Dressing for the Anonymous Internet Gaze
In a fashion-apathetic world, with fewer real-life interactions, fashion seems to be something that is mostly shared and experienced online--for better or worse.
One time on a family vacation, I stayed back at the hotel to watch the kids during my toddler’s nap while my husband went to an art museum by himself (the invisible labor of looking at art while giving your wife extra bonding time with the children, #dadlife.) Anyway, when he returned he told me that a lot of the women at the museum were dressed to impress in a way that seemed unusual for a museum, both on the basis of formality and boldness.
At first, I wondered if there was some “must serve looks at the museum” rule of which I was unaware, and this got me a little excited, because it meant all my outfits for which I have “no occasion” could assert themselves at a still life exhibit while I pretended to look at the art. But no! The more I thought about it, the more I realized that these women weren’t dressing up for the museum. They were dressing up because the museum was a socially acceptable place to take Instagram photos. They were dressing up for the imaginary people on their phones, not the real people in the museum.
If you’re a fashion-obsessed adult living in 2026, you likely don’t interact with tons of people in real life who care about what you wear. This could be a good thing—fewer people who care means nobody is judging you for wearing a turtleneck sweater in a “last year” shade of mocha mousse. But it also means that when you wear something cool, nobody cares. There are no stakes to fashion anymore, unless you live in a very specific social niche. The only people who will care—positively or negatively—will be people online, and only a small fragment of those people.
As a teenager, I actually liked the high stakes and pressure of fashion that came along with the shallow world of high school. This wasn’t always good—when I was thirteen, I was bullied for wearing knee socks with a pleated skirt when I thought I was serving dark academia realness (2003 suburban tristate area kids don’t get it.) But there were other times that I met and exceeded the social expectations around fashion, like in eighth grade when I returned from summer break decked out in burgundy, camel and blush prepwear from American Eagle to a veritable wave of approval. If I wore a really pretty or daring dress at a school dance, people would notice. I could, reasonably, expect to be seen, wherever I went. Picking my dress for the prom was always so much more fun knowing that other people gave a shit about it—and by the way, I totally killed with this gorgeous emerald green silk number in 2007:
At the time, when I obsessed over my clothes, adult women in my life would “reassure” me that this was such a temporary phase, and nobody outside of high school would ever care what I wore. Of course, they were right—but it hasn’t always been a good thing. On some level, I really miss how it felt when people cared about my clothes, even when it carried a risk of ridicule. And now, as a mom in her thirties who enjoys fashion far more than anyone else within a five mile radius, I sometimes wonder “who I’m dressing for” when I put together a really cool outfit.
Increasingly the answer is obvious and kind of disturbing: with nowhere to dress up, no fashion “scene” and very few people in my life who care about fashion… I am like those girls at the museum. I am dressing for thousands of imaginary friends in my phone. And I have a feeling many other socially (and sartorially) isolated fashion-lovers are doing the same.
