I was watching Real Housewives of Beverly Hills last night (S15E11), and it unexpectedly delivered advice that has nothing, but also everything, to do with clothes.

Erica is talking to her therapist. People keep telling her “things are about to get better”. Erika is tired and wants to know “but when?”

The therapist responds something along the lines of : “We expect there to be a time when all the bills are payed, the laundry is folded in the drawers, we’ve gotten to the other side. A place where everything is ready, and everything is done, and you can finally start enjoying your life. That moment is never going to happen. There will not be such a point. Life is now. This is what life is.”

This got me thinking about clothes. Clothes are one of the better and more effective ways of distracting from the realities of life. “The perfect wardrobe” seems like the solution for all the problems of life. Finding the perfect item seems solvable compared to solving life. It is so easy look for better clothes. They are everywhere. It is so easy and so reassuring to plan for future that these clothes will deliver, once you find them. Attempting to solve the wardrobe before life can start, postpones the start of life indefinitely.

It also puts on the clothes a task they can’t possibly complete. The task of saving from the present day and delivering a desired, but not defined future. Once we have these better clothes, then our life is going to change. These clothes will save us, if only we found the right ones. And then we finally have the clothes, they seem strange, it’s difficult to wear them, and the life most certainly didn’t change.

We are persistent in believing that there is better clothes out there. That thought carries hope. Hope that it is indeed possible to get better clothes, and thus change your life.

This comes with the accompanying thought, that once you have a wardrobe of “better clothes”, you will of course stop wanting new clothes. I have never heard that someone stopped buying clothes because they had bought themselves into a situation of “perfect wardrobe”, where they don’t need any new clothes. This, like the moment of everything being ready, will not arrive. If someone reaches a place of “I have enough. I don’t need more,” it wasn’t because they got really good at buying. It was something else entirely.

There is no better clothes, just different clothes. There is no future wardrobe that will unlock your life. There is only now. The clothes you already own. The life you already have. And the uncomfortable, yet strangely freeing thought, nothing is on hold. Here is your permission slip to start living the life you are hoping the clothes will deliver.

“Natural”, however, is very different from “moral”. What does the casual not-so-quiet acceptance of nepotism say about the fall of moral? What does the fall of moral say about where humanity is headed?

Ever since the watershed moment of Hailey Bieber’s “Nepo Baby” t-shirt, something has shifted. Nepotism stopped being ashamed. At least in the past, there was an attempt to keep nepotism hidden, albeit in plain sight.

We live in a historically interesting time, characterised by free access to information and platforms for discussing it (somewhat) openly. The visibility of operating systems in society and the flaws are more clearly visible, and the communal aspect of social media allows for the private to become political. Yet we haven’t taken full advantage of it.

Wealth inequality is now worse than it was during the French Revolution. The visibility of the wealthy and their portrayal as “self-made” perpetuates a narrative that if you are poor, it is not a structural fault but a personal one of your own laziness and poor choices. It is this shame that keeps us as consumers, rather than becoming an angry mob of peasants with pitchforks storming the Permuda Triangle of Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos, as it were Versailles in 1987. But grabbing the pitchfork would mean admitting you are poor, exposing yourself as someone who is wealth signalling instead of being wealthy.

The casual acceptance of nepotism has made it appear almost campy. Is the celebration of inherited privilege a coping mechanism for realising as a society that most of us are peasants? I hope the rise of camp nepotism isn’t true acceptance, that it is a phase of cultural discomfort. When a system is too entrenched to dismantle immediately, we first turn it into a joke. We might be laughing with nepotism, not because we like it, but because we don’t know what to do with it. The pitchforks seem so drastic; there has to be something like soft-launching a revolution.

To go back to the Musk-Zuckerberg-Bezos triangle. There is something morally disorienting about the kind of wealth that arrives quickly, without precedent, and without societal guardrails. People have always gotten rich. It’s that our systems never imagined that a single individual could suddenly own the platform where elections are influenced, culture is shaped, and truth is moderated. Acquiring wealth and power has been shown to lead to entitlement, self-centeredness, and decreased empathy, i.e., moral becomes optional. So it is up to the peasant mob to keep things in balance, but if we refuse to acknowledge our peasantness, the acceptance of nepotism could be just a canary bird in the coal mine of what the future holds and what kind of totalitarian nepotism we are politely asked to accept next.

I’m not ready to roll end credits on humanity yet. What could soft-launching a revolution look like? By refusing to cosplay as the elite. You don’t have to grab a pitchfork. But at least stop dressing like you’re guarding the palace.

You can abandon fast-fashion versions of aristocratic aesthetics: “quiet luxury,” “old money style,” the beige, the camel, the performance of subtle entitlement. Instead of appearing wealthy, to appear awake. Instead of imitating privilege, cultivate a style that communicates awareness, curiosity, even dissent.

Fashion has always been political; it’s time we remembered. When you stop trying to look like privilege, you stop actively protecting it.

The human need for beauty is real; already the ancient Greek philosophers tried to tell us this. Recognising this need and attempting to fulfil it has implications for your well-being, as does ignoring it.

Beauty isn’t a word or a concept used in fashion anymore. We are much more comfortable with irony or subversiveness. There is this elitist connotation attached to beauty all of a sudden, as if beauty would now be something that is too hard for mere mortals to comprehend. It’s best not to use the word, for fear of alienating the consumers. Calling something beautiful, or saying that something has beauty, is excluding something, and that is unacceptable in the era of make-shift inclusivity. So, to not overcomplicate the matter, I’ll refer to this phenomenon as “sparkle”.

If you think about “sparkle”, how present is it in your life? And what is it that we are doing to try to get that into your life? Not necessarily very consciously, this sparkle hunt is a very unconscious business. For example, a well-lit department store, a luxury boutique, or even a fast-fashion retailer, these places are very curated, very appealing, very organised. Whereas if you look at your own home surroundings. When you look at social media, these sorts of aesthetically pleasing, curated, sparkly things.

One might even say that that is why men being dubbed as being highly visual and appreciating beautiful women dressed frivolously, that it is because they have denied themselves the expression of that need. That they then have to just consume the sparkle of someone else.

And here we come to this, whether you are just consuming sparkle or if you are actively contributing to expressing the sparkle in your own life. I know people who make art who still struggle from this lack of sparkle. So it’s not necessarily about art, even though I’m sure enjoying culture and making art can’t hurt in this instance.

Especially in terms of getting dressed, this sort of need for beauty and need for sparkle, we are trying to get it from buying and going to these environments, whether it’s online or offline. Trying to get a little piece of it for ourselves by buying. Then, when we think of our lives, how actively are we trying to foster that sparkle? By expressing the sparkle ourselves, putting on outfits, and trying on different things. That is then the part that feels more difficult, and less like a solution for this need for sparkle.

Since our environment and society currently are set up so that this quite fast overflow of sparkle is coming at us at a pace that it’s making it quite cheap. We are not able to have the richness of beauty and sparkle, but we are because of how the system is set up, only getting this cheap diet version of this experience.

The antidote to this is going against the grain a little bit and thinking: how can I express sparkle? How can I be a part of it? How can I manufacture it by expressing myself, rather than consuming? Expressing the sparkle, that’s what’s going to make you feel good. To feel like this need is being satisfied, rather than just constantly trying to fulfil it and not getting anywhere.