Shopping Starvation
Our anonymous fashionista bemoans her inability to buy the whole of Topshop; thanks, student living
After realising I hadn’t actually paid my rent for over four months and ending up signing over a cheque worth £1200 to my landlord this week, my purse has felt pretty empty. Just as all those pretty pastels and spring florals hit the shops too. I’m a sucker for spring fashion, more than any other time of the year, floral dresses, skirts and blouses feel like home. And I can’t afford to buy any of them. You know the saying ‘home is where the heart is’? If that is true, then I think my home might be somewhere in the middle of Warehouse, and right now it feels like my parents have changed the locks without telling me.
I’m getting pretty desperate to go shopping. Whenever I do any work I have to switch the internet connection off on my laptop because the Asos tab on my bookmarks bar looks like the best idea in the world. Lent starts on the 22nd of February and right now I’m willing it on to hurry up so that I can at least pass this shopping detox off as an act of favour towards God (although it would make me a feel a little bit uneasy and possibly cheap when I end up betraying God by bulk buying the suede pastel ballet flats in every colour Primark has available in my size.)
Every girl has to agree that shopping is an addiction rivalled only by hard drugs and alcohol. It gives you the kind of feeling you get when you go home at Christmas and get the effect of heating, red meat and triple ply toilet roll for the first time in three months. But this habit has to be kept up, otherwise the withdrawal symptoms can be disastrous. Like the time I tried to make myself a pair of DIY shorts one summer out of an old pair of 915 New Look jeans but ended up cutting the crotch so thin that everyone managed to catch on to my leopard print obsession due to the fact my pants were wider than my new g-string styled shorts. Or the time me and my sister tried to make bleach affect t-shirts and instead ended up with a bleach affected kitchen carpet and a very un-understanding mother.
I’ve been trying to fill my time with things that are fashion unrelated in order to save my overdraft and my will to live. Luckily for me, my flatmate got herself hospitalised with a blood infection earlier in the week which took up some important potential spending time, but even visiting her I couldn’t help but lose attention on the doctors in her ward, not because they were hot, but because those mint green pastel scrubs were the exact same colour as a bandage skirt I’d had my eye on online. Then out of desperation I decided to have a Facebook cull, of which you’ll be proud to know I’ve deleted over 100 friends I no longer speak to/actually ever liked. I then deleted an extra 50 out of anger at anyone who was wearing floral prints or lilac in their profile pictures.
But I’ve lasted so far (around four days) without a single clothing/handbag/shoe related purchase. And secretly I’m quite proud of myself. Although this weekend is one of my best friends birthdays in Newcastle, so I’m sorry if you’re reading this, and seriously I do love you, but you’re going to have to be super nice to me this week if you don’t want the money I put aside for your present to mysteriously disappear as I turn up at your party in a new mint green bandage skirt…
