The mirage of perfection

Open with care! This week, Annie gets personal.

Talking about women’s bodies is often unwelcome and unhelpful. I have been on the receiving end of callous commentary about my own far too many times, and many of you will know, from your own firsthand experience, that this does not make me unique. But it has started to feel morally insane not to name the elephant in the room: extreme thinness is back. And, thanks to GLP1s and a dose of mildly disordered thinking, it’s now just a prescription away.

Over the last few days, I’ve seen those images of a certain pop star, styled resplendently by Law Roach for her latest music video, and felt a familiar weight in my chest. Memories of my own emaciated body. The way my feet stayed ice-cold, even in three pairs of socks. The hunger pains that felt like a pat on the head. The way this malignant force, too ugly and desperate to contain, seeped into every nook and cranny of my brain.

Then I read the comments on those images and thought about why calling for the boycotting of someone for the apparent moral transgression of being very, very thin is extremely stupid. Like our culture doesn’t practically demand it of women. As if punishment is a sensible reaction to pain. As though we could beat back shame with more shame.

I don’t know what condition said pop star is in, mentally. I’m relieved to hear she is taking time out. Still, upon seeing those images, I thought about all the vulnerable young girls who will quietly assume this pop star’s ever-shrinking body is normal… aspirational, even. Adding it as mental evidence that they’re not good, talented, beautiful, worthy enough — because they don’t look like that.

And, though I rarely think about it anymore, I also contemplated my own history of disordered eating and wondered — not for the first time — what triggered my GP to refer 16-year-old me to an anorexia clinic? How I first got infected with the notion that I could be perfect if only I were thin enough?

Many who have experience with this fucking nightmare of a mental illness will tell you: pinpointing the one moment, one comment or one picture of a famous person that kicked it into gear can be like looking for a shadow in the dead of night. For me, at least, it was an illness that carved its way into my brain via a thousand cuts, guided by the single, confused idea that perfection wasn’t just possible, but the only goal.

Let me pause here for a moment to state the obvious: this week’s newsletter sits a little outside our norm. We write about style and fashion. And while we all know fashion has its own well-documented culture of disordered thinking around women’s bodies, our goal is normally to make you smile (after all, fashion is SO god damn serious sometimes) by creating a little permission to feel joy in how we relate to clothes and to ourselves. Selfishly, we created homeroom to engage with the joyful parts of fashion without feeling the pressure of having to wear a costume (something we’ve both felt a need to do while working in the fashion industry).

So, here’s me removing the costume: I am no longer anorexic, thank god, but I remain a painfully annoying perfectionist. And it is probably the biggest obstacle standing between me and the kind of rule-breaking that makes for the iconic, joyful style I admire so much in others. Not lifestyle, or budget, or weather, or lack of time. Just the dogged fear of being wrong.

And this only seems like a superficial problem until you realise how stubborn and sprawling the roots are.

Perfectionism is commonly misunderstood as a healthy drive for excellence. We imagine it to be the one ‘weakness’ a prospective employer can tolerate in us, which makes it seem like a confected, fake problem — the fodder of self-indulgent, privileged private school girls.

In reality, it’s a pattern of thinking defined by rigidity, restriction, shame and punishment. It’s a system of control and denial. It effectively silences creative expression, freedom and experimentation because at its core, the system scans for a possible mistake and kills it before it can become an idea.

Not all perfectionists have to endure being force-fed calorie-dense nutritional supplements against their will. But, like anorexia, perfectionism rejects the urge we all feel deep within to respond to our appetites — for risk, for play, for the ‘wrong’ shoes that make an outfit so right. A perfectionist might find it harder than most to embrace the fact that going against the grain or making “mistakes” on purpose is the most honest way to live — and dress — on your own terms.

We’re living through a time when the mirage of perfectionism has imbued many aspects of culture. If there is a common truth between the rise of AI, ‘Instagram Face’, the recreational use of GLP1s and the endless stream of upper blepharoplasty content on my feed, it’s that we’re very easily seduced by the promise that ‘perfect’ is possible. That we might be able to shortcut our way to some kind of ultimate physical utopia. But, to paraphrase an iconic Mad Men scene, the Greeks had two meanings for utopia: ‘eu-topos’, meaning the good place. And ‘ou-topos’, meaning the place that cannot be.

The more we chase perfectionism, the further we get from our inherent ability to express ourselves freely and originally. In matters of substantive style, this is a stifling situation to find ourselves in.

Some might ask why it matters at all. It is, of course, no more necessary to have dazzling personal style than it is necessary to give birth, be married, have a career that is perfectly aligned to your ‘purpose’, or any other conventional north star we associate with ‘self-fulfillment’. That said, we’ve shared a fair amount on why caring about our personal style isn’t as superficial as it seems. Put simply, it helps us understand who we are and what we care about. See also: cooking. Reading. Travelling. Talking. Eating!

So, what do we do when the culture we exist in is trying to force-feed us the false promise that perfection is just one clavicle, one perfect eye socket, one perfectly constructed sentence away? How do we hold on to our moral sanity and have the bravery to be a little bit wrong?

I cast my mind back to the moment I chose to listen to my appetite after years of denying it. I was 19. I had just moved to a new city, made new friends, listened to new music. I felt galvanized by the excitement of discovery. I wore things I had bought in little experimental spurts, but, until then, never allowed myself to enjoy. The malignant force got weaker and I ate food without first cross-checking its caloric contents against my goal of no more than 700 (calories a day…truly). Joy!

So perhaps the only way out of this perfectionist trap is to listen to our appetite for discovery. To build our own metaphorical spice rack, and embrace the inevitability that we’re going to, at some point, fuck up the recipe and potentially stumble on our signature dish.

I say this as someone who is objectively terrible at practicing this philosophy — especially in matters of style — but it’s not for lack of wanting. My appetite is there. I know the joy that could be unlocked if I caved to it more freely and more often.

But right now, the sun is shining and I’m about to savour the first scoop of chocolate-dusted foam from my coffee.

Perfect.

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