If you are someone who’s interested in clothes, chances are that in recent months you have been pondering your relationship with them. Does one really need any, beyond track pants? Was the pleasure you took in dressing up real or did you just imagine it? Who even are we when not directly exposed to the gaze of other people and their judgement?

I’ve yet to see anyone who has emerged from the last 5 months thinking: “You know what we need more of in our lives? Clothes.” In the general hierarchy of things, fashion is not doing well and rightly so. But we obviously still need to wear something and personally, I think that the world would be a poorer place without the art of creating and wearing garments.

It is a bit early to assess how the virus is going to change the economy and the fashion industry. It’s also unclear how much we will be teleworking in the future: certainly more than before, but there is a difference between going to the office twice a week and almost never. But regardless of these considerations, there are three sentiments I believe are widely shared by people whose situation is similar to mine (middle-class white woman who still has a job).

The first I already mentioned: that we own too much. Nothing brings home the extent of the excess quite as effectively as staring at your own wardrobe for months without wearing anything in it. The second is the importance of comfort: after weeks upon weeks of slippers and sneakers, putting on heels feels like a kind of madness. Why have we been doing it exactly, does anyone remember? And finally, when we do leave the house for anything else but exercise or a quick shop, we only want to wear our best things. Which begs the question why we acquired some of the sub-optimal stuff in the first place?

I bought almost no clothes during the lockdown and when I ultimately decided to buy stuff in July, I took some time to think about it. The conclusion was not surprising, but still painful: there really isn’t much space in this new world for trends as we know them. We were obviously heading in that direction already with the climate change and the glaring unsustainability of the fashion industry, but this period of suspended time really crystallised it for me. If one wants a relatively small wardrobe where you wear items for many years, there is no place for items that feel dated after a season or two.

That doesn’t mean I think trends will go away, they never will, but they can be expressed differently than buying a whole new wardrobe every season (styling, makeup, smaller items like jewellery, etc). The other side of the coin is that trends will last longer, a trend (ha, how clever!) we have also seen for a while ready. I waited for the tie-dye trend to die (and a pun?) for several years, before giving up this summer and buying a tie-dye dress.

What I’m getting at with my somewhat rambly post is that figuring out what you really really like – at the moment and long term – becomes increasingly important. There is some truth to all these articles about great basics, but one woman’s basic is another one’s evening dress. So rather than follow the Instagram consensus on what these basics should be, figure out what they are for you.

Bearing all this in mind, I promptly went and ordered a custom-made coral shift dress. I realise this is not what most people would consider going back to basics, but bear with me here. I had the dress made because I know I’m going to wear it for years and I know it because in a way, I already have. I bought the original, orange-and-black version of this dress seven years ago, when Oksana Tandit showed it on her catwalk. I wore it consistently throughout the years, because it never was exactly trendy, so it never felt ‘last season’. At the same time, it was always flattering, because both the cut and the colour were right for me.

When the orange dress was tragically shrunk in the wash this year, I decided to get a replacement. I couldn’t bring myself to order the exact same dress, but it had to be close enough to ensure that it would suit me as well as the original. I made a snap decision to go with this light coral colour, which I think is actually a better shade for me than the orange. The white accents make the dress less wearable during colder months, but that was a conscious choice: while I have many wintery office dresses, I own a lot fewer that are suitable for summer. I have a white jacket to make it more office appropriate (not that I’m afraid to show my shoulders, but it’s usually rather cold at my workplace even in summer) and crucially, it works nicely both with white sandals and sneakers.

I fully expect to be wearing this dress for the next decade. If you’d like to as well, I hear there might be something similar in the next spring/summer collection by Oksana (I cannot confirm nor deny the rumours that it’ll be called The Annikky Dress). Whatever your basics, take your time finding them and making sure they are The Ones. You don’t want to be locked down with clothes you don’t like.

Dress by Oksana Tandit, shoes by Aldo, photos by Laura Nestor, MUAH by Lembe Lemmiksoo. Sincere thanks to Rannahotell for allowing us to shoot on their premises.