Last week, like so many women before them, Selena and Cara experienced the blissful fun of clothes swapping. One day Cara was wearing her fedora, the next day Selena was in it – a sign that their friendship was sealed. Does the tight bond of female friendship provide a perk any better than new clothes and shoes? Well, apart from that support and ‘love for life’ thing.
A borrowed piece of clothing can give you the same ‘new garment’ high as if you had just blown your overdraft in Zara. But a word of warning, girls: it’s all fun and games and ‘look at us, twinnies!’, until Selena gets drunk and accidentally leaves the fedora in a club bog.
Borrowing and lending clothes is a delicate business – and one for which we've compiled some basic rules...
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Create and in turn respect and understand the tier system
Clothes, much like property, have an individual value that I have neatly divided into a tier system for you:
Tier Three: any old tut from Topshop (non-Boutique range), any old tut from Primark, all T-shirts.
Tier Two: occasionwear, good coats, good jackets, anything silk, anything beaded, leather goods, most things vintage.
Tier One: grandma’s fur coat, the Terry De Havilland shoes that cost three months of saving, the one-off dress bought for 90p in a thrift market in Prague four years ago.
As the tiers escalate, so should the neuroses and sensitivity around lending and borrowing the garment. If an item is lost or damaged from Tier Three, it’s nothing that can’t be patched up over a friendly pint. But Tier One? Good luck bouncing back from that, my friends.
**Ask permission and, if not, leave ******a note and **a gift with the monetary value of up to 80p
**
It’s five to eight, you can see your uber driver Mark creeping closer and closer toward you like the magical Marauder’s map in Harry Potter and you’ve got nothing to wear.
You go into your housemate’s room and try on a dress. You text her – no reply. Mark is ringing from outside and saying he won’t wait around forever, in a mildly threatening way. As long as you know this dress doesn’t belong in the aforementioned Tier One clothing bracket, you can borrow it.
BUT you must leave a gushing, overwritten, scrawled note of explanation peppered with slap-dash references to why they’re such a good friend and at least four ‘sorry’s. A small gift is preferable too. (Wispa, Lion, etc NOT a Bounty.)
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This will ensure your housemate is so moved she won’t be upset you took her clothes without asking. In fact, she will probably say something like: ‘Oh babe! As if you thought I would be bothered. Of course I wasn’t bothered! Borrow it whenever you like!’
But know that if you had not left this note, she would have gone quite mental.
If you bestow a piece of clothing on a friend, accept that they might look better in it than you
Sisterhood: (noun) word to describe solidarity with other women, even in times of difficulty. Eg when you lend your friend the cotton smock dress that makes you look like a heavily pregnant farmhand and her look like a 60s supermodel, you don’t change your mind and say you’ve just remembered you need it for a pretend party. OK?
Be photo-aware
If you borrow a piece of clothing from a pal and hang onto it slightly longer than agreed – and we are all guilty of this – be wary of people photographing you when wearing said garment.
There is little as irrationally blood-boiling than a photo popping up on Instagram of your friend smiling, as bold as brass, wearing YOUR dress she said she’d ‘left at her mum’s house’.
It is, however, glorious when you are the bustee. Such a sense of sleuthing triumph.
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** Sex, drugs and bacon rolls**
If you borrow a friend’s outfit and then go out and embark on the last days of Rome, clean it before returning it. This means: if you have sex in it, if you spill rum on it, pour ketchup down it, smoke 3,000 fags in it, you can’t say, ‘I'll get it dry cleaned!’ then not get it dry cleaned.
You can emulate the dry clean experience with a 30-degree wash (twice), an iron and your fanciest hanger. Do look at the material before, though – this is not a failsafe route.
Find a good excuse
A word of advice to the lender: sometimes, you just won’t want to lend stuff out. You might know your friend will never give it back, or you might know they will start making a banquet of supernoodles and crisp sandwiches after a night out, your cream silk top bearing the brunt of it.
Or, you might just not want to. And that’s fine. It’s YOUR stuff. Should you be honest about it? Absolutely not. You don’t want to be known as one of those uptight people who cries about a missing shoe and sends out emails to their housemate that begin: ‘Guys – we need to talk about the carpet situation’. Instead, think of a watertight, neutral excuse.
These won’t wash:
‘Well I’m just worried your head will stretch it. I’m worried you have a big head.’
‘It’s just… I think black isn’t really your colour, you know?’
‘OK, but straighteners do run out.’
These will:
‘Oh mate, I would but it’s in the wash.’
‘That’s a great idea! OH NO!’ (smacks hand on head) ‘I have to wear it to a thing tomorrow!’
‘You know, I would but I gave it to Lucy. She never gives stuff back!’
Then, next time, I don’t know. Just say you left it at your mum’s.
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Picture: Lukasz Wierzbowski
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.