The Quiet Power of Dressing With Intention
Caring about what you wear isn’t shallow. It’s strategic. And women? They have … opinions.
→ Read the full essay on PROVOKED
Editor’s Note: Off-Script—the why, what, and oh sh*t moments behind this article.
I have a closet full of designer labels, and I dress for myself.
I love the craft of fashion—the drape of a good wool, a hand-stitched buttonhole, the way a great silhouette can turn heads. I ran costuming at Disney years ago, including the dress code for every on-stage and off-stage employee up through the executive ranks, so I know what intentional dressing looks like at scale. I also know what it looks like when you give up.
I don’t buy fast fashion. I’d rather own one good vintage piece than a closet of American lazy. I wait for the right thing to go on sale. I know the silhouettes that work on me and the ones that don’t, and I know the difference between a Chanel jacket and a Shein dupe. When I travel in Europe I look like I belong there, whether that’s Paris or Munich or London, because I’ve studied how women dress in those cities and I respect the rules enough to know when I’m breaking them.
So when Melissa Gould pitched a piece about getting dressed for a trip, I was interested but I needed her to find the spine.
The first draft came in soft. She was sitting in European cafés, watching women of every age move through cities with a physical ease she couldn’t quite name, and she knew her own packing—grays, blacks, no dresses, pure default—was wrong. She just couldn’t say why yet. We went through revisions, then pivots, then more revisions, until the through-line landed.
The through-line is this: Comfort is one aspect of dressing, but it isn’t the heart of intention. Intention is what makes you walk into a room without shrinking. It’s what happens when you put on a red suit, or a classic herringbone jacket with a leopard silk blouse underneath, pattern on pattern, and people take you seriously. It’s the difference between fading into the gray-sweats background and channeling Iris Apfel, or the Accidental Icon, every woman who ever made a room turn its head because she’d thought about what she was wearing and meant it.
Melissa got there. She bought four dresses in Europe. Not as a metaphor. She actually bought four dresses, and it’s what makes the piece work.
The response wasn’t quiet. Nearly 50 comments, readers split hard, which is what we wanted. One reader invoked la bella figura, the idea that you owe yourself and others your best look. Another called the whole framing irritating, said she finds clothes and the judgment around them exhausting, and couldn’t see why black linen pants don’t count as intention.
Both reactions are legitimate. But default and intention are different things. Knowing which one you’re operating from may be worth a few minutes thought.