Are you experiencing fashion burnout?

“I know what I want to wear, I just don’t know if I have the energy to wear it,” a friend recently said during a late evening FaceTime call. Both wearing sweats, we were comparing notes on wishful summer travel plans that currently hang, precariously, in the balance. The conversation had switched to an upcoming event that stipulated a dress code.

From Kendall Jenner’s impressively huge woven handbag, swinging like an enormous Bottega Veneta hammock on the forecourt of an LA petrol station, and various iterations of the almost-totally-open-front going-out tops that are everywhere right now (see Emily Ratajkowski’s Cult Gaia halter and Ariana Grande’s recent performance of My Hair in full-look SS21 Supriya Lele), to Bella Hadid’s blockbuster appearance on the Cannes red carpet in Schiaparelli’s AW21 haute couture “lung dress”, and Hailey Bieber’s appointment at the Élysée Palace (wearing a cutaway look by LaQuan Smith)—style that you can’t look away from is fast becoming summer 2021’s calling card. And, well, we all want to get out there and make up for lost time, right?

Yes. YES! But, beyond the widespread anxiety-inducing pressure to look like the best possible version of our virtual selves as we reconnect IRL with peripheral friends we potentially haven’t seen in more than a year, wardrobe-wise, we could be in need of a jump start. Many of us have, after all, been working a minimum of two-and-a-half additional hours per day during the pandemic, according to a (slightly crushing) Bloomberg report, which doesn’t leave all that much time to enjoy ourselves or our closets. You don’t need me to remind you that we’ve experienced long stretches of repetitive dressing, complete with a monotonous uniform that’s sole purpose was to enable us to deliver on the tasks of the day (predominantly: hunching over a screen).

We emerged from 2020 a tad ground down, exhausted even—grown adults who secretly Google horoscope love-match compatibility (or was that just me) and haircuts that will make us look less tired. In terms of what we actually wore, the upshot was that we were no longer dressing according to occasion or to celebrate, date or simply be out, because for a long while there were no occasions, celebrations, dates or ‘out’. So, isn’t it kind of to be expected that we might be feeling a little burned out right now when it comes to our wardrobes?

As it turns out, there could be a correlation between our occupational tendencies to overwork and our sartorial exhaustion. A May 2021 article in The New Yorker investigating the rise of burnout cites exhaustion and cynicism as two of the defining symptoms, adding that “around the world, three out of five workers say they’re burned out”—a statistic that rises to three in four for US workers—with millennials self-earmarked as a “generation burnout”.

The article’s author, Jill Lepore, offers caution about our cultural emphasis on work in general. “You can suffer from marriage burnout and parent burnout and pandemic burnout partly because, although burnout is supposed to be mainly about working too much, people now talk about all sorts of things that aren’t work as if they were: you have to work on your marriage, work in your garden, work out, work harder on raising your kids.”

Somewhere along the path to easing back into real life, did we start treating fashion like work? A box to be checked, photo to post, label to own, rather than love?

In the interests of safeguarding our future sartorial bliss, this is Vogue’s 10-point guide to taking the work out of what you wear.

1. Don’t rush. Get dressed on your own schedule, without a time limit, to remember the joy of taking that time for you.

2. Remove the pressure to document your style on social media in real-time. Instagram can wait. Being fabulous and in the moment is far more fun.

3. Indulge your imagination. That’s what Vogue Runway is there for…

4. Remember, your look is not up for appraisal—don’t take uninvited opinions on board about what you like to wear.

5. Do select a handful of wardrobe ‘primers’: five pieces you love that provide the inspirational basis of a go-anywhere summer outfit. (Nylon sports shorts, razor-front vest, pseudo-ironic pearl earrings, or a chain belt that goes with all your boxy jeans, are each great starting points.)

6. Lighten the load. Reselling or donating the pieces you no longer love is freeing. The beauty of less choice is less overthinking.

7. Schedule a fashion vacation—this is your downtime, when you don’t need to try—and enjoy every second of it.

8. If you can feel yourself agonising about what you don’t have in your closet, put an hour into taking care of what you’ve already got. No longer thinking that sweeping cotton dress is the pinnacle of Balearic chic? It might just need a steam…

9. Don’t save your most-prized fashion pieces for a distant occasion—consider Wednesday night margaritas with your high-school best friend as the warm-up outing for the main event.

10. Never forget that your body itself is your best look. The clothes you choose to wear are there to show a little extra love for it.