It a question I get ask by a lot of people, why I am so obsessed with fashion and clothes? Let me tell you why I have this obsession with fashion and clothes, the truth is stranger than fiction.

I always been that girl who loved playing dress up from a young age, I would raid my mum wardrobe and try on all her coats and dresses, much to mum’s dismay. But in honestly I think all little girls go through that phase.

In primary school I would fight with my parents on the hatred of wearing school uniform, I never liked how I looked. I hated wearing the school tie and the grey pinafore.

At the weekend I would dress up to go food shopping with my mum, I would never wear jean and t-shirt, it has to be my Sunday’s best.

What I’m getting at, even at a young age I always been aware and fascinated by what I was wearing. I also has this knowledge of clothes and what I liked and didn’t liked. Even at a young age, I had this sense of my own style.

I think that early style development has stayed with me my whole life. It has never left me. And I think as I got older, it soon developed into an obsession.

The kind of obsession where, I would spend all my free money on buying clothes. The kind where I would choose a new dress over paying a bills. Yeah that’s how crazy I am about clothes.

One of the first thing my parents said to me when I first went out to work was, now I have my own money – spend it how you want. That has stayed with me my whole life.

Is there a deep psychological connection, a deep rooted problem on why I like clothes so much? Well the thing is, I never felt pretty.

That another thing I’ve always been aware off, I never felt pretty. I would see other girls who dressed in their finest clothes and be green with envy. In my teen years, I was scared of going into Topshop due to the fact I felt not pretty enough. Everyone told me I was being silly, and it took my mum one day to force me into the store to break the chain.

It also didn’t help that I was bullied quite badly over how I looked and what I wore. I went to boarding school and the girls were genuinely the bitchest girls you can imagine. There were one girls who would snare and pulled faces as soon as I would enter the room. This was during the 90s, when the Spice Girls was around. It suddenly became fashionable to wear tracksuits, because everyone wanted to be Sporty Spice. If I wore a dress or something that wasn’t a tracksuit, I would get laugh at and asked why am I dressing up? Sometime I’d be teased so badly that I would just change into a tracksuit to get people to leave me alone. This pretty much continued till I left school at 16, to go to sixth form.

Not long after I left school and it took a while for me to regain my confident, I got a little part-time job. And this when my parents told me to spend it how I wish.  So I did.

I was determined to be that person I was in primary school, the little girl who loved dressing up. While at sixth form I did start to think or even entertained about working in fashion. But once again I was aware I didn’t feel pretty. I also couldn’t draw to save my life. Someone told me that to work in fashion, you had to know how to draw, and that stayed with me. But then I came across some very early fashion blogs and it sort of clicked in my brain that maybe I don’t need to know how to draw, I could perhaps write or work in the admin part of a fashion company. What I’m saying is, there more than one avenue to go down when thinking about working with fashion.

I then met Richard and we sort of got swept up with life, us and general work/home situation. I ended up working in retail and now being in my mid-20s, I felt so bored with my work routine. Desperate to get out and determined that I don’t want to be there in 10 years’ time. I thought about studying fashion and going to uni. I also have this thought where if I didn’t do it now, in my mid 20s then I never will.

I ended up studying at London College of Fashion where I did a fashion media diploma, that allowed me to enter University for the Creative art on a BA Fashion journalism course.

I think during that time I really vamped up my obsession with fashion and clothes, it wasn’t just due to the fact that with my student loans I suddenly had loads of disposable income where I could shop to my heart delight. But I also had access to some amazing culture and fashion text books. I found myself analyzing catwalks shows, doing research at Dior store and writing about high end designers.

Once I graduated and left uni, that continue for me. But I soon found myself in a battle to leave my dreaded retail job, till I got so fed up that I just left to work for myself.

To answer my original question, why I am so obsessed with fashion and clothes? Well it a combination of my past and how I got to this point in my life, the need to prove those bitchy girls from school wrong, and also the need to be confident with myself. Also the fun of dressing up and wearing your best clothes. From studying fashion, it has taught that it is indeed an art from, yes clothes are an art form despite what anyone will tell you. I don’t doubt for one minute that this obsession will continue for the rest of my life, the only drawback is I will be soon running out of wardrobe space.