones didn’t make it through a single winter without falling apart. And this is where my cost-per-wear argument falls apart, too. So many luxury brands these days have kept the price tag but moved their manufacturing to the cheap factories.
Recent purchases, such as my JW Anderson slides and those silver Balenciaga boots, got trashed so fast they made me wonder what the difference truly was between the eye-wateringly-priced real thing and a trip to the Hong Kong fake markets to buy the same thing for 20 bucks.
Luxury brand letdown
I can rattle off a long list of luxury brands that I refuse to buy because of their whorish associations with vacuous influencers and reality TV stars. Basically, if it has a Kardashian in the ad campaign, it’s dead to me. This policy cuts out a surprisingly large number of brands, including Dolce & Gabbana, Givenchy, Balmain and now, Balenciaga.
Balenciaga also gets the elbow for its bizarre decision recently to create an ad campaign featuring prepubescent girls holding bondage-clad soft toys. It saw the company go into full damage control mode after accusations of creating child porn. On the #metoo front, while we are at it, I wouldn’t touch Alexander Wang or the QAnon-infused Lonely lingerie.
Alexander McQueen used to be the sort of genius who had runway shows where amputee models were sprayed with paint by robots. Now, his posthumous brand is dressing Catherine, Princess of Wales, in a nice white frock for the coronation. I am running out of idols. I can’t wait until September, when Phoebe Philo, previously at Chloé and fashion’s last great hope, launches her new eponymous label. In the meantime, I make do with buying Isabel Marant via the online retailers. Marant has the edgy but grungy look I’m committed to. And I am committed because it is All About the Mood Board.
Southpark’s Eric Cartman famously said, “I don’t make the rules – I just think them up and write them down.” Did I make up the original brief I am forcing myself to follow? Absolutely. But now my theme has taken on a life of its own and I am going along for the ride. And so, one day, I almost magically find myself dressed in a pair of high-heeled Isabel Marant trainers that look like something Timothée Chalamet might wear in Dune, a pair of voluminous Zara parachute pants, a black lace camisole, a shoulder-padded pearl-beaded cardigan and a super-duper-sized Gloria hair scrunchie, and I think, yup, this is it. I have achieved “peak mood”.
Granted, it might not be as comfy as cashmere, as safe as an oversized white shirt or as logical as seven identical suits, but it’s been a journey.
On the way, it’s been endlessly, surprisingly revealing about who I am, what sparks joy in my soul, and, when I look in the mirror, who it is I see looking back and who it is I want to become. Yes, I lost all my clothes, but fashion, for me, was never just about the clothes. And even a flood can’t wash the fashion out of me.
