Dressing Room Dilemmas

For as long as I can remember, I have been captured by the sight of beautiful things, directly correlating to my daily wardrobe. This has led me to be pretty well-versed in the experience of ~the dressing room~ and the anxieties that it can entail. However, it never fully dawned on me how problematic a dressing room, or just the shopping experience as a whole, can be. That is until my roommates compared my room to a dressing room— a cave-like, beautiful wonder. This description was paired with how overwhelming it can be at times. Nevertheless, it made me really wonder why dressing rooms are the root of such an ostracizing experience.

The shopping experience, itself, is highly designed to not only play into your visual and social perception of the world and specifically into your insecurities. From thin mannequins, to the body and race selective ads, to the store’s environment just being unfriendly (usually to dissuade certain types of customers), the act of shopping is harsh, confusing, and at times degrading to one’s well being. It brings a lot more to the table to worry about than just finding clothing that you personally enjoy.

This has led the shopping experience to be tumultuous, and it has made some people hate shopping or fashion in general. The jarring nature of staring at your body— especially with our current fixation on appearance greater than ever before due social media— can make anyone anxious, stressed, and overall uncomfortable just from entering the store, let alone the dressing room. It turns fashion, a form of art and expression, into a trigger or stressor. How is someone expected to see and appreciate the beauty of a garment when it is being forcibly entangled with our perception of self?

Entering a dressing room— I can’t help but feel pressure to make the clothes work for me as if returning to the salesperson is a sign of defeat, but it’s as I struggle to live up to this image I’ve doctored for myself that I start to hate the clothing, itself. However, entering it, I also feel an intense excitement at the possibility of a new addition to my wardrobe, but this excitement only exists because of my “love” of clothes and deep-rooted capitalism. I am not sure when exactly one of my favorite activities, shopping (or at least mainly online shopping), became riddled with pressures and stressors relating to my own insecurities. It only makes me wonder what pushes people, who don’t care about fashion, to even step into a clothing store.

In recent years, I have started to hate the experience of shopping in person. There’s so much pressure to find clothes that are interesting, different, and look appealing on you. I remember there were times when I started working in a boutique during high school— the first two shifts, I would start stress sweating. There was always so much stress around the store, from how to act with the customers to just how to carry myself. The relationship between our clothes and bodies has seemed to have created this ever-present tension in the air.

People are so drastically affected by the size on the tag of their clothes. Something that is known to vary from company to company. These constant expectations about being a certain size and its intense link to our self-worth allows the idea of finding your style to be daunting and, at times, impossible. This overwhelming sense of trying to be perfect leads the whole shopping experience for customers and employees to be much more uninviting.

Through working in that boutique, I saw first-hand how employees can affect your shopping experience. It became apparent that the half-assed comments I dished out during my shift to customers of “wow that’s so your color”, “oh wow you look amazing!”, etc. made them feel more comfortable in the clothing pieces and shopping at the store. It just shows how brands and their brick and mortar stores can directly influence the entire act of shopping. Decor, ads, and even the employees they hire all equate to the stress that shopping is now associated with.

In reality, there just seems to be unmeetable expectations at this point. The customers are so pressured to be perfect or to look just like the model on the ad through society’s expectations (mainly rooted in the rise of social media) that they get upset when any issues arises or when there isn’t a specific size. They hold on to the notion that the missing size would have been the perfect one. We give these fashion conglomerates too much credit for the most part, mainly in caring for their clientele. Most of these fast fashion cemeteries (i.e. F21 lol) or even “boutiques”— that put on the facade of being a better alternative or more original when they really just buy from wholesale— just want the profit at the end of the day. It is all about the money.

The way the majority of customers and brands think has been so skewed by the supposed expectations of society that the view of fashion and shopping has made the dressing room, and sometimes the shopping experience as a whole, a place once of beauty and art but now one riddled with self-judgement. The world we live in focuses too much on the appearance of things and making profit. It makes total sense, with the obsession with image, that dressing rooms, a place where we are forced to examine our bodies, have become associated with negative emotions and experiences.

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