Source: Dressing for the Anonymous Internet Gaze Publisher: Cartoons Hate Her | Author: Cartoons Hate Her Published: January 23, 2026 | Archived: March 21, 2026

At the time, when I obsessed over my clothes, adult women in my life would “reassure” me that this was such a temporary phase, and nobody outside of high school would ever care what I wore. Of course, they were right—but it hasn’t always been a good thing. On some level, I really miss how it felt when people cared about my clothes, even when it carried a risk of ridicule. And now, as a mom in her thirties who enjoys fashion far more than anyone else within a five mile radius, I sometimes wonder “who I’m dressing for” when I put together a really cool outfit.

Increasingly the answer is obvious and kind of disturbing: with nowhere to dress up, no fashion “scene” and very few people in my life who care about fashion… I am like those girls at the museum. I am dressing for thousands of imaginary friends in my phone. And I have a feeling many other socially (and sartorially) isolated fashion-lovers are doing the same.

Maybe for other people, fashion has nothing to do with being seen and is purely just for “themselves.” The way I historically experienced fashion might be a bit different. Part of it is unambiguously about the male gaze (as in, my husband, and men before him). If I didn’t enjoy pandering to the male gaze at least a little bit, I would have bought and worn this insane Selkie dress years ago, and yes, I’d have walked around with that cunty muff too. (Wait. Cunty muff? Keeping it.)

• my local female friends, who I don’t see in person that often and who mostly don’t care about fashion. I met one woman who was obsessed with TheRealReal and we immediately hit it off, and then my five-year-old son mooned her at a birthday party and I never heard from her again. Sad!

• other moms at parks, who don’t seem to care very much for fashion (and if you show up at a park in something really dressy, it’ll be a bad mix of impractical, uncomfortable and potentially intimidating.) Once I showed up to a playground wearing a crop top and shorts co-ord set with a matching robe-type lounge thingy and a pair of five-inch platform sandals, looking like an extra at a Palm Springs resort scene in an Austin Powers sequel, and then further humiliated myself when my kid stepped in bird shit and I began screaming, loudly, about avian flu. Nurse, she’s escaped again!

  • I will say that one time when I was eight months pregnant and wearing a ratty Cleveland Cavs oversized T-shirt, I went to the playground and had one of the BEST socialization experiences with other moms that I’ve ever had before—including a mom who I always thought disliked me for no particular reason. It might have been total coincidence, but I wouldn’t be surprised if my degree of fashion obsession was actually off-putting to other moms. That said: do I really want friends who judge other women for such a thing? Ugh.

I do have a few long-distance friends who like fashion, three in particular who come to mind. My sister-in-law is also so amazing at taking outfit photos that she will say “Oh sorry, this is a terrible photo, not my best work,” and then hand me my phone to reveal a photo I would have paid \(500 for. (Of course, I return the favor but am not nearly as gifted.) Ahead of the last time we hung out in person, she sent me a link to a pair of Aritzia pants we both owned and asked if we could do a twinning challenge where we both styled the pants differently on the same day. Then I have two other long-distance female friends who are into fashion, including one who sends me her curated TheRealReal picks of the week. But ultimately, I do not frequently interact *in real life* with anyone who gives a shit about fashion. I also don’t live in an extremely fashion-centric city, so I can’t strut around the streets hoping for a compliment by a random woman in passing. “Dressing for myself” is, of course, a thing. But there’s a limit to how much I can appreciate my own clothing. I would never wear high heels alone at home. I’m not a psychopath. I don’t even wear a real bra if I don’t have to. Sometimes I take my toddler out to places just so I have a reason to wear something other than leggings (I’m sure she doesn’t mind more library and park visits, even if it’s partly about Mommy’s Imaginary Runway.) Given very little real-life fashion interactions, I’ve been stuck between two options: just give up on the “fashion challenge” component, and wear cool clothes knowing nobody but me will care (limited appeal) or show my clothing to the only people left who give a shit, aka strangers online. Some of you might be like, “NOOO CHH what are you THINKING?! I would rather EAT GLASS OUT OF STEVE BANNON’S ASS than POST MY OUTFITS TO THE INTERNET!” and to you I say: you probably don’t enjoy being seen as much as I do. You’re also probably less masochistic, which is another topic entirely, and even I have my limits, which is why I don’t post outfit photos to Twitter anymore. When I post my outfits to the Internet, I do it *knowing* people will be a little snarky. There’s a “way too personal and mean” threshold that I hope people don’t hit—where it’s not even about the outfit and entirely about my grave sin of being over thirty, or creepy/unsolicited sexual stuff—and that’s a risk I knowingly take, but most outfit comments I’ve ever gotten have been strictly focused on the outfit. I’ve even gotten really good [constructive criticism](https://www.cartoonshateher.com/p/i-asked-my-haters-to-critique-my)! As a result, I live in this weird space where I’m putting together outfits for real-life events, but with the understanding that most of the people really noticing the outfit will be strangers on Substack. There are days where I’m like, *why am I even bothering?* Things were a bit different when I was active on Facebook. Back in the late 2000s, every party I attended or threw involved a *very important step* of “taking pics” because not only was it important to document the event on Facebook, but it was important to document the outfits we all wore. This was a brief blip in my life—mostly a college thing—because by the time I was in my mid-twenties, the idea of uploading all your party pics to Facebook with an indie sleaze album title like “I forget taking all of these” was already falling out of favor. So back then, my outfits were *also* for the Internet, but it was an Internet of people I knew, who were approximately 5000% less likely to be teenage groypers in the Philippines. I think some people who are still active on Instagram are doing this, but I never really got into Instagram and frankly, I don’t think *now* is the time to start. s_!cCrv!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F60200b5a-3bd0-4d09-8552-9d7a1a0feae6_1268x1280.webp) This was what passed for a great photo in 2011.

There’s also the fact that for my lifestyle, in 2025, there are very few opportunities to actually wear things that go beyond jeans and boots. My husband and I go on a lot of date nights, but a lot of the time I’m wildly overdressed, even for a nice restaurant, solely because I just really want an excuse to dress up. Seriously—who is wearing fancy clothes anymore and to what, if even a Michelin star restaurant warrants a gray wool sweater and straight-leg jeans? Even when the restaurant is “fancy,” dressing up beyond something I’d wear to the library always feels a little costumey. When I wrote about how hard it was to get people to attend my dressy parties, several people offered up that the dressy nature of the parties was the problem in and of itself (major blackpill for me) because people attending, especially women, would actually be turned off or threatened by the fact that I wanted an excuse to dress up. They would see it as showing off, trying to seduce their husband, or just being a narcissist. This is a shame, because I don’t think a really fashion-obsessed woman would see it that way, but there seems to be a major dearth of fashion-obsessed women in my demographic and location. I may have to start standing outside the Sezane, soliciting cool women in need of a brunch buddy to make me their friend (undisclosed requirement: my two-year-old has to join us.)

Sometimes, I ask myself why this even matters so much to me, and it’s because of a specific idea/image I have in my head about life as a fashion lady. But when I think about women who have lots of fashion-focused female friends, who are always dressing up and doing fashionable things together, the people whose lives I try to emulate when I dress up, I’m thinking of women I only see on the Internet. These outfits—as they are presented—might not even be real! In particular, I think about comedian Sabrina Brier, whose parody videos always include her wearing Carrie Bradshaw 2020s-esque styles that would be wildly out of place in my neighborhood but seem to fit with her lifestyle as it’s presented on Instagram:

Except…is this friend group even real? Are these just costumes she’s wearing for her content? Maybe not, I mean, she lives in New York City, so perhaps these are normal outfits for her. I will say that I’ve been to New York City plenty of times, and I don’t see a lot of people dressed up like this. But either way, I’m realizing that the type of fashion-centric friendships I imagine having in real life are just based on scripted content I see online, not anyone I actually know.

Indeed, my social media feeds are awash with fashion inspo and fashion videos—what to wear to a summer wedding in Lake Como!—all of which might be outfits the creator never actually wore outside the home. These people could, honestly, just be doing the same thing I’m doing. A bunch of Internet fashion people showing off for other Internet fashion people, all of us cosplaying for events that don’t really exist (To be clear, my “events” do exist, I’m just overdressed for them because they’re things like “walking around.”) A while ago, I wrote about the wear-nowhere cocktail dress and about how many very expensive, formal, but too-revealing-for-weddings dresses I see online, despite having zero opportunities to ever wear them. I realize the only times I see women wearing these dresses are on social media. And if these people are influencers, they likely wore these dresses specifically for the shoot, and then went home, wore something else, and did something else! AAAH! IT’S ALL MADE UP! IT’S ALL FOR THE INTERNET! NOBODY IS REALLY WEARING ANYTHING!

In fact, when we went to Paris for a family vacation, I saw some of these influencers and outside of social media, they look extremely weird. Even though Parisians generally put more effort into style than Americans, you can always tell when a young non-French woman in Paris is wearing something for a photo shoot, in part because her boyfriend is taking lots of pictures of her but also because she looks far too perfect (most French women wear very subtle makeup—not flawless “no makeup makeup” but makeup that very obviously shows the imperfections of the skin.) The other “tell” is that she’s dressed like this:

So basically, whenever I wear anything, I am imagining what the Internet would say about it, because nobody else cares. This is, of course, maladaptive and bad. The Internet has its fair share of fun fashion geeks, but it’s also full of groypers, gooners, and various other flavors of degenerates. These people should not be my audience! But ultimately, nobody else cares, and the only cool outfits I ever see are also on the Internet. So alas, I suppose I will keep dressing for the anonymous crowd of Internet weirdos, of which I am one.

But for my mental health, I now keep it all on Substack. If Twitter people want to mock me for having fat ankles, they can pay to do it.