crocodile skin boots
if clothes are self-expression, who gets the biggest wardrobe?
‘Under brutal fluorescent honesty, my former flings hang like nocturnal bats, representing my mindset at purchase: brasher, bolder, more caffeinated and apparently unconcerned by my overdraft.’
Instead of skeletons in his closet, Raven Smith, columnist at Vogue, has Burberry trench coats and the Wales Bonner x Adidas Japan sneakers, immaculately boxed, in a storage unit.
This all came about after reading an article with “three of London’s most intriguing” and their use of storage units as second wardrobes. I can’t stop thinking about it, this is something I need to get off of my chest. Perhaps it’s because I first read the article in question (Stash Hits: Storage Containers Are The New It-Bags) in the April 2026 copy of Vogue I keep in my work bag for slow periods between calls, where I could be reading about a blue-ticked colonic irrigator based in Strawberry Fields before handling a call from a someone in social housing whose soil-stack has backed into their home. They say variety is the spice of life, after all, but sometimes variety throws up some uncomfortable juxtapositions.
“As British Vogue explains,” Big Yellow Storage cite the article on their website — being the location for its photoshoot, “these spaces are no longer simply practical solutions — they are extensions of personal identity and style.” The idea that a wardrobe is form of self expression isn’t new, but surpassing a degree of “stashing” where you can justify buying storage space to accommodate the trinkets of your identity, begs the question: why do some people get more “self” than others? Are those without the financial means expected to shrink themselves and the concept of their identity?
Or, are we using this to translate excessive consumption into a conversation about the self, to sidestep the issue of a wealth gap that has now superseded that of 17th Century France?
I’m not here to deny the importance of clothes to identity, hell, the degree to which I study the hip-minimising, ass-accentuating angle of how a pair of say 501s sit on my leg versus a pleated pair of high-waisted bootlegs borders on the fetishistic. And while the three interviewed for the article — Julia Hobbs, Raven Smith and Ch’lita Collins, a contributing senior fashion features editor, a writer and a stylist respectively — have obvious reasons to document their lives through a curated wardrobe, there is still something that grinds against my fascination for the obliviousness of the article, a mild sense of distaste. Collins laments the ordeal of finding a storage facility near enough to her De Beauvoir flat, one of Hackney’s most elite neighbourhoods, especially when she still has 90kg of cargo still travelling overseas. According to Safestore, the average cost of renting a storage unit in London varies between £80.85 and £242.50 pcm. That latter figure is the best part of my share of rent.
Of course, any Condé Nast publication isn’t the kind of place to look for a self-aware take. And Vogue is most certainly not about accessibility, I’m reminded of the controversy a couple months ago where after Anna Wintour snubbed fashion influencer Lyas’ invitation to one of his famously open-doors LA Watchparties, Vogue stage their own watchparty, but it was invite-only. What piqued my interest was the setting, the apparent chic-ness of storage units, which have always struck me as objectively fucking ugly.
This follow a tendency of taking things that are typically fashion-backward (shipping containers, the Jolene coffeeshop font) and monetising it into a trend. Industrial aesthetics as chic are nothing new. Urban Outfitters has done everything in its power to ensure that its walls look as though some raver called Dave from Stoke-on-Trent would have banged his head against them thirty years ago. In this same way clashing prints walk a precarious line between hideously contrived and fabulously real, a red Prada shearling number against a backdrop of corrugated iron is inherently cunt.
Referencing Jolene’s unattractive typeface, Anna’s Instagram reel speaks about about artwashing and the new image of gentrification, and I think that logic applies here. A laundering of familiarly un-glamourous aesthetics, handed back to the spaces from which they originated with a price markup.
I might be being too cynical, definitely jealous, as though I hadn’t woken up this morning with a beautiful pair of crocodile skin boots on the ‘suggested for you’ page of my Vinted app. But I have no more room for shoes, especially not until I have fully worn the fraying cowboy boots I was going to replace for these into the ground. In other words, this article probably caught me at a sensitive time. I’d promised myself I’d buy them after payday. I’ve just secured a new job after all, and was envisioning myself in my beloved black velvet suit and those boots at all the open mics my new shift pattern will allow me to attend, an idealised version of me, just one purchase away. By the time I had brushed my teeth and washed my face, they had sold. I would have been crushed if I didn’t have the tiny dimensions of my bedroom to reason with my disappointment. There’s no room for crocodile boots in this boy’s life (yet).
In my bereft state, it’s hard not to see the article as one glamorising overconsumption, particularly when one of the interviewees states: “I hate renting clothes – I want everything in a shoot to be listed as “stylist’s own”. This is not to ignore that these three intriguing people are in the business of clothes, I suppose it might be like criticising a writer for having too many books (although libraries exist for a reason) — my issue lies more with the article presenting this as the next big thing, or something we should aspire to. Despite the article’s celebrating the archival value of one’s wardrobe, its fascination with the storage container gimmick suggests its more commercial homage to excess for excess’ sake. But while renting clothes is a great way to keep clothing cyclical, I get it. There’s something special about the relationship you build with your clothes and the memories you wear into them: an “element of fate”. I know the fascination with, and the tangible appeal of, being worn into your clothes. As a trans*person, how my clothes make me appear and relate to my external world is something I acutely monitor, albeit sometimes on a subliminal level, constantly. My undulating comfort with femininity (and its association with exuberance) can be seen in in my sartorial footprint: sheer shirts with dagger collars, velvet suits and cuban heels, a rewritten masculinity from another time, have retreated to very special occasions. I wear them with a kind of tenderness for my younger, more flamboyant self. I love the familiarity of pieces I always reach for, how I’ve worn the leather smooth on the collars of a leather jacket, or that the graphic on my Brando-kissing-James-Dean t shirt still feels cheeky every time I pull it on. The comforting silhouette of a straight leg chino is a kind of armour to me — I can understand how a sense of your own gumption and vulnerability can summed up in the pleat of a trouser.
Clothes are exciting, their context forever changing (which is why wearing them out only adds to their personal value, imo) — like metaphors, they signal something else about your person, unsaid, but inherently dynamic. They carry histories, inter- and intra- personal. You can map out a life well-lived in the clothes that have adorned it.
But how much is too much? It’s hard for the average reader to realistically envision having quite so many clothes, so much so that a separate storage unit needs to be used to house them. When I think of the times I’ve found myself at a storage unit, it has been in the months after the loss of another grandparent, my parents in a state of anguish do we keep the upright piano with a cigarette burn on its middle C? Or do we chuck it? It’s an ugly thing but grandma loved it. What about the bureau? There’s no space for it but Grandpa Beautiful built it over how to deal with the sheer amount of possessions that have accumulated over a life, over how much of its previous owner they can truly hold. Storage facilities have always felt like completely soulless places that work on the basis that the afterlives presumed to be caught in its stored objects are happy to stagnate there on a monthly basis. They’re functional, bleak, and rarely busy.
What’s more is that, if these storage units were filled with brands like Primark or M&S, nobody would be writing about them in Vogue. Instead words like obsessive compulsive disorder or hoarding might be thrown about. The interviewees talk frivolously, now from a perspective of financial security, about their overdrafts and debit cards. Maybe they knew their taste would rewarded and scrimping on the weekly shop would be eventually worth it. You too could one day house your designer collection in a Big Yellow storage facility on some industrial estate a twenty-minute drive from your house. It’s a phenomena too obsessed with its own clout to be a true phenomenon.
With its inherent sense of superior taste, of having a personal collection, it’s giving legacy planning. Like with a collector who hides away their art collection, millions of dollars of art and countless hours of an artists’ labour kept from curious eyes for the sake of their value, there’s something sad about a red shearling Prada coat being bagged away and rarely worn, no matter how much you love it. Something… elitist.
Maybe the storage unit is the new It bag, not like the hobo bag or the baguette bag or the Uniqlo round mini, but in that aspirational, ungraspable sense of it. These are the people I want to be. Writers and stylists and editors who get to live through their wardrobes. It’s a heady dream for those who have worked to hone themselves, to be able to haphazardly respond “this old thing?” with one raised eyebrow and an absent minded hand gesture — as Smith says — and “resurrect” a old self. But can a person be archival? Can they push the clutter of their past lives into a metal container and call it curation? I imagine, enviously, the experience of running my hand over rails of silk sleeves, of faux fur and real fur alike, of endless leathers, velveteens and crocodile skins and hearing the self-assured clack of hangers in my wake. That I could rock up in my everyday uniform of shirt, vest, jeans, boots, jumper, jacket and see multiple iterations of myself reflected back to me. That I might be able to investigate my own sweat stains and heel bites and have a sense of having left a mark on something.
I’m still fascinated and perturbed by the article. Maybe it’s a whole don’t-knock-it-til-you-try-it situation. I’ll have to get back to you on that one after a few more years of accumulating, whereby I should have the extra 75ft² of storage required to make me a more fully realised person, who (hopefully) knows the answer.
B
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Vogue. 25th March 2026. “Stash Hits: Storage Containers Are The New It-Bags” Vogue. https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/storage-containers.
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