Uniforms, self expression and the importance of choice

I’m aware that over the last couple of weeks of the challenge I’ve talked lots about how not being able to shop is doing me good. I’ve done posts about emotional shopping, and about wasting money trying to look like someone else. I stand by those posts and the lessons I learned writing them. 

That said I’m a bit worried that I may (inadvertently) have given you the impression I think that clothes and personal style are unimportant, trivial even. And that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Choosing what we wear every morning is one of the key acts of control we take over our lives. And whether you consider yourself into fashion or not, whatever you chose to put on your body today does say something about you. 

The reason that I chose this challenge is because I value personal expression so much, and use clothes to both express and hide myself. I’m hoping the challenge will support me to dress more authentically, but I don’t want to break my relationship with clothes. I value the opportunities for non verbal communication they provide.

Recently I’ve read loads of interesting articles about uniforms. These articles talk about people taking an active choice to limit what they are wearing to one particular look, even in some cases exact copies of the same items worn every day. 

There is an evolution in the increasingly popular choice to find one look and stick with it that I find beautiful and fascinating. It’s not just about saving time and energy.  I love that by adopting a uniform people are subverting something that is traditionally externally imposed  on us (by our schools, workplaces & prisons) and claiming it as a symbol of their uniqueness. 

Throughout history uniforms have been used to strip people of their individuality, identify them as a type and essentially dehumanise them. From traditional maids outfits designed to make your ‘staff’ indistinguishable from each other, to the harrowing examples of the striped pyjamas of holocaust victims, uniforms make it easier to ask things of or do things to people than it would be if we saw them as fully rounded human beings. And if you are not sure this follows check out the way staff are treated next time you go into a fast food restaurant. Do you think these guys get treated with that dismissiveness , distain and outright rudeness when they are dressed in their civvies? Of course not. Like it or not clothes are used to delineate status, and we humans are total arsewipes when it comes to the way we treat people we believe to have lower status than us.

I can’t pretend it doesn’t worry me that the people I tend to see in uniforms are people who we are asking to work for less than a living wage, people who we expect to obey orders without question and children and young people in their educational settings (yes I’m aware my first 2 points also apply to children and young people – they get a bit of a raw deal no?).

Those of us who get to choose what we wear to work are really privileged, we are offered the opportunity to choose things that fit us, are comfortable on us and express whatever we want to say about ourselves. Showing up to work in trackie bottoms is just as powerful a statement as wearing high heels and lipstick every day. And we are super lucky to be able to make that choice. 

It’s just a shame that that choice has turned into a brilliant marketing opportunity for clothing companies, who’ve gotten really good at getting us to spend money on stuff that doesn’t express who we are, but instead a sense of ‘now’ that is transitory and leads to us constantly updating our wardrobes rather than confidently choosing what our look is and sticking with it.

That’s why I totally admire people who are make really strong choices about what they like to wear and stick with that.  For example Matilda Kahl wears a white silk shirt and black trousers to work everyday,. She decided she had better things to think about than what to put on every morning, and  says her career and self worth are blossoming as a result of the time and energy she is saving.  She is – in her own way raising the social value of wearing a uniform. And yes it’s a chosen uniform – but I hope there is a translation there to the way we feel about everyone who dresses in a consistent way whether that is chosen or not.

Clothes are important, to how we are seen by others and to how we see ourselves. And we can make the best of this by taking the good and leaving the bad. We can choose to wear what we feel comfortable in as often as we can, and by seeing past the uniforms other people wear to the human being – worthy of respect-  that is wearing it.

Or to put it simply – don’t wear things that chafe or give you blisters (unless that’s your thing…..) and don’t be an arsewipe to the girl serving you your burger, or the guy cleaning the street you live on. Clothes tell you a little something about the person wearing them – but not enough. To know someone you need to know them.

And those of you that know me will know I’ve been getting my hugely impractical polka dot dress out to look at everyday this week. I know I can’t put it in the capsule, it’s too fragile and it doesn’t go with anything. You can help me to resist temptation and stay strong with a bit of sponsorship. Here’s the link.  

And this is that frock I'm missing (and my gorgeous neice)

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Can your capsule wardobe survive the wear? My sandals haven't

Yesterday I completed my 8th week doing the clothes of my back challenge and I've begun to realise something a bit scarey. When you wear your clothes a lot - they wear out really fast!

I appreciate the rest of you probably knew that - but for me this is genuinely a bit of a shock. I was prepared for my clumsyness to rob me of an item (hello grey t-shirt, don't worry I have plans for you....), but I thought everything else would just tick along for the whole year. But already I can feel my tshirts getting thinner with each wash.

And worse my sandals are beginning to give up the ghost. 

On the third or fourth day of the challenge I went to the pub with some fellow dog owners and a couple of them expressed real concerns about my sandals. They all know how much time I spend walking and didn't think they'd last the course. I naturally poo pooed them explaining that the rules allowed me to wear my walking sandals when I was walking the dog (as long as it wasn't a social walk that'd end up with a coffee or a meal somewhere), so the sandals wouldn't really see that much punishment.

How wrong can one person be. What I think I'd forgotten about myself is three things:

• I walk a lot. Everywhere, all the time. Even not counting walking the dog I probably do 6-8000 steps a day
• I like to get my toes out. So if it's not raining I will be wearing sandals. So far I've worn them 37 out of 56 days. That is 66% of the time. I start wearing sandals in March and rarely put them away until October. If I continue to wear them at this rate for that long we are talking 146 days of wear.
• I'm not 23 anymore.

Not being 23 anymore might feel a bit irrelevant here - but it isn't. I truly wish that sometime in my late teens or early 20's someone had taken me aside and told me, really convinced me that continually slamming my heels against the pavement in paper thin soled shoes would come back to haunt me. I wore ballet shoes (note not ballet flats - actually wear to dance class when you are 6 ballet shoes) to tramp around Sheffield for years.

I can't do that anymore. The padding on my heel has worn down after years of abuse and feeling the pavement through my shoes hurts now. It sends shocks of pain up my legs, it's more than a little bit grim. And about two weeks ago this began to happen with my sandals. 

I panicked a bit about this - I don't really have room for another pair of shoes in the capsule ( I currently have 4 and have allowed for 5 with some winter boots), unless I'm prepared to sacrifice a winter jumper or a second pair of jeans. But equally there is another 109 days when I'm going to want to be wearing sandals to get through that I can't spend in pain.

So my first thought was to try and fix them. The lovely chaps at the cobblers put on new soles for me. This gave me an additional couple of millimeters between me and the pavement. What they couldn't do anything about was the wear on the cork, which has basically compressed as a result of an 11 stone woman taking 260,000 steps in them and so has lost it's shock absorbing qualities.

Insoles in sandals are a tricky issue, I always think a visible insole in a sandal is slightly revolting. Just a receptacle for sweat and odour  - a sanitary towel for the foot. This is not an option for me. But after a bit of a search around I found some gel pads in M&S. I took some photos of them here - they are not pretty! They are also super tricky to get into sandals that have anything that goes over the top of your foot.

Still eventually I got them in, they are invisible once the sandals are on and they are a tiny bit more comfortable. But if I'm honest will they see me through another 109 days of wear? Doubtful. And the attempt to get them fixed wasn't cheap either £25 for the new soles and £5 for the gel pads. I'm really aware that these repair attempts wouldn't be an option for some of the parents Contact a Family support, who are struggling to make ends meet due to the extra costs of raising a child with additional needs. And being comfortable in your shoes isn't a luxury.

Anyway, I think you can expect to see a new pair of sandals being added to this mix over the next week or so. Which means there is something else I won't be able to have come winter - so let's just hope it's a mild one!

Why am I putting myself through this you may ask? Because 65% of families with disabled children Contact A Family spoke to said they went without essentials like clothes in order to cover the additional costs of meeting their child's needs.

This is not ok and I'm raising money for Contact A Family and awareness of the challenges families face through the #clothesoffmyback extreme capsule challenge. You can help by donating to Contact A Family's work supporting these families here and by sharing my posts through your social networks.

 Finally for all you rules checkers out there here is what I wore on days 55 and 56

Good News and Bad News for child poverty

Today is my 49th day doing the clothes off my back challenge. If you're a regular reader of the blog you'll remember that it all started with a conversation about capsule wardrobes and child poverty (you can read about it here), and has turned into me following these rules for 49 days so far, and a full year by the time I'm done.

I've been thinking about child poverty even more than usual over the last week for one good and one not so good reason which I'll share with you.

 As is traditional I'll start with the bad news....

Our government has decided to change the way child poverty is measured. And (in my personal opinion) they've got this wrong. 

Our current measure says that a child whose family are living on 60% less than the national average income are living in poverty. Now as a measure it's a bit of a blunt stick as individual families will move above and below that line based on national income without their ability to pay their rent changing one iota. But it does acknowledge that you measure poverty by money.

The government will now measuring the impact & the causes of poverty (impact - attainment of children, causes - families being out of work) - this isn't a bad idea BUT without maintaining an income measure there is a risk that this will shift the debate from poverty to education and back to work programmes. Crucial work to be sure but I don't care how well your teacher/ mentor has prepped you for that exam/ interview, you are not going to perform your best if you enter the room starving hungry.

In my borough (Walthamstow) End Child Poverty estimate that 34% of children are living in poverty. To put it another way 10 children in the average classroom round here are living in families where they struggle to make ends meet. Not struggle to buy designer trainers, a new xbox or holidays. But to heat their homes in winter and keep everyone in the home fed and sheltered. This makes me angry. I spent years of my life doing direct work with families in areas of Sheffield and London where poverty is a real issue. I've worked with children who despite their parents best efforts are inadequately dressed for the weather, come to school bone cold because their house has no heating, or indeed hungry. And much as the rhetoric from our more right wing media would have you believe that this is because their parents are feckless and lazy -  my experience is very different. 

Lots of the families I've known who live in poverty have one or both parents in work (63% of children living in poverty nationally are in a working household), lots of them have children whose care needs are higher than the usual and most of them have cut out the luxuries for themselves before they reluctantly decided that their son or daughters winter coat would need to wait for the next paycheck. These are families like yours, made up of people like you and difference between what they need to spend to keep their heads above water and what they have coming is stark.


Income matters and I'm really worried that we've stopped measuring it.You can read more about why it is important here.

The GOOD NEWS of the week is also about income. Specifically it's about the rights of families of children in hospital to continue to get DLA. You'll remember I've talked about the brilliant Mathieson family before in my post about Dowser Day.


Contact A Family have been campaigning with the Mathieson family against the rule that meant DLA payments stopped when their son Cameron was in hospital for more than 84 days.

On Wednesday the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that this was a violation of his human rights. This is the first time ever that the Supreme Court has found for a claimant in a social security case, and it will be transformational for all those whose children face extended hospital stays. 

I'm not ashamed to say that there were tears and whoops in the Contact A Family offices as this verdict came through - it is brilliant, brilliant news.

It's made it easy to keep plodding on with the clothes of my back challenge this week. I know in the scheme of things that the challenge is a small thing - but the money raised helps Contact A Family to do the big, the exciting, the life changing things. 

And with 41% of families of disabled children telling us they've had to take a loan out to pay for food, there is still a lot of work to be done. Thankyou for your support - as always if you want to Support Contact a Family's work you can do so here.

And here for all you rule checkers are day 47 & 48's #clothesoffmyback photos. No effort at all made to pose in these sorry!

Dowser Day - supporting the Mathiesons court battle

Hello Everyone,

Those of you that follow either me (@edarcherthinks) or Contact A Family (@contactafamily) will have noticed a lot of tweets about Dowser Day recently. You'll have seen lots of photo's of dinosaurs and may have wondered what it is all about.

Over the last few years Contact a Family been supporting the Mathieson family as they fight against the government rule that takes away Disability Living Allowance (DLA) payments from children who spend over 84 days in hospital.

The Mathiesons' son Cameron spent over two years in hospital with cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy when his DLA payments were stopped. The family are currently awaiting a decision from the Supreme Court on their legal challenge to scrap this rule. If they are successful it could mean no other family loses essential financial support when their child spends long periods in hospital.



Sadly Cameron passed away in October 2012, aged five. Every year on his birthday, 19 June, his mum, dad, brothers and sister celebrate his life through Dowser Day, a nod to Cameron's love of dinosaurs.

Cameron's dad Craig Mathieson explains: "Cameron loved everything and everyone in his life and, like many boys his age, he was fascinated with dinosaurs. Because of Cameron's speech delay he couldn't say dinosaur and called them Dowsers instead."

 

One of the reasons I love working for Contact A Family is that the Mathieson's aren't a symbol or a test case for us. Everyone in the organization - including people like me who have never met the family take the situation they were put in by this unfair rule personally.

 

Which meant when we were offered a way to show the family we cared about their loss, and we were grateful for all the effort they are putting in to change this situation for other families by joining in Dowser Day celebrations everyone really threw themselves into it.

 

Here's some of the stuff the team made in our lunchbreaks:

You can find loads more contributions to Dowser Day from staff, families and supporters here and our thankyou video here. People from all over the country got involved. It was brilliant, and no it won't make a difference to the outcome of the court case wether we made a giant dinosaur head or not. But it does make a difference to remember that families of disabled children are families first, and to support and celebrate ordinary family life. 

And it does (to me at least) make a huge difference to work in a charity where everyone really gets that and knows that it is not for us to set an agenda for families but to support them to set their own agenda, get their voices heard and celebrate and protest in a way of their choosing. Contact A Family are really good at what they (we) do, because we are all about families leading the way. Doesn't that sound like the kind of organisation you want to support? As always donating is easy you can do so here.

 

  

How to sell unwanted items on ebay and raise money for Contact A Family

Hey there,

Thank you all so much for the positive messages you've been sending about my challenge and the blog. It's been brilliant to feel so supported.

I realise taking a challenge this extreme is not for everyone, but none the less lots of you have been asking about how you can help. If you want to you can donate here or you could consider getting rid of something you no longer want by selling it on ebay for us.

This post is a detailed step by step guide to listing items for Contact A Family in a way that will raise the most money. I've used clothes as an example but really you can sell anything, got an old bike in your garage? Furniture you no longer love? Selling these things online with ebay's direct donate function is really easy and every penny Contact a Family receives is put to good use.

So here goes

Step 1 - identify the item you want to sell. Clean it up & make it photo ready. While you are doing this note any features or damage someone buying it might want to know about.

Step 2- Take photos. You can load up to 12 photos free, so take detailed close ups as well as photos from as many angles as possible.

Step 3 - Make a cup of tea and boot up your computer. If you've never used ebay before the next stage will take up to 20 minutes, if you are an old hand you can get a listing up in 6.

Step 4- Go to www.ebay.co.uk  If you have an account log in if not you'll have to set one up (there are easy instructions and it's very quick to do) - or use a friend's account.

Step 5 - Along the top of your screen you'll see a 'sell' tab. Click on it. On the top right of the page you have the option to 'switch to advanced tool'. Do this - ebay is going to ask you if you are sure. You are - it's the only way you can automatically donate to charity, so confirm 'switch'.

Step 7 - Fill in a basic title for your item. I typed 'pink jacket'. This helped ebay suggest a category I  could list in. You can choose 1 category for free, and if you want a second it'll cost 35p.

Step 8 - Once you've pressed enter you should be on the real listings page. Your first job here is to revisit your title and make sure that you have as many keywords as possible in it. Keywords are the words people would type to try and find an item. My item title was 'topshop beaded jacket pink blush wedding festival 12 14 #clothesoffmyback'. I included the hashtag so Contact a Family supporters can find everything that is being listed for us, if they want to help out by buying you item & so we can promote your item on social media.

Step 9 - Describe any faults or quirks the item has in the condition box.

Step 10- Upload your photos using the basic photo uploader. Make sure your best photo is on the far left as this will be your cover photo. There are little arrows on the bottom of your uploaded photos that move them left or right use these to give your best photo top billing.

Step 11 - In the details box, describe your item. Talk about it's size (dimensions are especially important for furniture),style and condition. Cut and paste the below text and links into the details box.

I am listing to raise money for Contact A Family. In their 2014 research they found 65% of parents of disabled children go without essentials like clothes in order to provide properly for their children. (The research is here along with the number of families – 33%- who can’t afford to heat their homes). This year a member of our team is raising money by selling all her clothes (except 35 key items) to raise money for Contact a Family to continue their work supporting these families. As a part of this she's challenged people to join in this summer by selling one wedding outfit on ebay for Contact A Family, if you want to get involved you can find the challenge here, and if you want to donate you can do so here.

If not- please bid generously - because this item is gift aided every penny you pay plus 25% extra is donated to Contact a Family. Happy Bidding.

Step 12 -Tab down to choose a format and price for what you are selling. Start as low as you would be prepared to part with the item for, items with a low starting price often end up making more than higher priced items as people become attached with repeat bidding.

Step 13 - Set a start time and duration for the auction. You want your auction to finish on a Sunday evening - that's when items make most money

Step 14 - This is the important one! You'll be asked if you want to donate all or part of the sale to charity, if you don't get offered Contact A Family as an option click select another charity, search for and select Contact a Family. Then you'll be asked what percentage of the sale you want to donate. Obviously I'd suggest 100%.

Step 15 - If you are planning on selling more than one item for Contact A Family Thankyou! You should tick the save this listing box - it'll make listing your next item much quicker!

Step 16 - Confirm your listing.

And you're done!

We can help you promote the things you are selling to raise money for us. If you tweet me @edarcherthinks or Contact a Family @ContactAFamily with a link to your listing we'll try and help you get the word out.

Thankyou for your time and support

Edx

PS here is what my finished listing looked like