As I read Caitlin Moran’s chapter on fashion in her book How to Be a Woman, a few of her statements made me go,  “Aha! This is exactly why I created Campbell & Kate shirts!” So that’s what I wrote about on this week’s Campbell & Kate blog.

Fortunately, Fashion Week begins today, which gives me an excuse to share another excerpt from her book here. (For a more thorough review of the book, check out SweetNothingNYC’s recent write-up about How to Be a Woman.) I wish I could find the photoshoot she describes in this excerpt, but my googling powers have failed me, so I give you this image instead.

I’d never really realized how much fashion isn’t “on my side” until I did a fashion shoot for The Times. The idea was to get a “normal woman” to wear the upcoming season’s trends: pastels, safari, op-art prints, corsets as outerwear, and decorated leggings.

“We’ll make you look gorgeous,” the editor promised. “We’ve got an amazing stylist and photographer. We’ll take care of you.”

The following eight hours were the worst of my life that haven’t ended in an episiotomy. Previously, I’d always thought that all that lay between me and looking like Kate Winslet on the red carpet was £10,000 worth of clothes, hair, makeup, a stylist, and a good photographer. And sure enough, in resulting photos, I look pretty good. They got some frames of me looking pretty hot in a corset, silk combat trousers, and four-inch heels. To be honest, if I’d seen the picture of me in a magazine in that outfit, I would have thought, I will try that outfit! that looks good on her! And she has an arse a lot like mine, although a little bigger, hahaha!

That was just the frames, though: the one position it worked in. It took us 20 minutes, half an hour, an hour to find that one position the outfits looked good in. The rest of the time, it was dealing with the camel-toe here, the upper-arm fat there, the muffin-top bulge the other. The clothes were stretched, pegged, tied on with string; the lighting changed, the hair arranged; hats brought in, in an emergency, to balance cruelly proportioned shoulders. I felt like a pig. A clumpy, awkward pig out of her league. I was supposed to be selling these clothes by finding the “best” angle for them, fronting them, working them–but my tits were wrong, and my arse too big, and my arms helpless, heavy, and exposed. I left that studio, eight hours later, sweaty and in tears. It was the ugliest I’d ever felt. Without even the aid of being able to smile–“Look mysterious, and sexy. Kind of . . . vague”–I was reduced entirely down to the clothes on my back and how my body looked in them. And in these styles, rather than the ones I’ve carefully collected as being “helpful” to me, I was a total failure.

I’m not stupid–I’d always known that the difference between models and normal women is that normal women buy clothes to make them look good; whereas the fashion industry buys models to make the clothes looks good. They were certainly helpless on me. I could do nothing for this sh–. I couldn’t even stay upright in the heels.

“I’m so sorry–I bet all the models can do this for hours,” I said gloomily, scrambling to my feet again, having keeled over sideways, ungainly, like a horse on its hind legs.

“Oh no,” the stylist said cheerfully. “They fall over in them all the time, too. They’re impossible to walk in. No one can walk in them. Hahaha!”

I thought again about my years of despair at not being able to walk in heels, despite “everyone” wearing them. Quite a lot of the “everyone”, I now reflected, were in fashion shoots or on a red carpet, i.e., they weren’t really wearing them as “shoes” to walk around in all day. They were just wearing them for the photographs. They know it’s just for photographs. We–the customers–are the only ones who are buying this stuff and then trying to walk around in it all day; move in it; live in it.

So much of this stuff is just for tableaux–not real life, I finally realized. Although we use it as our major study aid, fashion does not, ultimately, help us get dressed in the morning. Not if we want to wear something we can walk around in without constantly having the hem ride up or picking the seam out of our crotches. Fashion is for standing still and being photographed. Clothes, on the other hand, are for our actual lives. And life is really the only place you can learn the most important lessons about how to get dressed and feel happy.