This is a different one this week. I haven’t really gone down the road of dressing for the feelings instead of an aesthetic. And hoo boy, do I have some feelings that I want to dress for.
I am turning 47 this year, which I had to look up on one of those “how old am I” websites since I wasn’t sure if it was 46 or 47.
Because I honestly just don’t care enough. But over the last few years, there has been this gigantic shift to getting here.
I know that you always hear that once you hit 40, you run out of fucks to give, but I had no idea how much anger and resentment would also be there, along with this strange feeling of power that is surging inside.
The world is a dumpster fire, and I know everything that is going on is just enhancing these feelings as well, so it is pretty potent, and I literally feel like I might spontaneously combust at any point.
Fun fact: When I was little, I read entirely inappropriate books for my age that were my dad’s, and there was one with a section (and photos) on spontaneous human combustion, and it really stuck with me all these years later. So the concern is real. Lol.
Anyway, this wardrobe is built from the feeling of when you realise that being agreeable has not protected you.
Not from being interrupted or overlooked. And definitely not from the what feels like constant erosion of your time, body, and energy.
I am tired. So very tired. And somewhere along the way, I stopped trying to be pleasing.
I don’t know when it started, probably in my early 40s. Maybe in the middle of a Tuesday, I don’t know. It wasn’t a fanfare type of situation.
It was like one day there were one too many moments where the world asked me to shrink and smile at the same time, and I realised that I was done.
There wasn’t a loud or dramatic shift, but it felt complete, like when you flick a light switch on and off.
It is not depression or burnout, or defeated tiredness, but instead the exhaustion that comes from having carried too much for too long. Though it can look like that from the outside.
It is actually something closer to the opposite. Like a sudden lucidity about what you will and will not carry any further.
That translates visually into a kind of undone-ness that is deliberate. Clothes that look like you threw them on and somehow they’re perfect because you stopped overthinking it
No more trying to be pleasing, and sometimes it feels almost feral.
On Refusal as a Style Philosophy
Fashion has a complicated relationship with women in their forties.
The industry has historically treated this decade as a problem to be solved, like a category of women to be steered toward “age-appropriate” choices, covering up, and “tastefulness” and invisiblity.
The message, delivered politely and persistently, has been: you have peaked. Now, please step aside.
But when we stop listening to that message, there is this kind of change that takes place.
It happens when you genuinely stop caring what the message is, who is delivering it, or why, then you are left with something much more interesting than fashion advice.
You are left with yourself and the question of what you actually want to wear.
Rei Kawakubo built an entire design language around refusal, with clothes that refused to be pretty, to flatter, or to perform femininity on conventional terms.
Patti Smith simply got dressed in the morning with the attitude of someone who has never once consulted a trend report.
We need to look at it in terms of not addition or adding things, but as the subtraction of everything that was never really you.
The Refusal Wardrobe operates on this principle. It is a spring capsule built not around what is happening on the runways but around what is happening in you.
The anger and the tiredness for sure, but also that clarity that comes from having carried too much for too long and finally deciding not to anymore.
Refusal Dressing is what happens when you step outside of aesthetic expectation.
A refusal to:
- soften yourself on command
- dress for approval
- participate in a version of femininity that requires constant calibration
There is a shift, and clothing becomes more like a boundary that you can wear.
Graphic Tee | Vintage Jeans | Black Boots | Striped Clutch | Black Blazer | Black Sunglasses | Yellow Sweater | White Mules | Yellow Bag | Black Sundress | Tuxedo Shirt | Black Camisole | Bermuda Shorts | Black Flats | Black Peplum Shirt | Stripe Panel Hat | Sweatshirt | Green Slip Skirt | Denim Shirt | Navy Sneakers | Yellow Sunglasses | Black Tote | Green Loafers | Wide Leg Trousers
Clothing as Boundary, Not Performance
For years, fashion has sold us a version of femininity that is deeply tied to performance. Be soft, but not weak. Attractive, but effortless. Put together, but never trying too hard.
It is a balancing act designed to keep you constantly adjusting, but Refusal Dressing steps out of that loop entirely.
It does not ask: Do I look good?
It asks: Does this hold its own?
There is an important difference there.
The Pieces: What Refusal Actually Looks Like on a Body
The silhouette of the Refusal Wardrobe is built on tension: oversized where it matters, precise where it counts. These are not opposites. It is what you get when you have figured out proportion on your own terms.
Not focused on flattering, because we have stopped caring about that word entirely.
The Jacket
Every capsule has an anchor piece, and this one is the jacket because we tend to still need one in spring.
Something like a blazer or lightweight wool. I prefer something structured like the blazer I included that has incredible shape.
Though the ideal version of this coat might exist somewhere in a secondhand shop, already broken in, already carrying some other woman’s history before it carries yours.
The coat says: I arrived. Not I tried to look like I arrived. I arrived.
And for something extra special look for a standout lining.
Something special for you that can be almost like a secret indulgence. Maybe a deep oxblood silk, a dark stripe, how about bright pink or blue? That is between you and the coat.
The Trouser
Wide-leg, high-waisted, with enough fabric that it moves when you walk. This is not a trouser that apologises for taking up space. It is also not a trend piece.
The the wide-leg trouser is one of the most enduring things in fashion history, worn by everyone from Katharine Hepburn to the women who file past you in a city on a grey morning who understand what power these trousers hold.
Thrift is your friend here more than anywhere else in this capsule. The wide-leg trouser in good fabric exists in abundance in vintage and secondhand markets.
It cycles in and out of mainstream fashion often enough that there are always options. Take your time. Find the one with the right weight, the right drape, the right amount of drop in the seat.
The Shirt
A white or off-white cotton shirt, probably a men’s, worn with abandon. Untucked on one side. Collar open one button further than conventional. Sleeves rolled in the specific way that communicates unhurriedness rather than effort.
Slightly rumpled.
The shirt is the piece in this capsule that does the most work without making a fuss.
This is also one of the pieces most worth investing in if you are going to invest in anything. A good shirt in proper cotton, with real structure, is something you will wear for a decade.
The Olsen twins have been photographed in versions of this shirt for twenty years. That should tell you something.
Then on the opposite end, I wanted to included a worn in, slouchy, oversized men’s denim shirt by Bill Blass that you can throw over everything. This one is a stellar deal.
The Knit
An oversized knit with a statement. This is the piece you wear when you cannot be bothered with the shirt, which will be often. It says something, so you don’t have to waste your energy doing it yourself.
The sleeves should also be too long. This is not a flaw. The sleeves being too long is the point.
It is important to get your point across, without needing any other explanation, because we don’t have time for that shit. As the weather gets warmer, the same idea works in t-shirts.
The Boot
Low-heeled or flat boot (I much prefer flat), with a square, pointed, or rounded toe, in black leather. This is not a spring recommendation that guides us toward sandals and wedges and the promise of warmer weather.
The boot is a choice to remain grounded, in the most literal sense. It is also the shoe that walks fastest, covers the most ground, and takes the longest to wear out, which is the kind of logic that makes complete sense once you are done performing your footwear.
Vintage and secondhand are the ideal sourcing routes. A leather boot that has been worn in already moves differently than one that is new.
I am going to side-track to the shoes as well. I have been searching for months for a black pony hair ballet flat with an aggressively square toe for myself, and I finally found one (which I included here).
I have a few pairs of shoes and boots (my square-toe snake print) from this brand, and I keep coming back to them because I am so happy with my purchases.
The Bag
Structured, mid-sized, in black or the darkest leather you can find. Not a logo-covered bag that announces anything about where you bought it, or how much you spent, or what season it is.
A bag that holds your things and looks like it has always been there, because the best bags always look like they have always been there.
The secondhand market for bags is deep and rewarding if you are patient.
The brands you want, the ones making bags with real leather and real hardware and real structure, made those bags twenty years ago too, and they are still there, in consignment shops and online platforms, waiting for someone who knows what they are looking at.
On Dressing Without Explaining Yourself
There is a kind of exhaustion that comes from years of dressing with an audience in your head. The colleague, mother-in-law, and even the stranger on the street.
All of whom you have been dressing for without admitting it to yourself. whom you have been editing yourself for, and whom you finally evict from taking space in your head.
What is left, when they go, is a quiet that allows you to finally question what you actually like, what makes you feel like yourself, what fits the life you are living right now.
Not the life you were supposed to want, or would make the most photogenic capsule wardrobe, but of your actual days.
This is not an aspirational capsule. It does not suggest you will look like a Parisian or a minimalist influencer, or a woman who has somehow solved the question of how to dress.
It focuses on you already knowing the answer, and not asking for permission to act on it.
Françoise Hardy, in later photographs, looks like a woman who stopped negotiating with fashion somewhere in her fifties and simply arrived at herself.
Charlotte Rampling has spent decades looking precisely, specifically like Charlotte Rampling and no one else.
Patti Smith, in her uniform of white shirt and black everything, looks like a person who decided what she liked and then never wasted another morning reconsidering it.
These are your references. Not necessarily for the style, it is the confidence and attitude that we seek. The sureness of one’s self.
Fashion writing does not often make space for anger. It is a genre that tends toward the aspirational and the optimistic.
It tends to give the promise of transformation, the excitement of the new, the careful suggestion that with the right purchases, you might arrive somewhere better than where you are.
The Refusal Wardrobe is not interested in transforming you. It is interested in you, as you actually are right now, in this decade of your life that is strange and difficult and clarifying in equal measure.
The anger is real. The tiredness is real. And the clarity that comes with both of them, that sudden, crystal clear knowledge of what you will not do, what you will not wear, what you will not pretend any longer is real too.
Dress from that place.
You have had enough, which is not the end of something. For this stage in your life, this is just the beginning.
Spring Outfit Ideas for Women
Graphic Tee | Vintage Jeans | Black Boots | Striped Clutch | Black Blazer | Black Sunglasses | Yellow Sweater | White Mules | Yellow Bag | Black Sundress | Tuxedo Shirt | Black Camisole | Bermuda Shorts | Black Flats | Black Peplum Shirt | Stripe Panel Hat | Sweatshirt | Green Slip Skirt | Denim Shirt | Navy Sneakers | Yellow Sunglasses | Black Tote | Green Loafers | Wide Leg Trousers
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Love this and your creative way of sharing who you are in ways that are relevant to today’s times (especially). TYSM
Thank you Colleen. I always appreciate reading your comments.
Your energy and creativity for putting these capsules together are amazing! I always look forward to the next one and check the site daily. And your honesty for how you’re doing/feeling is relatable and appreciated.
Thank you so much Louise. I figured people were feeling similar to me so I wanted to dive deeper into how it affects how I dress. It was a fun one. Almost cathartic. – Sara
This is my very favourite capsule!
I’m glad you liked it!
Thank you for ALL you do! It’s ok to rest when you’re tired. Turn off the bullshit and focus on your gratitude. 🙂
Thank you Jessica! I wish my brain let me shut off all the bullshit. I’m my own worst enemy sometimes 😂
THIS. IS. EVERYTHING.