Lockdown has seen the fashion world pivot from frocks to food, with models and designers sharing their favourite recipes online
Here are a few things that I have not done during the past two months. Wear high heels. Pick out a handbag because it works with a certain outfit and transfer contents into it from another bag. Go to the dry cleaners. Think about what I’m going to wear tomorrow. Change from a day to evening look, except on days when I have still been wearing my morning exercise gear at 6pm – and even then, I haven’t always bothered.
And here, on the other hand, are a few things that I have done: made a souffle for the first time ever. Through trial and error, nailed a failsafe béarnaise sauce. Pitted bowls of cherries for clafoutis. Eaten a salad made from rocket and radish leaves that I grew myself.
Making dinner is the new getting dressed in my lockdown life. Friday early evening once meant a drive-by visit to the kitchen for a G&T, and then upstairs for the serious business of trying on eight different dresses before putting the first one back on again. Now, my day-to-night change means putting my hair into a ponytail so that I can cook, and then it’s straight to the kitchen. The deliveries I get excited about aren’t from Net-a-Porter, they are from the local butcher – and are almost as expensive, unfortunately. Instead of blisters on my feet from wearing my Prada sandals, I have welts on my forearms from being a klutz with a paella pan. The seasonal drops in stores I get excited about these days? Asparagus and alphonso mangoes.
It’s not that I’m wearing disgusting clothes, I should add. I still love a nice summer dress on a sunny day and I have not gone a day without earrings. But without the context of where you are going out to, to do what, and with whom, and what they will be wearing, and how you are getting there and where you might end up later – without all that, getting dressed is a lot less spicy.
A simple diet of sundresses and sandals leaves me with time and headspace that I am sating by cooking. My love of clothes and fashion is always much less about shopping than it is an endless conversation inside my own head, and that conversation is much less involved than it usually is. For example: I have a pair of trousers that I used to think of as my “slightly nicer dog-walking trousers”. Now they are just “my trousers”. So the time I used to spend thinking about clothes and dressing up, is now all about recipes and cooking.
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