For a while there, I wanted to be a fashion designer when I grew up. From the age of about eight, I would draw outfits for hours, filling sketchbook after sketchbook with images of “models” in my creations. I can’t remember what I was most inspired by, but it was likely a combo of old movies, my Sweet Valley High collection, and Madonna.
In retrospect, I think I was actually drawing versions of the woman I couldn’t wait to grow up into, as I would spend equal amounts of time getting my model’s hair and face and figure right, paying extra special attention to how her boobs looked in her dress. After all, not only did grown women get all the best clothes, they also got to have men fall hopelessly in love with them.
Considering my dad had apparently fallen out of love with my mum (and by proxy out of love with me), making sure I looked like the kind of woman this would never happen to again had evidently inched quite close to the top of my priority list. The story of my parents’ breakup is obviously way more complex, and of course I wasn’t consciously aware of the effect it had on me back then, but if reading and writing had always been my comfort and my joy, there came a point when I decided that, actually, fashion was my “thing.”
Fast-forward twenty years and I’m working a six-month contract covering maternity leave for the style editor on the British celebrity gossip magazine Heat. Not exactly the glittering career as a designer eight-year-old me had in mind, but close enough since I still got to write and think and talk about clothes all day. More specifically, in this particular role, who’d gotten it right and who’d gotten it oh-so-wrong on the red carpet.
Heat was right there at the beginning of the whole “celebrity fashion” thing, the first magazine in the UK to run a regular “Steal Her Style” page (showing us civilians how to copy celebrity outfits on the cheap) and pit A-listers against each other in the battle of “who wore it best?” Yes, anybody under the age of thirty-two, there was a time in history—before the likes of Heat, People, and Instagram—when not ALL our fashion inspiration apparently came from celebrities and “influencers.”
And since it was still a fun new game in 2006, when I worked at Heat, even the highbrow catwalk crowd had decided they were allowed to obsess over Jennifer Lopez versus Geri Halliwell in the green Versace in an ironic sense. How hilarious. But let’s face it, also how addictive—since it’s a game that feeds one of the ego’s favorite pastimes, comparing ourselves to others.
My favorite part of the job was picking through the paparazzi images that piled up on the picture desk each day (the agencies still sent bundles of actual prints!), selecting candidates for our weekly “best-dressed” list. Which, like all best-dressed lists in the history of the Universe, was actually a “best-looking,” “best legs,” and “least likely to scare the children” list. In other words, pure, unadulterated, comparison-making poison.
But obviously, with perspective, every inch of my numinous soul can now see how fundamentally WRONG this was. Yes, it may be human (ego) nature to compare how we measure up against our “rivals” for survival—and for women, at the most basic level, this tends to come down to how we look (i.e., how lovable/fuckable) we are. Since a lot of it is about dressing to impress, it seems to me that fashion will always play a pivotal role in our collective neuroses around this.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. In the chapter titled “Calling in Number 1,” I wrote about how, for me, self-love is essentially about cultivating self-knowledge, self-acceptance, and self-forgiveness. And actually our wardrobes can be a great place to practice this. How?
Self-knowledge because your ideal closet will be filled with clothes that reflect the real you, and make the real you feel amazing.
Self-acceptance since this may mean getting really real about where you’re at right now, versus dressing (or spending large amounts of cash on unworn outfits) for an “ideal” past or future version of yourself.
And self-forgiveness, which basically goes hand in hand with self-acceptance; for example, forgiving yourself for the extra ten pounds or the extra ten years that mean you’re probably never going to rock those denim microshorts again (soz).
Thinking back, I can pinpoint numerous occasions when I was not dressing from a place of self-love, when what my friend Annmarie O’Connor, a fashion stylist and author of the book The Happy Closet, describes as “the mean girl in your closet” was calling all the shots. “She’s also the one who tells you to hold on to that pair of size 2 jeans because you’re going to diet back into them,” Annmarie told me. “She might frame it as ‘motivation,’ but it’s actually a rejection of the person in the mirror right now. It’s a mockery and a reminder of our perceived failures.”
I met Annmarie when I was editing a special Irish edition of Style magazine, and she was essentially the fiercest fashionista in Dublin. Every time I saw her, she was decked out in another killer look: Louboutins and a vintage kimono one week, cropped leather jacket and a Westwood kilt the next. And topped off with a perfectly coiffed rockabilly quiff. Wow, she must live and breathe fashion, I always thought to myself, in awe of her Bradshaw-like ability to “Carrie” off (haha) a look.
So you can imagine my surprise when we Skyped recently and she told me, “Any time Fashion Week rolled around, I had a next-level meltdown about what to wear. I always felt like I was some sort of circus performer, you know? Like I had to dress for the shutterbugs.” It reminded me of Chloe Kerman talking about her experiences at Fashion Week—how it would leave her feeling utterly drained of her own life force—and I began to wonder how many people in the fashion industry were secretly feeling the same way. I can see now that fear of being judged for my outfits, being subjected to an unspoken “best dressed list” I could sense was rolling behind my fellow editors’ eyes, was one of the reasons I’d always avoided Fashion Week like the plague.
And perhaps you’re more highly evolved than me and don’t really need reminding of this fact. But when I take even the briefest moment to check out the kind of “style icons” being championed in the mainstream media, it strikes me that we’re still pretty much stuck in the Dark Ages with embracing fashion as a path to self-love.
The word icon is defined as “a person or thing regarded as a representative symbol of something.” But also, “a painting of Jesus Christ or another holy figure.” And I’m sorry, I see nothing remotely holy in Kim Kardashian’s shopping addiction (let’s call it like it is), while in no way is she representative of how I have come to view the role fashion plays in my life. But that’s also just me, and I can’t really comment on Kim’s motives for buying out every Christian Louboutin store in existence since I’ve never actually met her (although an . . . interesting . . . interview I once did with her sisters Kendall and Kylie did go a little bit viral—oops).
So what exactly does a spiritual style icon look like, then? Simply put, she or he is somebody whose clothing choices and the vision of human expression they represent to you as a result make them worthy of the term “icon”—to YOU. Whose “look” in some way speaks to your soul and inspires you to clothe your physical body in a way that feels like a healthy, genuine, and joyous reflection—or rather projection—of the mind-body-emo-spirit being you know yourself to be.
And so, in the name of diversity, and to kick off the section of this book that will address the ways in which we adorn our exterior being, there follows an alternative Best-Dressed List. To be referred to in times of self-doubt, body-image crises, and “help I’ve got nothing to wear” moments.
KALI
SPIRITUAL STYLING TIP: Make your outfit mean something.
Okay, so the full blue body paint is a strong look, and I’m not suggesting that you might literally want to dress like Kali, Hindu goddess of time, change, power, creation, and destruction. But as far as fierce feminine figureheads from ancient mythology go, she’s pretty much up there.
The “destroyer of evil forces,” Kali is usually depicted as having wild, matted hair and raging bloodshot eyes, her hot pink tongue panting from the exertion of, y’know, creating and destroying whole worlds. She is also naked from the waist up, #freethenipple, usually dressed in a skirt made of human arms, and with a garland of heads dangling from her neck. Dripping in gold jewelry, she also wields a trident, a severed head, and a bloodied sword. Gruesome!
Again, there is no scenario in which I envisage you stealing Kali’s actual style, but what I love about her—and all the Hindu goddesses for that matter—is that she is dressed in symbols. For example, the severed head is said to depict the ego; the sword, “divine knowledge,” its destroyer. The wild hairstyle, meanwhile, is a symbol of nature’s freedom from civilization (yes, Divine Feminine icon!). Therefore, to channel the spirit of Kali is to make fashion choices that actually mean something to you and to drape yourself in talismans that amp up your sense of personal power.
Sure, I could have picked a less aggressive goddess to depict this idea, like Lakshmi, goddess of abundance, sitting pretty in her pink lotus blossom. But Kali’s name comes up time and again as the deity whose energy women most wish to channel when feeling in any way “less than,” which is maybe because she’s often portrayed dancing over the prostrate body of her husband, the great god Shiva. Kali’s soundtrack? It’s gotta be “Caught Out There” by Kelis.
THE QUEEN OF PENTACLES
SPIRITUAL STYLING TIP: Shop for what you REALLY love.
As discussed elsewhere, in the tarot the Pentacles represent the Earth element, which in turn speaks to all things concerning the material world. Root chakra stuff—like food, shelter, money, and physical comfort. Oh yeah, and fashion! And the Queen of the suit embodies the emotional part of Earth, our intuitive and passionate connection to our stuff.
When I asked my friend the New Age Hipster to write about the Queen of Pentacles for The Numinous, she likened her to Beyoncé. “Powerful, strong, determined, and super hot, she can basically get paid for just breathing,” she wrote. “On top of that she’s actually just really cool. Everyone wants to be her friend, not only because of her money but because she totally works it.”
Interestingly, she is also associated with the energy of Capricorn, the sign of so many regular old-style icons: see David Bowie, Kate Moss, and Michelle Obama. Capricorn energy might be kinda practical, but Capricorns certainly know how to get dressed. No Capricorn could ever be accused of not wearing the (rhinestone-encrusted Versace) trousers, and with the Queen of Pentacles there’s absolutely a sense of mastery over the material, of ruling, as opposed to being ruled by, life’s luxuries.
So what I’m suggesting is that you make her your default personal shopper. Like maybe even carry her card when you hit the shops, or prop it up next to your computer the next time you decide to indulge in a late-night Nasty Gal shop-a-thon. Her message is one of empowering indulgence, and she will guide you toward fashion choices that make you feel like a million dollars—versus splurging for the sake of it and ending up with a closet full of designer swag you never wear. Oh, and since she also governs over seriously good food, she’s kind of the ultimate lady who lunches. Why would you not want to shop with this bae by your side?
DAME VIVIENNE WESTWOOD
SPIRITUAL STYLING TIP: Dress for the character you want to play today.
I never get tired of telling people how I share my birthday with Vivienne Westwood. Because this like totally makes us soul sisters, right? It means I also like to think of this absolute badass of a designer, the woman responsible for bringing punk to the mainstream in the 1970s and who remains a major disrupter well into her seventies, as kind of my fashion spirit animal. But as a complete confrontation avoider myself, I actually find Viv equal parts inspiring and intimidating—which is also her appeal as a spiritual style icon.
While some (most) fashion designers are all about creating trends in the name of selling as many units as possible, Vivienne Westwood seems more concerned with telling a story with her creations. Specifically, a properly scary fairy tale, involving pixies, pirates, lost little boys, plenty of gender fluidity, and at least one evil stepmother. She’s also a total Peter Pan figure herself, absolutely and resolutely refusing to allow age to dampen her personal style—or her sex life (see hot Austrian husband, also her former student, also twenty-five years her junior).
What I like about Vivienne’s approach is that she’s all about creating characters, which is what we’re all doing every time we get dressed anyway. She also recognizes that some of those characters will be “good,” and some of them will be “bad,” just like the many selves that reside within us. The best fairy tales and myths depict exactly this, the multifaceted nature of being human and the moral dilemmas we’re faced with as a result.
Vivienne Westwood says: don’t you dare deny your dark side. Because we all know the upshot of this: your less attractive impulses will find another, often self-destructive, outlet. As a designer and with her personal style, Vivienne is a champion of celebrating your whole self, and playing with the many aspects of your personality, all the better for getting to truly know, love, and accept yourself. Also why it feels so liberating to dress up in costume, and something kids do naturally. Maybe let’s not be in such a hurry to grow out of it.
VENUS
SPIRITUAL STYLING TIP: Dress for a body you love.
When Vivienne Westwood went to collect her OBE (Order of the British Empire) from Buckingham Palace, she wasn’t wearing any knickers. The world knows this because when Viv did a twirl to “show off my outfit,” the paparazzi got a lens-full of her lady parts—and Venus, goddess of love, sex, beauty, and abundance, would no doubt have approved wholeheartedly. Wherever she’s been depicted throughout history, the most she has to preserve her “modesty” is a wisp of diaphanous drapery.
Personally I’m not big into nudity. If, as my mum tells it, I refused to wear any clothes for the first six months of my life, it’s because the year I was born the UK experienced one of the hottest summers on record—nothing to do with me feeling innately more comfortable unclothed. I did not grow up in a naked household, and the one time I stripped on a nudist beach in Ibiza my bikini went back on as soon as I needed to stand up and find a bathroom.
But I do think overall it serves us humans well to get comfortable with what we look like naked, and how it feels to simply exist beyond the “boundaries” of clothes. Comfortable as in “accepting.” What makes Venus sexy is her total lack of self-consciousness—you definitely don’t get the impression she’s stressing over the diameter of her thighs, sucking in her stomach, or trying to hide her cellulite. Rather, she looks like a woman who knows that her body is hers to be enjoyed.
How does this make her style icon material? The years I spent trying to get my body to be a certain shape, a lot of the time it was so I could wear certain clothes. And, okay, I might have taken it to extremes, but I know I’m not alone on this one. For me, Venus is a reminder that your body kind of got there first, and so the clothes should fit it. See the day I decided it was okay to buy something in a size 8 because it just looked—and felt—better on me than the 6.
MAN REPELLER
SPIRITUAL STYLING TIP: Self-expression is the best accessory.
Yes, Leandra Medine, the brains behind megablog Man Repeller, is deeply in the pocket of the same mainstream fashion industry I basically just took a shot at in the beginning of this chapter.
But.
What I (and her gazillions of followers) like about Leandra is that she uses fashion as a means of pure self-expression and creative play. The name of her brand is also a reference to the fact that in its highest expression as an art form, fashion is actually nothing to do with looking “hot” and making it onto anybody’s best-dressed/best-body list. Her outfits tend to be a crazy mishmash of colors, textures, and styles that just somehow seem to work, while her whole shtick is a subtle poke in the ribs at anybody who takes it all too seriously (i.e., has bought into the idea that the only way to be a credible human being is if your outfit is sufficiently on-trend).
This bit could also have been about Carrie Bradshaw, who embraced a similar disregard for the “rules” of fashion. But Carrie was always way too hung up on designer labels (not to mention bagging Mr. Big) for my liking, which are essentially Girl Scout badges for the ego, particularly later in the series and in the SATC movies. When she was seduced by the glamour of the megabucks brands, her early playful experimentation was replaced with OTT peacocking.
Not so the Man Repeller, who clearly never grew out of her five-year-old fancy dress phase and has, in fact, managed to make a career out of it. I don’t know about you, but I LOVED my five-year-old fancy dress phase, which for any little girl (or boy) is also about discovering the transcendent power of clothes. In the same way one of my old editors used to don a jade green trilby when she was suffering a creative block, sometimes a simple outfit change can shift our whole perspective on life. Something else that helps me understand how everything, including the clothes we wear, carries its own energy.
THIS, as the Man Repeller reminds me time and again, is the power of fashion as fancy dress.
JOHN LENNON
SPIRITUAL STYLING TIP: You don’t have to get dressed to impress.
Our honorary dude, John, makes it onto the list because his beautiful Libra soul did some of his most numinous work in his pajamas, a.k.a. the infamous Bed-Ins for Peace that he and Yoko Ono staged following their marriage in 1969.
With the conflict in Vietnam at its bloodiest, the bed-ins were a publicity stunt designed to redirect the media attention around their nuptials to the antiwar effort, and the iconic images of John and Yoko receiving the press from their marital bed have always rocked my world. This to me is an example of activism at its finest—I’m a huge proponent of the peaceful protest (what Mahatma Gandhi termed “Satyagrapha”)—and is also the kind of exploit I believe any celebrity worth their social media following should be embracing in the Now Age.
Like, if you’ve already got a million eyes on your feed to check out what you’re wearing (ahem, a certain famous family obsessed with K names again), I see it as kind of your duty to throw a few consciousness-raising nuggets into the mix. And no need to get all heavy on anybody’s ass! As John himself put it, “It’s part of our policy not to be taken seriously. Our opposition, whoever they may be, in all manifest forms, don’t know how to handle humor. And we are humorous.” To embrace humor is to recognize that we humans are all in this together, after all.
Plus, the PJs themselves. Since my working day tends to begin with me rolling out of bed and onto the chair in front of my computer, I also do a lot of my best work in my pajamas. In fact, I’m wearing a version of pajamas right now (it’s 6:47 a.m.), and I can’t tell you how liberating it’s been not to have to begin my day putting together an “outfit”—and one that I felt needed to in some way “impress” my colleagues at that.
In one of my old magazine jobs, a coworker once mused that I was “a funny little dresser.” Which basically was him picking up on two essential truths: (1) I am very much in touch with my multiple selves and never really grew out of my five-year-old fashion-as-fancy-dress phase either, and (2) ideally I need a good few hours in my PJs each morning before deciding who I’m going to dress up as that day.
DONNA KARAN
SPIRITUAL STYLING TIP: Yoga pants every damn day.
You might not think it considering she’s known for her love of beige, plus the fact she has a whole line called Urban Zen, but Donna Karan is a bona fide, one-hundred-mile-per-hour human hurricane. At least that’s how she came across when I interviewed her a few years back. There are certain women who truly embody the phrase “force of nature,” and Donna, all click-clacking wooden bangles, gravelly voice, and deep Haitian suntan (from a recent humanitarian mission), is one of them.
A native and typically high-strung New Yorker, it’s no wonder Donna is also a person who just NEEDS yoga in her life. Plus, she’s a Libra, so it totally makes sense that she’s into the concept of the “work-chill” balance. A regular practitioner for almost forty years, she once said, “To me, yoga is a way of life. It is meditation; it is consciousness; it isn’t just wrapping your leg around your head. It’s about connecting on a spiritual level—opening and bringing the heart out.”
OMG, now that I think about it, is Donna actually the original Material Girl, Mystical World?! It was her need for clothes she could wear to yoga and to work (creating some of the most directional collections of the 1980s) that shaped her original signature look: leggings + body-conscious layers of cashmere-jersey. Clothes that are designed for a holistic, mind-body-spirit way of life, and basically the way I, and many of the Numinati, dress the majority of the time.
And then there’s the fact that she’s dedicated the latter part of her career to turning the mainstream medical establishment onto yoga and meditation, as well as other alternative healing practices, not to mention donating her time and money to the survivors of natural disasters. But never, ever at the expense of looking fierce in a pair of thousand-dollar yoga pants. It’s what she calls “dressing and addressing.”
Just to get a teeny bit political here too, Donna’s Urban Zen line was actually founded to fund her wellness education initiatives, and the further removed I am from the mainstream fashion industry, the crazier it seems to me that more big brands aren’t actively invested in “giving back.” After all, after oil, the fashion industry is the second-largest polluter on the planet.
THE SPIRIT WEAVERS
SPIRITUAL STYLING TIP: Craft is not dead.
For the uninitiated, the Spirit Weavers Gathering is a five-day, all-female immersive retreat dedicated to the traditions of cultures past, which takes place each summer at Camp Navarro, deep in the redwood forests of Mendocino County, California. According to Instagram (I’ve never actually attended), the festival mainly attracts properly witchy women who live 80 percent off the grid, home-birth babies for breakfast, and would rather go naked than wear man-made fibers. But who also left their hot filmmaker husbands holding down the eco-friendly fort back in L.A.
As the organizers describe it, Spirit Weavers is “a place to re-skill, re-wild, and remember.” There are workshops for days on ancient dying, beading, textile making, and, yes, weaving techniques; the “look” of the festival could be described as “tie-dye tribeswoman meets Venice beach vintage.” Talk about fashion and clothes-making as a vehicle for creative self-expression, and Earth-felt connection.
I love how in Big Magic, Liz Gilbert draws attention to the fact that “the earliest evidence of recognizable human art is forty thousand years old. The earliest evidence of human agriculture, by contrast, is only ten thousand years old. Which means that somewhere in our collective evolutionary story, we decided it was way more important to make attractive, superfluous items than it was to learn how to regularly feed ourselves.”
And what are clothes that offer anything more than the most basic protection from the elements, if not attractive, superfluous items? But in modern society, our addiction to trends and fast fashion are just another example of our collective root chakra problems—and a major contributor to our polluting of the Earth to boot.
You know me, I’m still, like, “yay, Alexander Wang”—and by including the Spirit Weavers here, I’m not suggesting you cut up your Barneys store card and commit to sewing all your own clothes from here on out. Rather, I see this colorful tribe as a reminder that the desire to adorn ourselves is deeply human, and that on some level, choosing artisanal anything is choosing a connection to the Creator. And not to mention the human hand that crafted it.
MADONNA
SPIRITUAL STYLING TIP: You are every woman.
My favorite teaching from the tarot is that all life is a process of evolution, and that as such, incarnating in a human suit is essentially signing up for a never-ending cycle of transformation. And for me, nobody has embodied this concept more spectacularly than Madonna.
Madonna was my first bona fide style crush. The Like a Virgin video came out when I was eight (that tutu!), followed by Desperately Seeking Susan a year later (which I probably didn’t get to see until a year after that, since you had to wait forever for films to come out on VHS in the 1980s). So let’s say, then, I must have been ten years old when I dragged my stepmother to Camden Market in search of a bag like the giant hatbox the Susan character essentially lives out of in the film. (Ah, the psychology of handbags—that could be, and probably is, a whole book unto itself.)
Something about her East Village thrift store style in that movie evidently spoke loud and clear to the fledgling #rebelspirit in ME, while simultaneously opening the door to a world of exciting possibilities about what it meant to be an autonomous, free-spirited woman, like her character in the film.
Moving on from her club kid punk phase, Madonna has gone on to embody pretty much every subculture, trend, and feminine archetype going with her wardrobe choices—from Voguing transvestite, to rhinestone cowgirl. Clever marketing, yada yada, but also done from a place of such authentic self-expression (true to her Leo Sun sign) that you can’t help but be inspired by her perpetual use of fashion as a way to transform and explore all the different ways of being human.
Which is not to say I’ve been motivated to rush out and copy any one of Madonna’s looks since the Susan hatbox. But Madonna, self-proclaimed, Divinely Feminine, “unapologetic bitch,” makes me feel better about my own fashion “mistakes,” which I might also read as playful experimentation. Because, as I’ve also learned from the tarot, there is no such thing as a wrong decision—only never-ending opportunities to evolve and learn, on the journey to becoming more and more ourselves. Going forward, may the same please apply to how we get dressed.