3 reasons why your style mindset is damaged as a millennial women.
In this blog entry I delve into the concept of style mindset, exploring why millennial women have such a complex relationship with clothes and appearance which seems to be escaping Gen Z, who just wear whatever they want.
During a recent online style workshop that I ran I shared my personal experiences and insights on how I developed a more positive style mindset. Ultimately I stopped hating what I saw in the mirror after years of being genuinely plagued by it. In my teachings on style I emphasise the importance of having realistic expectations of yourself, secure knowledge of how to dress the body you have and a positive sense of self worth.
Please click here to be taken to the workshop recording where I encourage viewers to reflect on their mindset and consider the impact that their thoughts have on their style choices.
I offer my spicey musings on why millennial women, like me, have such a negative, sometimes toxic, relationship with our body and end up feeling very unstylish. I have shrunk this massive topic into 3 core reasons.
Our mothers
I am not going to be ‘mother shaming’ here. I love my mum with all my might.
However I am going to draw attention to what it was like growing up in a household where there was zero positive energy given to anything other than being thin in relation to my body. I remember being praised for losing weight, looking thin and berated for looking a bit fat. Equally I remember, and still notice, how much my own mum would criticise the size of her body, what it looked like and what she would wear.
The good low fat alternative to crisps - NOT!
I was not an isolated case, it was very much the vibe of the time. On two different occasions the impact of mothering cropped up in chats I had with my mates last week. One remarked on how once she nipped home from her boyfriends looking a little grey and puffy (aka absolutely hanging) and from that day her mother keeps harking back to the idea that she has ‘let herself go’.
Another childhood friend reminded me of how her mother would only allow us to eat twiglets and not crisps because they were less fattening - we were 11 - and she felt no way about sharing this with us.
I do not blame our mothers, they too grew up in a world where their sense of self worth was determined by them securing a husband not a degree. But I think we need to try to actively do better.
You do not need to be a qualified psychologist to recognise that an atmosphere at home like this is going to negatively impact the young people in it. I am trying very hard to adopt a body neutral tone in my household so my daughter grows with a much better relationship with her body than I had. I learnt about this expression from the wonderful Tara O’Donoghue who speaks so eloquently about the toxicity of body positivity and provided me with a more formidable term - neutrality. Acceptance of one's body rather than to love or loathe it. Check out her Thursday sessions ‘Talk to Tara’ - Your Safe Space for Questions on Body Shame, Image, and Perfectionism.
2. Body shaming magazine headlines
Thank goodness that society demands a little more from magazines and print these days because the late 90’s to early 2000’s were a wild ride.
I distinctly remember piling into WHSmith’s bundling magazines full of front covers and headlines that absolutely shamed women for cellulite, belly rolls, eating literally anything and their outfits and thinking nothing of it.
It was encouraging that to locate these shocking front covers I needed to hit the archives but the rate at which I, and literally all my friends, consumed literature like this in our late teens and early 20’s it's no surprise we have ‘issues’. I am not sure if I was consciously affected by absorbing these messages but I definitely know I was negatively affected on a subconscious level, and so was society at large. It gave space to accept outright insults being thrown at women under the guise ‘banter’. It sets an acceptable narrative that being thin, young and pretty is the only metric that matters. Really it's an abomination that magazines degraded women in public so freely and then cheekily sold it back to us for our reading pleasure!
Un-shockingly I have stretch marks, a flabby tummy, my boobs aren’t as perky as they once were and sometimes I look like absolutely sh*t. This is now thankfully more normalised but it really wasn’t throughout our most vulnerable years. Of course this affected our relationship with fashion and style too as we wanted to copy outfits on celebrated celebrities who were almost always thin or at least thin affirming (remember how popular the Kate Moss diet of a cigarette and diet coke was). Couple this with the fact that size 14 was really the largest size most shops went up to and if you wore that your choices were so limited.
Remember how popular the Kate Moss diet of a cigarette and diet coke was
Shopping was traumatic, magazines didn’t help and our inner child remembers this.
This is what is triggered in millennial women who struggle today in my opinion.
3. Feeling like a failure
I do not know why but I truly believed that at 28 I should be married to the love of my life. I could not wait to find him, so much so that any man who sniffed my way would get the full boyfriend experience - my heart and soul. Alongside this main goal I also expected that I would own a house, have some children, have an established career, good friends, a successful international travel record and a healthy amount of savings.
It's safe to say I failed to achieve my goals, but I can happily say Thank God I Did!
During my youth I positioned my worth adjacent to whether or not I had a man in my life… It was my number one goal and therefore I gifted men so much power that I literally turned down job opportunities, wasted hours and hours crying and felt so deeply useless without one. Naturally this slowly ate away at my self worth and I had no coping mechanisms to counteract the damage.
I wholeheartedly believe this attitude towards men and the utter sense of failure is quite typical for millennial women because this is what we were conditioned to believe gives up worth. It comes from our parents and then from each other. Women constantly report their relationship status to each other and by our 30’s when we are in full hen do and wedding era there becomes two clear camps. Those that have and those that have not ‘won’.
Now I am not saying having a man in your life eradicates any negative self image or feelings of unworthiness - in fact it may illuminate it more. The point I am making is the sense of failure millennial women face when they don’t get these big life things ticked off the list leaves a gaping hole in their self worth and negativity fills the void.
Thankfully, today strategies to cope are improving, the focus is shifting and we are seeing a rise in feminism and female empowerment - ISH.
This is a ‘hard ISH’ because I am aware that I write from an extremely privileged position being white and middle class. I also only write from a cis straight woman's mouth piece too because that is all I know.
Essentially our individual and societal history impacts how we feel. Not rocket science I know, but I do believe that there are so many incredible women out there feeling shockingly awful about how they look and what they wear but not sharing this with anyone due to shame.
The shame is the padlock stopping you from getting help.
Our nervous system wants to protect ourselves from the possibility of pain so we unconsciously lie to ourselves about how we feel. Our perspective can also change because there are loads of factors that affect how we feel; time of the month, who you are with, who you are intending to be with, where you are going, whether it's work or play, how well we are feeling.
All of these things can deeply affect how we are thinking and that's what I call our mindset. I help women to stop feeling like this via my group coaching Escape the Style rut and 1-1 in my Style Education course.
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Thanks for reading,
Love Jess
x
