Louisa Simmonds

I headed into Pitt St Mall with NC on Saturday. My aim was to have some retail therapy to help me compete with the other queens at Mardi Gras.

In my mind I was probably aspiring to end up looking like this…

I really wanted to look like this…

I was certainly determined to spend oodles of cash – the old man has been pissing me off relentlessly for the past week, (for no real reason other than the fact that he’s there), so I decided than an assault on the credit card might be therapeutic.

At that point I still thought shopping would make me feel better – like it used to when my clothes used to fit.

I knew what I didn’t want, which was to end up looking like this…Nightmare on Middle-Aged Street.

But it was the same old sad, shopping story. Before I left, I got all excited and had envisaged exactly what I wanted to buy, but that was obviously before I discovered that the only shoes left must have been designed for miniature poodles and the only dresses on the rails were a perfect fit for Barbie dolls.

I tried to remain upbeat while NC found item after item and looked like a fucking model in ALL of them, and then I retreated to Myer.

Alas, even in my safe haven of Myer, the brands that I have come to rely on recently – the ones that give me some middle-aged feel-good factor – just didn’t deliver.

Blame those beeatch hormones for trying to confuse me or the painful cloudiness still fogging my brain (a result of four too many Chardies on what should have been a quiet night in) the night before, but nothing looked or hung quite right, so by midday I was red-faced and sweating in the changing rooms.

Two of my favourite brands in Myer of late have been Stella of Myer (www.myer.com.au) and Wish (www.wish.com.au). The Stella range has a lot of loose fitting dresses in trendy (not frumpy) Vintage prints and I like Wish’s floaty elegance – in particular their stylish tops that do the best job of camouflaging the old muffin top without having to resort to kaftans.

By the afternoon, the added FML complication of torrential rain that led to squeaky, painful shoes with accompanying blisters, didn’t help my mood and even the lattes were working against me by blowing up the muffin top to a balloon.

I decided to play safe. I’ve been quite partial to the footless tights/mid-thigh dress combo for a while now and as distressing as it is to admit to needing tights in the summer, (WTF global warming), over the last few days, I’ve been freezing my ovaries off.

So I fancied something like this little dress on the right, from Country Road, but unfortunately the budget said no.

Of course, whenever I’m shopping for sensible, atypical middle-aged, dresses for work, (because I have to look androgynous there), or have no money to spend, those short, funky dresses throw themselves off the rails to tempt me, but alas, with a hundred bucks still burning a great fat hole in the back pocket of my jeans, it was Sod’s Law that there would be nothing I liked.

So finally I did what any desperate woman does in a serious shopping crisis and I grabbed at a handful of ‘possibles’ and marched bravely towards the changing room, determined to buy SOMETHING…ANY FUCKING THING.

The changing room attendant did her best to challenge me about the number of items in my arms, but when I flashed her THAT look, even she KNEW, stepped back and allowed me to pass with SEVEN items.

Here are some of the ones I tried:

Inevitably I bought the ONLY item in the whole of Pitt Street Mall NOT in the sale – a cute little top from Toi Et Moi – firstly because anything with a French name sounds super stylish, and secondly because I wanted the old man to REALLY hurt like it.

But mainly because I’M FUCKING WORTH IT!

#Clothing #Shopping #Women #middleaged #Myer #Humor #Dress #retailtherapy