Burning The Fashion Candle
Burn the candle. Eat the chocolate. Wear the clothes.
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Editor’s Letter, 12/12/2022 by Molly Elizabeth Agnew
“Clothes mean nothing until someone lives in them.” - Marc Jacobs
Have you ever been gifted a luxurious scented candle? Did you immediately grab your nearest lighter and let the fumes enter your nostrils, or did you say ‘thank you so much’ and gently placed it on a shelf where you will ignore its existence, lest you actually bother to light it? We have all been there. Too frightened to light a candle since it smells so inviting, too worried to eat an expensive square of chocolate since the wrapping was so intricate or keeping a perfume in its packaging to ensure its safety.
While this is a universal matter a phrase has been circulating on TikTok designed to help you out of this ridiculous, wasteful hole.
‘Burn The Candle’
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In many ways, it is similar to the mindset of ‘just do it’. Why wait around and procrastinate, just do it! Why wait around while your candle sits lonely and unused, just burn it!
The real question at the heart of the ‘burn the candle’ narrative is why own something if you’re not actually going to make use of it? So, why own clothing that you’re never going to wear?
Be honest with yourself, and I mean utterly, vulnerably honest with yourself, how many items of clothing sitting in your wardrobe currently have you never worn? I’d wager that a significant amount has never been touched, or only worn a handful of times. Let’s dig into why many of us tend to hoard our clothing in the same way we never light our candles.
Humans are a naturally nostalgic species that cling to memories of our past for dear life. We create books full of collages of images of ourselves as babies, children and teenagers. We collate our old certificates and school medals and place them in cardboard boxes at the back of wardrobes. We curate playlists on Spotify that remind us of certain people, places and moments. We know that life, and our memory, is fleeting and thus we do what we can to preserve these feelings.
Clothing and I don’t necessarily mean high fashion here, I mean clothing in its most general sense, can elicit a variety of emotions from absolute anger to pure pleasure. It does not matter if we care who the current creative director of Prada is or if we only care to not be naked, clothing unites us in feeling. This is why we may keep one of our first-ever bras, the dress we wore on that particularly magical date night, the coat our grandmother gave us when we turned 16 or the first designer item we ever bought with our own hard-earned cash. These items overflowing with sentimental value deserve to be held onto for us to rediscover every time we randomly decide to reorganise our closets. (Before going any further, this is most likely the right spot to say that, if you can afford it, buying a Birkin, keeping it in immaculate condition and then selling it some years down the line when you need some extra cash is also a reasonable form of hoarding and not something I would necessarily discourage. You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.)
There is, however, a glaring difference between holding onto items of affectionate merit and buying things we know we probably won’t actually wear. How many items of clothing did you buy in 2022 and how many of those items have you really gotten good wear from? With the trend cycle seemingly vanishing before our very eyes, it is becoming harder and harder to keep up with current popular fashions and yet we try in earnest by purchasing fast fashion day in and day out. We can buy every bright pink item in Zara, wear it for a month or two and then low and behold it is shoved in a corner as we move from Barbiecore onto some new, confusingly specific, core. In this way, we buy clothing to chase a never-ending goal. In spite of this unhealthy consumption, we can still aim to burn the fashion candle and in fact, you may find yourself surprised at how versatile most items of clothing are. Sure, you may have moved on from Barbiecore, but there’s nothing wrong with one little pop of pink as an accessory! There will be articles of clothing hiding in your wardrobe that you once adored. Give them a new lease on life and adore them once more. Burn the fashion candle!
As a society, we have placed designer and expensive fashion on a pedestal. Logically, it makes sense that we are scared to take a Chanel handbag on the tube as something so costly should be protected. This then begs the question though, what’s the point in owning that handbag in the first place if you’re too scared to go out in public with it on your arm? Surely, handbags are there to be worn (look at how Jane Birkin uses her Birkin.) Cost per wear refers to a metric used to see the value of your investment in a particular item and is calculated by dividing the price you bought it for by the number of times you anticipate wearing the item. Therefore, the more you wear an item the more bang you get for your buck. Hypothetically speaking, if you bought a Loewe small puzzle bag for roughly £2,400 but you only donned it 10 times, then each wear cost you £240. However, if you wore it 50 times (which really isn’t a lot) then each wear would only cost you £48, which suddenly seems far more affordable. So, burn the fashion candle and make sure your money gets used wisely!
As previously mentioned, fashion makes us feel. Even the most confident of us can struggle sometimes with the courage to wear something out of our comfort zone, and yet when we do we often feel elated. Be it a chiffon ballgown or a tight-fitting pair of jeans, we all deserve to get joy out of the things we own. We all deserve to try something we have always dreamt of.
Life comes at us fast and will leave us equally as rapidly.
Every single mundane day in this existence is an opportunity to celebrate.
Every day is a special occasion.
So, burn the candle. Eat the chocolate. Wear the clothes. Because, why the hell not?