Almost everyone knows the feeling of standing in front of a full wardrobe and still believing they have nothing to wear. That frustration often leads to another purchase, which seems like the only possible solution. After all, what if the problem isn’t the number of clothes we own, but the absence of one particular garment— the right one?
What if the problem isn't the number of clothes?
As an image consultant, I often meet people who hope the process will solve that feeling once and for all. As a psychologist, however, I feel responsible for starting the conversation somewhere else.
I tell them that this dissatisfaction will probably return. Not because the consultation failed or because we made the wrong choices, but because people change. New experiences, new contexts and new ways of seeing ourselves give rise to new desires. The wardrobe that makes sense today may no longer reflect who we become a few years from now.
I like to reassure my clients that this dissatisfaction is not a personal failure. Rather than being something unique to them, it is part of the human experience.
Perhaps this is one of the moments when it becomes clear that fashion is psychology.
If we look at this movement through a Lacanian lens, instead of treating consumption as a matter of self-control or making the “right” choices, we can ask a different question:
What do we expect clothes to do for us?
What do we expect clothes to do for us?
Imagine you’re travelling when the temperature drops far more than the forecast predicted, and you realise you need to buy a scarf.
If there’s only one available, the decision is simple. You’re cold, and the scarf does exactly what it’s supposed to do: keep your neck warm.
But imagine walking into a shop with dozens of options.
A plain scarf. A patterned one. One in your favourite colour. A handmade piece. One from a well known brand. Perhaps one of them reminds you of a scarf you recently saw your favourite influencer wearing. They all serve the same practical purpose. Yet your choice is unlikely to be random.
From a Lacanian perspective, your need could be satisfied by any of them. Desire, however, looks for something beyond function. It looks for an object that seems capable of answering—however temporarily—something far less tangible: belonging, authenticity, recognition, or a transformation in how you see yourself.
But if desire isn’t in the scarf, why do we choose that particular one?
Consumer anthropology offers an important clue. In his Meaning Transfer Model, Grant McCracken (1986) argues that consumer goods function as carriers of cultural meaning. There is nothing in the
fabric or texture of a scarf that makes it inherently authentic, elegant or creative. Those meanings are produced socially and attached to objects through culture.
This is why two people can long for exactly the same outcome and still choose completely different scarves. The desire may be similar; the object through which it is expressed depends on each person’s history, the groups they belong to—or hope to belong to—and the meanings they have learned to associate with clothing.
If desire isn't in the scarf, why do we choose that one?
The scarf you saw your favourite influencer wearing never promised anything beyond keeping your neck warm. Yet it’s easy to believe that owning the same piece might bring you a little closer to the image that made that person so compelling in the first place.
You buy the scarf.
For a few days, you like what you see in the mirror. It feels as though it was exactly the piece your wardrobe had been missing. But, over time, the scarf loses that place. It still keeps you warm. What fades is the feeling that it can deliver what you had hoped it would.
Then another scarf appears.
Colin Campbell (1987) describes this dynamic through the idea of modern hedonism: in modern consumer culture, the anticipation of pleasure is often more powerful than possession itself. Hope doesn’t disappear; it simply finds a new object.
This is how wardrobes gradually fill up—not only with clothes, but with different attempts to answer the same questions.
Perhaps this is where a different relationship with consumption begins: with the recognition that not every purchase is really about clothing. Sometimes, it is an attempt—always provisional, always incomplete—to respond to an anxiety, a desire, or a question about ourselves that we cannot yet put into words.
