Don’t Bother Me, I’m Thinking About Man Repeller
I was a junior in high school when Man Repeller came onto the scene, started by 21-year-old style blogger Leandra Medine. She was everything I wanted to be at the time: thin, living in New York City, dripping in bracelets, and launching her own blog. (It should be said that my other style icon at the time was Alexa Chung, which delves into my adolescent obsession with thinness, but we’ll get to that.)
I started buying chunky bracelets at thrift stores to recreate the Arm Party, which is when you just wear a bunch of bracelets and try to ignore how sweaty your arms are. I was constantly dress-coded, which is fundamental school lingo for wearing anything that was even remotely stylish.
Really, I was just wearing skirts that didn’t fall three inches below the knee, or jeans with holes in them, or sandals. I was a little fashion rebel for a bit, wearing polka dot tights under my dresses until one time I got up to turn in a history test and a pimply teenage white boy in the front row muttered “why?” under his breath as I passed. As in, why would you wear something like that to school, you absolute dork?
That little why felt like being stabbed in my poor tender heart. It clearly made an impact on me, judging by the fact that I still remember it to this day. High school Lauren was fragile. She had undiagnosed ADHD and was kind of stocky from being in the marching band, and she just wanted to be liked. No one knew her, and if I had gone to my 10-year high school reunion still no one would have known me. I wasn’t really bullied in high school, but I was ignored, which isn’t as bad but it still doesn’t feel good.
I read Man Repeller from the beginning because I was obsessed with expressing my personal style. At one point I thought I was going to be a fashion designer and go to SCAD, but turns out my designs weren’t really that good. Which isn’t a criticism, it’s just the truth. Instead, I turned to writing, and blogs, and poetry.
I started writing well in elementary school, got serious about it in high school, and haven’t stopped since. There isn’t a particular moment in time where I consciously thought, “Yes, this is for me,” because at that time I didn’t really do anything consciously. But, I just didn’t stop doing it, so I guess that’s as conscious a choice as we’re going to get.
True Life: A Teenage Boy Barely Through Puberty Made Me Feel Like Shit When I Was 17
To bring us back to that little why: my style went through fluctuations after that. I still expressed myself through fashion, but it was toned down. It was what my peers were wearing and I just fooled myself into thinking it was what I wanted, too. I wore floral dresses, woven belts, cardigans, cowboy boots. I also wore skinny jeans and marching band t-shirts and flats. There was nothing really ahead of its time, which, I guess I shouldn’t expect much from 17-year-old me.
I still had that love of style in me, though. It had just been trampled on by a kid with Justin Bieber hair.
Through the end of high school (and into my first year of college), I admit I dressed a little like Zooey Deschanel. (500) Days of Summer came out when I was a junior, and I carried that movie with me like a Vietnam War trophy. I fully embraced being a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and although it makes me cringe to think about now, I still want to hold that Lauren’s precious little psyche in my two hands and warm it up like a newborn puppy.
Body Image and Fashion Go Hand in Hand, But We’ve Been Known That
In high school I experimented with diet pills, got prescribed Vyvanse for my ADHD for a few months and stopped eating, (I eventually stopped taking the pills and forgot I had ADHD for seven years) and later developed a binge eating disorder that got worse when I was with my ex and which still haunts me to this day.
I was obsessed with Coco Chanel and Karl Lagerfeld, who ran the fashion house from 1983 until his death in 2019. Karl drank nothing but Diet Coke, so I drank nothing but Diet Coke. (I didn’t know anything about his racism and fatphobia until later in life. I just thought that — strictly for myself, not for anyone else — fat = ugly, and didn’t equate that with “fatphobia” until I was older and more self-aware.) Kate Moss said “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,” and I had that quote running circles in my head like a hamster on a wheel. I was consumed by the idea of being skinny. Not just thin and fit, but skinny.
My heroes were Leandra Medine, Alexa Chung, and Kiera Knightley. I felt that if you couldn’t see my collarbones through my skin, I wasn’t worth loving. I also felt that if I wasn’t skinny, I couldn’t wear the clothes that I wanted to.
But, it’s not like I was ever really skinny like that. I didn’t develop the kind of eating disorder that turns you into a living skeleton. Instead, I binged, but I never purged. (Maybe if I wasn’t so deathly afraid of throwing up I would have, but I have to thank my emetophobia for that.)
Things are better now. I’m on a decent dosage of Adderall, and it helps curb my binge eating in a good way, or, at least, that’s what I’m telling myself. As much as I hate getting on a scale, I have to monitor my weight so I can make sure I’m not losing too much too fast. I have to take a multivitamin now. I file this all under the tab Skinny Legend in my head as a joke and move on.
Personally — and all this is personal, really — the fashion industry did a number on me, as it did to a lot of people and still does. But, the particular time that I was a fashion girly is significant here: the early 2010s, when the It Girl was coming into prominence, blogs were popping up like weeds, everyone was getting bangs, and it literally paid to be thin and waifish.
In 2012, I had a Teen Vogue feature with Leandra pinned to my corkboard in my college dorm, next to a photo of Corey Monteith and Lea Michele torn from a previous issue. (Yeah I was into Glee, so sue me.) I remember in the inset photo Leandra was wearing a white tulle skirt and a black leather motorcycle jacket with black booties. She was thin, and tan, and covered in jewelry, and I despaired that I didn’t look like that. Could I really express my personal style if the canvas I was painting on looked like shit?
In reality, I was still fit from four years of marching band. I just thought I was fat that whole time. I had a regular-looking body for an 18-year-old, but something deep down inside my brain saw my body as something to be despised. (Only years later did I learn that this is called body dysmorphia and that I have it in spades.)
Man Repeller appealed to me not only because of my love of breaking all the fashion rules — I was wearing florals with stripes before it was cool thank you very much — but, subconsciously, I think I liked the idea of men being repulsed by my sartorial choices. (Of course, that’s a fun idea to have, but now men are actually repelled by my personality as well, and that’s less fun when you’re unfortunately trying to get back into the dating world. Again, neither here nor there but I wish sexuality was a choice because I would choose not to be attracted to men.)
Man Repeller appealed to me because things were fun there. Fashion was an expression of joy and personality, and it seemed like everyone who wrote for Man Repeller had an exceptional personality. I’d just spent four years being ignored, I didn’t want that to happen again. I was desperate for my own exceptional personality. It was like I was a blank slate, wiped clean of the anger and treachery of high school in favor of — what, exactly?
Again, it wasn’t until I started going to therapy as an adult that I made any conscious choice at all, really. It was like my brain existed in a pickle jar crammed full of all the other pickles jostling around in there. I was already embalmed, I just didn’t know it.
I blame that on undiagnosed ADHD, depression, and anxiety. I flunked my first year and a half of college because of it, almost lost an important friendship, did lose a few others, and holed myself up in my dorm for days at a time. I’m medicated now, but by that point, my 20s were already squandered.
In Hindsight I Should Have Made My Own Fashion Blog
I actually applied to Man Repeller in 2018, after graduating college. Admittedly, I didn’t go to school for journalism, and I didn’t know how newsrooms worked, even ones solely focused on fashion and style. I went to school for poetry, for crying out loud, who was I to think I could write essays right out of the gate?
But I applied anyway. I didn’t hear back, I think because I was an embarrassment and was most likely the laughingstock of the office (if anyone even read my application, which I doubt). But I wanted to be like Leandra, and Haley, and Harling.
Now I still want to be like them, but I also want to write like Em Seely-Katz of Human Repeller, Viv of The Molehill, and Jessica DeFino of The Unpublishable. My heroes now exist on Substack instead of a singular publication. We’re returning to the era of personal blogs. And I don’t know what that means, other than I need to take a look at how I write for once.
Am I good at all? Do I have anything interesting to say? Am I funny, or just pretentious and off-putting? These are the questions that keep me up at night. I should have just made my own fashion blog in 2011 but what did I know then? (I made a cooking blog instead, because I read Julie and Julia and, as we know, personal blogs were the big thing at the time.)
What do I even know now? I’m pitching articles that I have no business writing — have no expertise in besides having excellent research skills — when I should just stay in my lane and write about poetry or something. Is it too late to start a blog? Will anyone actually care? Can I get over my imposter syndrome and just fucking write?
I want to write about too many things, is my problem. I want fashion, and entertainment, and pop culture; but I also want investigative journalism, and month-long deep dives, and features. I guess I don’t truly know what I want, but I do know that I want.
Hey, you’re asking, isn’t this supposed to be about my relationship with fashion? Isn’t this supposed to be about how much I still love Man Repeller as a concept? Man Repeller opened me up to what a blog could be; it could be fun, and funky, and oppose the stodgy magazine editors in their corner offices.
Fashion could be outlandish. It could be funny. Daring, rule-breaking, astounding. It didn’t have to follow strict trends, or whatever is going on in Paris. Fashion could — and still can — create inclusive spaces, promote self-expression, identity, and — what I really want to get at — fun. Above all else, it should be fun, and that’s what Man Repeller taught me.
I’m getting away from myself, but the point is, I’m still a fashion girly at heart. Sometimes I play it safe, but I have a maximalist mindset when it really counts. I still love dressing up, I’m just trying to be healthier about it now. Wish me luck.
