thoughts on food influencers' performance of femininity, bestdressed, and my overflowing closet

i'm in my performing-femininity-for-the-algorithm era

My life lately has been consumed by clothing: getting rid of old pieces, buying new ones, biking all over town doing returns, running out of space to store the new things I’m keeping, berating myself about how I own and am buying entirely too much clothing for a person who doesn’t leave the house or dress up all that often. I can’t seem to break out of this mindset that if I just find the perfect going out top or just one black dress that I adore then my life will fall into place because I have an outfit to wear to every circumstance thrown at me. 

Instead I’m overwhelmed by all the maintenance required of owning too much of anything — breaking down and recycling the boxes delivered to my house, spending hours going to different mail carriers to return unwanted items, having to regularly sort through my closet and drawers to find things to give away, sorting every unwanted item into Newbury Street consignment shops, Buffalo Exchange, Threadup, Goodwill, and textile recycling piles and then delivering each pile, by bike or public transit or uber, to its intended destination in desperate hope to keep as many things as possible out of the landfill, even though, realistically, that’s where everything we once loved will eventually wind up — and asking myself when it will all be enough.

Through this I’ve been thinking a lot about Ashley Rous, better known as bestdressed on Youtube, a fashion influencer who never once did a haul video and stopped posting three years ago after a stalker found her studio apartment in NYC. I found her channel in May of 2022 and immediately binged the majority of her content, which surprised me since I haven’t been on Youtube much since 2011. Ashley had an amazing eye for styling her part-thrifted, part-store-purchased wardrobe of timeless clothing. She never styled trendy, of-the-moment pieces, instead focusing on cut, fabric, tailoring, fit, silhouette — qualities which guaranteed that her outfits were always stylish and always in fashion.

I fell in love with her videos because they found me at a time when I was feeling so low about my own wardrobe. After college I worked in food service, where my daily wear consisted of sporty leggings and a company t-shirt for three years. Afterward, I finagled an office job, which required a different wardrobe, except we were working remotely. Suffice to say, through my early-to-mid twenties, I was taking zero risks with my outfits and gave little care to my day to day appearance. This was fine until a weeklong trip to Los Angeles in February of 2022, when I started to notice that I had no enthusiasm towards my closet but that I desperately desired to be excited about dressing up.

For the trip to Los Angeles, I packed maybe seven pieces to take with me because they were the only things in my closet that made me somewhat happy, fit well, and had a cohesive colour scheme. In short, I packed a mini capsule wardrobe. The clothes worked well in Los Angeles, albeit I took too few things to last a full week. The problem was that when I came home, I felt nothing towards all the other pieces left in my closet. I realised I’d taken with me the only seven items I remotely liked and everything I left behind meant nothing to me. Coming back from the trip heightened this sense of frustration I’d been avoiding: I wanted to be a fashionable person yet I always felt like I had nothing to wear, I wasn’t inspired to put together outfits, and to be honest, I wasn’t ever totally sure how outfit styling worked anyway.

I have to interject here and say this: shopping for clothes as a fat person is like going on a mission you already know is destined for failure.

There are so few businesses that make plus size clothing, and fewer still that make fashion that is environmentally sustainable or ethically made. Add in other restrictions, like the fact that I’ve become incredibly picky about fit (I’ve settled for too many poorly-fitting clothes in the past), I want my clothes to be made well enough to last at least 3-5 years, I hate polyester, and I’m left with essentially 3 retailers that I can generally rely on (Madewell, Anthropologie, Aritzia), all giant national corporations that aren’t totally sustainable who price a lot of their clothes at $100+ per item. When I try to diversify the brands I wear, I run into the problem of having to get to know the sizing system and fit of the new store. Most of the time, I lose money on my orders by paying a shipping fee to return what I ordered due to issues with fit.

While bestdressed’s Ashley is quite petite and wears straight-size clothes, her focus on style and silhouette showed me how drastically my confidence could grow if I was more picky about my clothes — that if I stopped buying things because they came in my size out of a scarcity mindset and started paying attention to how the item made me feel while wearing it instead, then I could slowly build up a wardrobe made up of clothes that are all my favourite item. Her videos started me on a fashion journey that in a lot of ways has been incredibly joyous. These days, I no longer struggle to find just seven items that I love but have to actually whittle down my packing list when I travel. My closet overfloweth, yet every item in there is cherished.

One of my favourite bestdressed videos is her ultimate closet clean-out, where Ashley tries out every single item she owns and then decides to trash/donate/sell around half (100+ items) of her wardrobe. She embarks on this journey because she feels that her clothes have taken over her life and she’s tired of how much stuff she has spilling out of her closet and drawers. In this and in other, smaller clean-out videos, Ashley is sheepish over the total amount of clothes she owns, but she reminds the viewer (and partly, herself) that “fashion is her job,” which is true, thus entitling her to a much more lavish monthly clothing allowance than the rest of us can or should budget for. 

Watching her videos though, I can’t help but desire to emulate her. What can I say? I can be easily influenced. I want to have a dress versatile enough to style in 10 different ways, I want 30 fall outfits that I’m excited about, and a different set of 30 back-to-school outfits (back to office? back to wine bar job?) for when I feel like I have nothing to wear. I want to have a wardrobe of eternally fashionable thrifted clothing despite how impossible it is to thrift interesting things as a plus size person. 

But, if my job isn’t “fashion,” like Ashley, then how come I’m convinced that buying more clothes will launch me into the life I desire? Beyond the obvious capitalistic influence to endlessly consume more, I’m starting to think that there is a direct link between me wanting to turn this — the food writing, the cooking videos that I film but never post — into some semblance of a career. But to be a woman in food media you have to excel as a knowledgeable authority on the subject, an interesting personality, as well as an effortlessly beautiful, genuinely warm woman. It’s not enough to cook well — your performance of your femininity is part of the job too. You must also be a good host. You must have good taste. You must be writing about food and cooking (especially when it’s for money) as a means to feed family and community, because the food can’t possibly be just for you.

The biggest food influencers I follow come to mind: Alison Roman and Meredith Hayden (of Wishbone Kitchen Tiktok fame). Both flit around well-organised kitchens in to-die-for denim and crisp white blouses. They have impeccable taste, both in the kitchen and in their closets. Outside the kitchen, they’re sporting enviable, expensive, curated wardrobes that further prove their good taste, their trustworthy qualities. Before online food influencers, it was the traditional food media I watched as a teen on Fatafeet, (the Arabic equivalent of The Food Network which broadcast American and British cooking shows in the Levant). These shows featured Nigella Lawson, Giada de Laurentis, and Ina Garten, all gorgeous homemakers who cooked for an endless array of friends and family, putting on a multi-course dinner party every episode. All three were successful women working outside the home but the cooking shows couldn’t dwell on this point. The women were still cooking within a home setting, for other people, taking on the role of perfect homemaker and gracious host.

And so I admit I sometimes shop with the idea that I’m curating a new “cooking wardrobe,” that I’m on the hunt for comfortable, well-fitting jeans and perfect, thick (un-stained) t-shirts to wear in videos of me cooking (which, again, I shoot but never post). I coincide my cooking video shoots to take place on the days when my curly hair is at its curliest, I make up my face (despite how rarely I do that in real life), I dress in nicer clothes and an apron even though, when my phone camera is off, I cook in sweatpants and oil-and-tomato stained college t-shirts, hair pulled up, face bare.

There’s a fear here, that since I don’t fit the mold of the thin, blonde, white woman who loves to cook (but doesn’t overindulge!) and loves to host and looks so goddamn chic all the time then my cooking and writing will not be taken seriously. Falling for one trick (the compulsory performance of beauty that defines a woman) means I’ve fallen for the other: capitalism. The question of when will I ever feel like I own enough has an ominous answer. I’ll never perfectly fit the dominant mold and I’ll likely never feel content with how much I own, despite the nuisance of the upkeep of material things. And so the clothes are a salve, an imperfect solution to satiate a biased algorithm — maybe through them I can emulate good style and posit myself as a knowledgeable person with authority over the recipes I explore, all while successfully performing compulsory femininity.

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This week’s newsletter has obviously veered from the “i was cooking” theme and format, and I hope you’re ok allowing me to indulge in some recent all-consuming thoughts about fashion and food personalities and a Youtuber that I miss like an old friend. August turned into an un-intentional break of finishing up other projects and getting settled into a new job, and I know I keep teasing it, but grill content really is coming! See you soon.