Oh shit, it's 5 o'clock already. I still haven't showered
A review of quarantine hygiene, COVID-19's impact on the fashion industry, and working from home.
I haven’t exactly established a COVID-19 routine. My intention is to always get up early enough to exercise and focus on a creative project or 2 before starting work. Sometimes that happens, and I feel productive and the day feels kind of normal.
My ideal day
Get up early
Read for an hour
Exercise
Shower
Work for 8-10 hours
My reality
Sleep in
Watch I Love Lucy reruns while holding the book I was planning on reading
Put on gym clothes with every intention of working out but sit on the couch instead
Finish work, realize I haven’t showered, feel disgusted with myself
On my most routine-less days, the main thing that gets sacrificed is a shower. This happens at least 2-3 times a week, and I have to say that nothing quite makes you feel that your life is going nowhere like realizing that you haven’t showered all day.
It’s easy to lose track of time in quarantine. It’s even easier to stop caring about personal hygiene. There’s nowhere to go, no one to impress (the coworkers I talk to on Zoom can’t tell when I haven’t showered).
I should note that I haven’t become totally gross. Most days I do shower at an appropriate time for an adult (not 7pm), and I even put on real clothes. A lot of women I know haven’t left their sweats since March, and who can blame them? Women’s clothing isn’t exactly famous for comfort.
It may be too soon to tell whether the women’s fashion and beauty industries will be forever changed by this new normal. Right now my standards for ‘looking good’ are aligned with not having to go anywhere, but I wouldn’t say that I’ve made the decision to permanently forego wearing makeup and showering every day.
The title of an article published in The Guardian back in July says it all: “‘The thought of skinny jeans makes me ill.’ Five ways 2020 has changed fashion.” The writer, Leah Harper, interviews women in the UK about their lockdown attire and what quarantine has changed about their wardrobe for good. A few women mentioned that they used to spend a lot of money on dry cleaning in the before times, because they wore suits to work every day. But they said that they plan on wearing much less formal business attire whenever they go back to the office. Not pajamas, of course, which is a luxury only meetings on Zoom can give us, but certainly something more comfortable than a 3-piece suit.
“Lockdown has given me time to think about what I really like wearing,” one reader said. It’s funny how the pandemic has given some people a weird sense of freedom. For many women, they’ve found freedom in their fashion choices.
The bra might have been the first thing to go. What’s the point of wearing one if you’re not going out? I’m sure many women have already deemed their bras relics of pre-lockdown days. And as with any trend, there’s a debate about the benefits of women permanently going braless. Feminist think pieces say the time to embrace life without underwire is now. Lingerie experts say your boobs will sag without it.
Skinny jeans also seem passé in the age of working from your couch all day. I personally haven’t grunted my way into a pair since March, and this feeling seems mutual among women. So, if anyone ever wanted to know what 2 articles of clothing women could absolutely do without, now they have an answer.
Like bras, skinny jeans are constricting. And they’re temperamental! Some days you can breathe, some days you can’t. I’ve had the most success with locking myself in my jeans before I eat anything. Why are clothes designed to make women feel bad about themselves? To feel like they’re not enough if they don’t fit some rigid mold?
It’s not just women—no one is wearing jeans. We don’t want jeans, we want pajama bottoms (which have seen a surge in sales) to wear under our button-down shirts and suit jackets on Zoom calls. The past few months of quarantine have made it resoundingly clear that we, as a species, just want to be comfortable. We want to wear pants with elastic waistbands!
Popular denim brands might try to pin their dip in sales on the pandemic alone, but the truth is that sales for new jeans were on the decline before lockdown and the rise in unemployment. There are questions around how sustainable and eco-friendly denim production even is, and more and more consumers (particularly young consumers) are making purchases with the planet in mind.
Ethics have been threatening the fashion industry for a while now. As consumers move away from fast-fashion brands to shop secondhand through platforms like thredUp, department store giants like Macy’s have pivoted to offer a used clothing collection. These consumer trains dictate what and how much a store chain might buy from a particular designer. It requires a designer to see the future… Unless they were able to foresee quarantine and design a line of fashionable pajamas, they were bound to take a hit.
Like pretty much everything else in American life, the fashion industry was a fragile bubble ready to pop. The problems existed before COVID-19, but the pandemic has accelerated them. Now, we’re forced to confront them. Maybe we couldn’t have predicted that we’d all be held hostage by a deadly virus, but we’ve all known that so much of what we’re doing doesn’t work—our 2-party political system, healthcare that relies on employment, lunch programs and social services that require a school system to implement, the militarization of police departments, just to name a few.
Back during the Democratic Presidential debates, my mom and I argued about medicare for all. I supported Warren’s more radical and progressive ideas. My mom liked Mayor Pete’s approach of taking the time to show people why they would want a medicare model of healthcare. Welp, now we’re in the midst of a global pandemic. Do you think the people who have been gaslighted into believing that it’s better to have a choice when it comes to health insurance get it now? We’ve already taken too much time to make up our minds about everything that affects this human-centered planet, and the universe is responding with a big ol’ fuck you.
The human race has been slow to respond to the question, ‘What do we want the fate of the planet to be?’ How much we’d even be able to change on a large scale at this point is questionable. On an individual level, this pandemic has given many of us time to think about what we want our lives to be like after…
Perhaps the bigger changes I’d like to see in the world need to start with smaller ones I have more control over: I probably won’t wear makeup as much (goodbye unrealistic beauty standards!), and my wardrobe will be about 80% comfortable and sustainable going forward.
Showering, of course, remains 100% essential. I’d like to get back to doing that before 5pm as often as I can.
I give Oh shit, it’s 5 o’clock already. I still haven’t showered 3 stars.