Leandra Medine, or as the fashion world know her, the Man Repeller is an American author, blogger, and humour writer. Man Repeller is an independent fashion and lifestyle website, which Leandra summed up to the Daily Mail by saying “Good fashion is about pleasing women, not men, so as it happens, the trends that we love, men hate. And that is fantastic.”
Last November Leandra announced that she was pregnant with twins, now in her latest article she uses 30 mirror selfies to discuss how pregnancy changed her style and questions what purpose her clothes serve both physically and mentally.
Leandra writes ‘The common denominator among these occasions is that I needed the clothes to act as armour, which would mean that the definition of “the real me” is conflated because armour — a protective shield — can never get at the crux of who I really am, who any of us really are,’
Leandra also discusses the change in colour and accessories,
‘There is little colour, and they mostly exist as a function of limitations that I have tried to offset with a multitude of accessories and coats and shoes where I can. On most days, I don’t feel like I’m wearing my own clothes or my own style, but I don’t really care. Something far bigger than me and high-rise jeans and waist belts is in progress, and whatever sartorial malaise — the banality, the sameness — that this mass has ignited is helping me to find the energetic special sauce that I’ve previously used to define looking, feeling and therefore being better, elsewhere.’
The limitations of pregnancy simplified things in the sense that Leandra was forced to live within the capsule wardrobe she had romanticised about. Dressing became easy when the options were rotating between two pairs of pants and a handful of the same shirt.
‘It’s making me ask what I use my clothes to do for me and how I can do that for myself. Herein lies the difference between bandages (using clothes to look better) and stitches (solid self-talk to be better), surface-level medicating (a new blazer on a bad day) and cellular-level repair (getting to the heart of what is bothering me).’
All things aside Leandra admits that although this journey has been one of self discovery she knows herself and finishes with,
‘And once this is over, no matter how free I might feel right now, it’s back to the dungeon of maximalism. Maybe I’m a masochist, but man, I love a frivolous skirt’
