My new Covid-19 uniform is a flannelette shirt over thermal top, paired with high-waisted mom jeans and sneakers. It’s a look that might generously be called normcore, but is more of a kind of slothy-Brokeback-Seinfeld vibe. I’ve been wearing it, or some slight variation of it, for weeks now.
The jeans were an op-shop pandemic purchase, bought when I realised the skinny jeans – along with the button-up blouses, dresses and coats – that made up my winter work wardrobe simply wouldn’t do anymore. They had been rendered obsolete by months of working from home, about as appealing as a hoop skirt for a day spent shifting from chair to couch and back again, unseen by almost anyone from the neck down.
Changing the way we dressed was something of a novelty in the early stages of the coronavirus era. Our quarantine looks were a staple topic of the inane banter we were all locked in throughout March (Leggings! Tiger King! Zoom trivia!). Bras were triumphantly banished, activewear became all-day-wear and we perfected the news anchor art of being camera-ready by dressing for work from the waist up. My boyfriend and I bestowed on each other isolation sartorial gifts: he bought me a lavender Adidas tracksuit, which gave me a very Real Couchwives air, and I bought him a pair of Uggs. (At least I thought I did, until they arrived in the mail and I realised they were definitely counterfeit and I had been scammed. We now call them his ScUggs).
The hard lockdown has since lifted in my Australian state, but increasingly we’re realising that actual normalcy is nowhere on the horizon.
With that comes the realisation that I might not be going back to how I used to dress, either.
A quick callout to my friends on Instagram reveals everyone is living pretty much the same casual Covid truth. One friend sends a picture of himself on the balcony of his apartment wearing a stolen hotel bathrobe at midday. We joke that it’s the perfect outfit for working between depression showers, in that only kind-of joking way.
“I just put orthotics in my Ugg boots,” another friend confesses. Someone else is dressed in jeans and sneakers at his half-empty law firm, where “we’re basically just casual Friday all the time now”. Others respond they have, like me, slipped into a kind of relaxed daily uniform of comfy pants, sneakers or slippers, and practical layers (“all fleece all the time”) to stave off the cold of unheated Australian homes in winter. It’s a look that’s all about comfort in uncomfortable times –call it Covidcore, perhaps. The only must-have accessory is a mask.
“Fashion is part of the daily air and it changes all the time, with all the events,” fashion editor Diana Vreeland once observed. “You can even see the approaching of a revolution in clothes. You can see and feel everything in clothes.”
Winter is exacerbating the shift in our hemisphere, but even in summery Covid-gripped America, people say their aesthetic is shifting. Maggie Lange wrote in the Cut last week about a new Dora the Explorer-style typified by practical sandals and shorts. “What am I doing in these happy, practical clothes? Oh, nothing. Where am I going? Probably nowhere. What am I ready for? Every! Possible! Thing! Truly, I’d take anything.”
So much of the way we used to dress was geared for a lifestyle that barely exists anymore, even with most of the onerous restrictions lifted. Work is still largely from home, or in workplaces that are only sparsely attended. We can go out – in most Australian states – but public transport still feels like a risk and nightlife is necessarily a more sedate affair than it used to be (“no dancing, no singing, no mingling”).
But the change, for me at least, is more than just practical. After months of going cold turkey on dressing up, and instead dressing purely for comfort, I find I just care less about what I wear and how I look.
This unshackling from social expectations around appearances has been a common theme for women throughout the pandemic (many heterosexual men, however, have seemingly not changed a thing, they were dressing and grooming for quarantine their whole lives). Sydney writer Katie Cunningham wrote in June about how months in isolation had liberated her from her beauty routine, the lack of human interaction suspending the desire to try. “To my surprise, it’s felt like exhaling,” she explained.
In our quarantine clothes, many women realised we could literally exhale properly for the first time in a while – no more cutting waistbands, underwire bras or constricting dresses. “The idea of going back to wearing heels now is laughable,” another friend told me. My current aesthetic is kind of 90s cowgirl, but it’s also just how I remember my second-wave feminist mum and her friends dressing when I was a kid – practical, samey outfits that I once thought were terribly daggy but now see telegraphed a low-key insouciance about capitalism, work culture and the male gaze.
Now in my closet, scorned shirts and dresses hang reproachfully. Below them a row of stilettos and heeled boots are gathering dust, like artefacts in a museum. I’m not saying I’ll never wear any of them again. But times are changing, and I’m dressed for them.
