shopping irl

O THE HORROR

Last week I went to a wedding, didn’t have anything to wear or time to go home and get something to wear, so figured I’d visit one of those famous shops in one of those shopping centres I’ve heard so much about. It’s like online shopping except you deliver it to yourself and nobody has the right sized bag to put it in so you have to walk around holding it in your hands. I want to say bald. An item of clothing that isn’t in a bag feels bald to me?

NB: I don’t buy from fast fashion outlets but, due to logistics, there was no other option at this time.

Had a full four hours in the shopping centre before everything closed, my hotel was right by said shopping centre, was psyched to shop like it was 2008, good lord man what has happened to shops.

I mean I know what has happened to shops, I’m just about to publish this Substack post on it*, but allow me to whinge.

*I’m talking about the internet.

Firstly, I know other people have said this but every item of clothing really does currently fall into one of two categories: Y2K pop star shooting sex music video in sex shed with water dripping from ceiling (sex) or older woman attending the theatre. We have cut-out dresses and/or tops you can’t wear if you have boobs because one boob will slide out like a fried egg in a breakfast sandwich, or Hobbs.

If you’re not au fait with Hobbs, it makes clothes that couldn’t sound more like they are being sold in a shop called Hobbs. Nothing wrong with Hobbs, but Hobbs wasn’t what I wanted in this moment.

I used to be able to pick shops based on the sort of clothes I wanted, now everything is like mini versions of the same big shop. Like how all fast food places get their ingredients from the same cheap supplier so Tortilla tastes like Chipotle which tastes like Leon.

If someone finds out Tortilla does not use the same supplier as Chipotle don’t comment or I’ll block you, this is a roll, I’m on a roll, I’m on the sort of roll my boob was on when it kept rolling out of the surprise cut-out tops I tried on. It was like whack-a-mole if, instead of whacking the mole, you looked at the mole and felt sad.

Do I need to add that there are no mediums in stock because everybody is a medium and they don’t provide enough clothes for humans to buy them? So many rails of XS tops that are the same three colours.

Cos! Some of you are screaming. Cos has a distinct personality! You can’t say Cos is the same as H&M even though it’s literally the same because H&M owns Cos so they use the same sweatshops, but Cos staff steam the clothes before putting them on the rail while H&M staff scrunch everything into balls and fire them onto the shopfloor out of cannons!

I went to Cos after looking on the website and finally finding what I wanted to wear: a simple blue matching shirt-and-shorts combo that could be dressed up with nice shoes. I went to Cos and saw the shirt, but not the shorts. I went to Cos and the woman said “that shirt doesn’t have matching shorts”. I went to Cos and I showed the woman the picture on the website and the woman said “oh yeah we don’t have them”. I went to Cos and asked the woman where I could find black shorts, because the shirt had black piping and it might look like it matched? I went to Cos and the woman said '“we don’t have any shorts”. I went to Cos and it is July and Cos does not sell any shorts and I bought the top and I went to Next next door to Cos and when I asked the woman in Next where the shorts were she said “I don’t know”. I went to Next next door to Cos and as I ran around trying to find shorts because the shopping mall was about to close, the Next woman appeared with a pair of leggings and said “is this what you want” and then when I said no, the Next woman brandished a shorter pair of leggings and said “what about this” and I said “honestly don’t worry I just need shorts” and there were no shorts in Next or Cos and I cannot express how much this was in the month of July.

There was a Zara so I ran there with my Cos shirt in hand (“sorry, we only have bags for necklaces or cars”) and found three pairs of shorts which were all meant to show off your lower butt cheeks. The use of ‘lower’ implies a ‘higher’ which logically sounds like I have four butt cheeks, and let me tell you when a 38 year-old woman who hasn’t exercised since October 2025 wears shorts that short, she often does develop four butt cheeks. I bought them and thought fuck it I’ll do some squats or only move parallel to the walls of the wedding like a crab or something.

This gave me half an hour to find shoes. Would you like to know the very complicated shoe brief I had to fulfil? Heels that aren’t open toe or arseless. As in, those kitten heel things with no backs because if I wanted to constantly walk out of my own shoes I’d go to a joke shop. Anyway I had been keeping my eyes open for this sort of shoe in the clothes shops I’d been in and had only spotted flat strappy sandals or a backless arseless mules (shoe not donkey).

There were three options: Office, Dune and a small John Lewis above a Waitrose that, upon closer inspection, sold only flat ballet pumps and knee high boots. Good on them I suppose.

Office had trainers and backless mules. Dune had winter brogues and a pair of black court heels that were so boring my eyes kept sliding over them like they didn’t exist. I’d say “there are no heels” and the woman would patiently reply “we have these in an 8” and I’d be like “what why are you pointing at blank space” etc.

I chuntered so much while trying the shoes on that eventually, when I picked the boring court heels along with the brogues (just in case) and returned the latter the next day, the woman recognised me and said “You’re the lady who hates shopping”.

These shoes did not work with the outfit. The outfit also did not work with the outfit. Nobody in the shops knew what was going on. None of the shops stocked anything interesting there were no sizes the range of shoes sucked ass everything was bizarrely wintry and it was silly to think that shopping would be the same as it was when I was young and online hadn’t really kicked off yet.

It’s the same with restaurants where the food is late and cold and you have to ask 14 times for tap water because the waiting staff are understandably more focused on the constant slew of bags that need handing to the Deliveroo drivers.

The decline of IRL restaurants because of online delivery feels slow and steady to me because I’m constantly in restaurants, like the frog that slowly boils to death in the increasingly hot water except I’m just faintly annoyed that my edamame beans didn’t arrive. The decline of clothes shops hit me harder because the last time I tried to buy something in one must have been 2019.

Vinted is the only way now, I suppose. Or independent online shops, provided I stop getting scammed by the multitude of pretend AI stores on Instagram. Yes, I do diligent research on the brand names, but I prefer to do this after buying the product, okay? It’s avant garde. It’s friction-maxxing. It means that last month a denim jacket arrived from China that smelt like playdough and looked like something I’d happily put my dog in. When returning it, the company (Innovare Denim) requested it be sent to a house in America and recommended I lie at the post office about the value to avoid paying Custom Tax. That’s when I started to suspect it was a scam.

Oh it’s got all depressing, I can’t end this here. Okay okay on the plus side I had a nice time at the wedding and am going to see The Kooks this weekend. Lots of people have openly scoffed at this decision but Inside In/Inside Out was the sound of (one of my) teenage summer(s) and isn’t it nice to just go have a laugh and a drink and a dance to something you like eh.

No I won’t be wearing the Cos and Zara outfit because when I got back to the hotel it looked mental, so instead I wore an old beach coverup to the wedding that I’d accidentally packed in my suitcase thinking it was a skirt. Which I’d also thought ‘that’s a weird thing to pack, I hate that skirt’ as I’d put it in the suitcase, but thank god I did! What luck! And yes it means that entire shopping debacle was utterly pointless but I returned everything so nothing was lost other than time, peace and my trust in the retail sector.

Byeeeee