the fashion girl
I was window shopping online in between classes a few months ago and I came across this brand called Meji Meji. The first top I saw had these words plastered across the chest:
‘GIFT FROM GOD’
Depending on how much stock you put in cosmic alignment, this may or may not be relevant: my name, Ayan, translates to gift of God. So you can imagine the fashion-gasm that happened the moment I laid eyes on it.
The full-body oh.
Why Did I Get Married (2007)
I added it to my cart with the smug confidence of a woman whose name had finally caught up to her only to be promptly informed that it was sold out in my size. I wanted to dissipate.
This was not the first heartbreak this top has dealt me. And it certainly wouldn't be the last. This was, if we're being precise, the fourth. Since then, I have been shamelessly and devotedly stalking this top for months. From restock alerts to refreshing my browser with the discipline of a day trader, you name it.
I've done it.
So I did what any reasonable woman in mourning would do: bought two other tops to help nurse the wound.
Grief shopping is a recognized coping mechanism, look it up.
And when I tell you they are eating? I am genuinely and embarrassingly in love. And just like that, retail therapy, as a category, has been vindicated yet again in this household.
Which, conveniently, brings me to my actual therapy update.. or lack thereof.
Wendy Williams Show (2018)
I’ve been in therapy on and off for a few years, and my current therapist is more of a new edition. When I turned 30, I realized I needed something different than what my old therapist was giving. So I found a new one and we’ve been seeing each other just shy of six months now. To be fair, I genuinely believe I got exactly what I was looking for, but also some things I wasn’t looking for.
Things between me and my therapist right now are, to put it generously, complicated. The communication breakdown of the ages, honestly. It’s the kind I'm choosing to address with the maturity of a woman who once ghosted a man for using the wrong ‘your’.
So yeah, we're in a bit of a rough patch... eerily similar to a situationship on the rocks. The kind that calls for space, reflection, and yes, retail therapy. Because while she and I “work things out”, I have to keep my serotonin levels stable somehow. And the part of my brain previously occupied by "unpacking my mother" has been redirected, lovingly, toward "unpacking my package." I am not saying Meji Meji is a replacement for therapy. I am saying that when your provider gets snippy with you via email, sometimes the most psychologically intact thing you can do is buy a top that fits.
Which I would have called a deeply unserious thesis, until I went back to school and remembered I could cite it.
Some of you may recall I am back at UW. (Mrs. Commitment Issues regrets to inform you that she did, in fact, commit to something & college classes, no less). I am currently knee-deep in a unit on consumer psychology, which means I am being paid in tuition debt to study the exact behavior I am about to defend in this blog post.
Moesha (1998)
The academic term for what I did this week is called mood-repair purchasing, and has a respectable body of research behind it. The girlie-pop term for what I did this week? Retail therapy and has my Apple Pay history behind it. Both are valid, only one is peer-reviewed.
The research, briefly, because I know some of you only come for the storytelling: it distinguishes between impulse buying (emotionally reactive, often regretted, and structurally similar to the way you text your situationship at 1am) and intentional buying (mood-aware, self-knowing, and oriented toward something you actually want to keep).
Intentional buying restores a sense of control and agency, which is why it tends to feel especially good after, say, getting a deeply impersonal email from a therapist you've been seeing for half a year. Impulse buying gives you a hit. Intentional buying gives you a wardrobe. The difference, academically, is whether the purchase is about the thing or about the feeling. If you can name what you bought, why you bought it, and what you'll wear it with? Then congratulations sweetheart, you're not spiraling, you're shopping!
And in the interest of full disclosure, the brand responsible for my recent academic findings deserves a proper introduction.
Meji Meji is the work of a Nigerian designer, Tolu Oye, drawing from a deep well of Black cultural references. From vintage Americana, West African textiles, and the rhythms of the music she grew up on, she translates all of it into high fashion streetwear pieces that feel both reinvented yet, rooted. The brand reads like a love letter and a thesis statement at the same time: fabrics carrying their own story, references that don't translate for everyone (and don't need to), the kind of pieces that make you feel like you're wearing something designed with you in mind rather than despite you. It's a rare kind of brand where the cultural specificity is the luxury, and watching African women continuously shift the streetwear conversation in real time has been one of the more satisfying fashion stories of the last few years.
And then, of course, there is the matter of that top I can’t stop thinking about…
*deep spiritual sigh*
Sold out in my size, yet again. I have set up so many restock alerts my inbox thinks I am running a wholesale business. Truth is, I am just a girl with a special name and one extremely specific footnote.
Meji Mama, if you're reading this…be so fr.
Living Single (1994)
None of which, by the way, would surprise the person who has been calling this exact bluff on me since I was twelve.
My best friend, Faiza, has been trying to dub me a "fashion girl" since middle school, and I’ve been resisting the title for almost two decades. The origin story, if we must: it was 2007, possibly 2008. Picture day. I showed up to school in a hijab with a little undercap peeking out at the front and the trim of it the exact shade of purple as the top I had on. We're talking pantone-level accuracy. Not "close enough." Not "in the same family." The exact same purple. She clocked it immediately, because she has always been more observant than is convenient for me, and asked how I had managed to find two pieces in such precise color harmony.
Thing is, I didn’t find two different pieces. I found one piece, cut the bottom half off my top, and hemmed it into an undercap. Then I asked my sweet, unsuspecting mother to re-sew the tank because it had "gotten ruined in the wash." A complete fabrication. A little criminal, even. But for the love of fashion, at only twelve years old, I had already internalized the foundational principle of personal style: everything is a piece. And the cost of acquiring them, apparently, includes your mother's goodwill.
She was not impressed. (My mother. My friend was gagged.)
Showalter Middle School
Circa ‘07
Yes, I still have the picture and it’d be wrong to not tell this story without it. And I know what you’re thinking, I should burn this photo, right? I mean it’s pre-braces, pre-upper lip waxes, pre-everything. But I don’t know… something about those folded arms and the look in her eyes tells me she knew what was coming. Truthfully, used to hate this era of my life. But I realized that also meant hating her (s/o to my therapist for leading me to that lake) and I could never hate her. I mean look at that sweet face.
A little ghetto but there’s definitely a runway quality about her!
What my best friend saw in 2007, and what I have spent nearly twenty years trying to talk her out of, is the same thing the ‘gift from God’ top would say about me if I could ever get my hands on it: that I have always been a lover of fashion, even when I was working with one tank top and a sewing machine I had to negotiate access to. The 12-year-old hacking up her wardrobe for a color story is the same girl now setting up restock alerts for a Nigerian designer she's been quietly evangelizing for months.
Same brain. Bigger budget. Marginally better impulse control.
But I think she's been right about me all along. I just wasn't ready to be the kind of person whose middle-school instincts pay off this hard. There is something genuinely surreal about realizing the small, ridiculous, and deeply specific version of you who was rifling through her closet for color matches at twelve is now living inside a wardrobe she would have wept over. The dream was never really about the clothes. It was about being the girl who knew exactly what she was reaching for.
I am going to patch things up with my therapist. Probably this week. Possibly after one more outfit. I am going to keep refreshing the ‘gift from God’ page until the universe corrects the cosmic injustice of its absence from my closet. And I am going to stop pretending that buying clothes is something I do despite being a serious person, and start admitting that for me, getting dressed has always been a way of staying in conversation with myself.
Which, while we're here, brings me to my off-duty assignment for the year: documenting more. My fashion has, for most of my life, been a deeply personal, and mostly irl experience. Meaning, if you’ve ever caught me slipping, you also caught my fit, fitting. But most of my best fits don't make it past my world. Moving forward, it’d be a public disservice not to share. The fits I get off deserve a main stage so consider this your warning.
Retail therapy really gets a bad rap because it keeps getting confused with impulse spending. But intentional buying, the kind where you know your proportions, your palette, your reason—is not a coping mechanism. It's a craft.
And one I’ve been practicing since 2007.
