My Favourite Outfit: Alyson Shane
In this series, I ask the contributor to share an image of their favourite outfit – maybe a pair of pants they wore every day, maybe a special party dress – and write about where they were in their life and why this outfit has such significance. Today we welcome Alyson. She’s a content marketer, copywriter and social media manager, and — most exciting — part of my freelancer squad in Winnipeg. This is her favourite outfit.
My favourite outfit is a red dress that I bought a few years ago.
I’d like to say that buying the dress was a big deal for me, but I’m sorry to admit that it languished in the back of my closet for some time. I felt like it was too “bold” for me to actually wear, and so it hung there like a sad reminder of the outgoing person I wanted to be.
A few months after buying the dress I broke up with my longtime boyfriend. He and I had been together for nearly five years, and to say that it was a messy breakup is the understatement of the century. He broke my things, vandalized our apartment, and harassed me online for nearly half a year after we broke up. It was one of the most stressful and challenging periods of my life.
Shortly after we broke up I came back to the apartment to find all of my things in a pile in the living room; apparently my ex-boyfriend had intended to throw them out but had thought better of it. I remember sitting in front of the pile and being an absolute mess. Everything felt so overwhelming and terrible, and as I started to gather up my clothes I wound up packing up the red dress, too. I don’t honestly know why I brought it with me; I hadn’t worn it until that point, but nevertheless I gathered it up with some of my clothes and left.
Over the next few weeks and months, I started untangling myself from my old life. I had partied too hard, spent my time on fair-weather friends, and ignored a lot of pressing personal issues which were making me deeply unhappy. Leaving that relationship and those negative influences gave me the strength to start doing the personal development I desperately needed to do.
Around this time, photos of me in the red dress started popping up all over social media. Photos where I looked markedly happier: I was smiling with my teeth and laughing, which was something that I’d never done while being photographed before because I was too anxious about my appearance, or of what other people might think if I didn’t look “perfect.”
My red dress isn’t the most expensive piece of clothing that I own, nor is it the fanciest by a long shot, but it’s my favourite because when I see photos of myself in it from that time, I can see the person I was starting to become, and that makes it special.