- As a Black woman working in luxury resale, I held myself to unattainable standards.
- I wore expensive clothes, wore a size 0, and chemically straightened my hair.
"So what do you do for a living?" How can a question feel so innocuous and simultaneously like a threat?
On this occasion, it was being posed by a Buffalo Exchange employee as I watched her eyes widen with each designer article of clothing she pulled from my giant blue Ikea bag — the last vestiges of my old life.
I had the "joy" of getting to watch a stranger at a consignment shop assign a monetary value to not just my clothes but also my identity. As the words came out of her mouth, in her hands was a $2,000 Celine skirt. Looking at her face, I could see another question emerging: What leads someone to both accrue and want to part ways with the kind of closet most women would kill to have?
The short answer was that I left the job in which I'd earned numerous accolades, pulled out of a deal for the home I was buying, broke up with the man I was going to marry, and had my third nervous breakdown in six months.
I had let my clothes do the talking for me
Spending so much money and time on clothing and taking care of myself are as much about how I see myself as they are about how others see me. Because I'm a Black woman who has had my right to belong in many rooms be interrogated — directly and indirectly — having a wardrobe that could say for me, "I belong here," was a necessity. What I put on my body, how I maintained my hair, my tone, and the size and shape of my body itself were all part of the character.
So I was super skinny wearing a size 0 with chemically straightened hair and a soft, passive voice who never left the house without at least one couture label on my arm, feet, or back.
I used to work in fashion
My fixation with letting my clothes do the talking for me ultimately guided me toward a career working in fashion. Over three years, I managed to jump from one company to another, entertain a new, more exclusive client roster as a luxury-resale consultant, and extend my social circle to the edges of the upper echelon — which I thought if I reached, I'd finally be permitted to relax and enjoy the view. I was wrong.
In winter 2021, because I was holding myself to an unreasonable standard, many of my relationships broke down. I started to see myself as a fraud and believed most other people did, too.
As much as I desperately fought this, I couldn't really say they were wrong. Because underneath the Alexander Wang suit, I knew I wasn't the woman I was trying so hard to pretend to be. I chose to quit my job, which was the first domino to fall and led me to reevaluate my life.
By spring 2022, I was unemployed, single, and suddenly living back with my parents in the suburbs.
When my life crashed, I entertained the idea that this time off was just going to be a brief unpaid sabbatical of sorts. But the longer it lasted, the clearer it became to me that I could never put on that old costume again — and not just because I went from a 24-inch waist to a size 27.
I sold my old clothes
Later that year, I made my first visit to the resale store. That first trip was the easiest, but they got increasingly harder. By my last selling trip, fear had me attached to the counter. I watched like a hawk, but I let it continue. Before I knew it, the jumbo bag handed back to me was nearly empty — what can I say, I had nice stuff.
Despite being unsure of how I'll be able to find "success" outside the costume I once wore and the identity that accompanied it — I'm done with that person. But I thank her for everything she gave me.
I had to ask myself, "What happens if I do let all these overpriced relics go, but for some reason, I'm still called to walk into a client meeting I'd never have dared enter without them?"
And the answer was I'd still walk in. But I would not be entering as the character who had to legitimize herself by hiding behind a label, a size, or someone else's plus-one. I'd enter as the woman who recently learned to walk around without any costume or artifice successfully.