This article is taken from the March 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
I’ve been flirting. I mean, obv., dallying with a modish little piece of ass. Also, obv. However, in this instance, the object of my lust is a garment I detest, despise, find utterly abhorrent — a hostility I have harboured for some 30 years.
And, yet, the crush. I gaze at said article, I add it to wish lists, I remove it from wish lists; look again, recoil, and still my head is turned.
Behold, the sartorial hate fuck. Just as — in our sexual adventures — sometimes the hottest scenario involves the worst of all possible partners, so, in fashion, we can loathe something with such passion that it is almost love, qualifying as obsession at least.
The heart wants what the heart doesn’t under any circumstances want; such infatuations registering as perverse in a way that is smoking hot.
Full disclosure (I feel I am allowed italics, if not an exclamation mark): it’s a pair of lilac, faux-fur Birkenstocks (now £67.50, asos.com). I know, I know. You couldn’t judge me more than I judge myself. Their ugliness is so profound that I couldn’t even wear them in secret, at home, in the dark.
On being informed of my pash, my boyfriend literally staggered. “But, it’s the kind of thing I’d wear!” he exclaimed, being the proud owner of knock-off, budget, not-even-Crocs.
And yet, even as I contemplate them now to find their price to add in above, my fingertip frots my mouse pad ready to click. I love them, I tell you, I love them!
Your hate fuck might be a tweed jacket: finding it too campily patrician, battered Brit, yet somehow the Mitfordism you crave. It might be an Alaïa bandage dress you regard as too sexpot, obvious, Noughties “Posh” Spice, whilst fatally drawn to its power-slut mode.
A black pal notes: “I am all about the black Ivy (League) guise. Yet, part of me hankers after the tight-crotched flares with shiny shirt and an afro Blaxploitation vibe. I’m preppy and primed, yet somewhere inside myself I’m humming the theme to Shaft.”
Real me knows that I have no truck with denim, neutral tones, oversized garb, athleisure, dropped waists, German architect dressing, hippy shit and clompy shoes. Yet, re: the fur Birks, hippy shit/clompy ain’t the half of it; a German architect would swoon were they greyer; whilst all of the above would work well with them.
Even visiting the Lanserhof clinic last year — where Birkenstocks are sported as part of the high-net-worth, hair-shirt uniform — I couldn’t. Yet, here I am again, checking whether the “Birkenstock Arizona Teddy Borg Sandals in lilac”, to use their full title, can be dry-cleaned. (They can’t.)
We spend a good deal of time pondering our sartorial loves, less so what we hate. Yet both are defining, informative, teaching us who we are in style terms. There’s a lot we can learn from lustful loathing.
In my own case, there is a thrill in the witty juxtaposition between tree-hugging, utilitarian monstrousness and the tactility of that lush lining. I am beguiled by the idea of walking on a lavender cloud. Plus, I always have a colour obsession. It’s been fuchsia, it’s been emerald, it’s been Klein blue.
Currently it’s ice lilac — achingly zeitgeist/très Gen Z, plus it suits me — meaning I have to watch myself when any item is rendered in this hue.
By way of reality check, not only do I detest the Arizona Teddy Borgs, I am a heavy-shouldered, — handed, and — footed galumphing type, forever attempting to resemble a gazelle.
To sport similarly galumphing garments exposes me as the brick shithouse I am. Only actual gazelles can look Hepburnesque in vast, clumsy things. I require sleek narrowness by way of disguise.
This was amply proven when I at last succumbed to the blasted things, returned in the blinking of an eye. One would have thought this impossible, but they were even worse in IRL, their (unfastened) plastic buckles the stuff of nightmare.
As to how they look on — wait, is this actual vomit rising in my throat? I have rather charming feet, yet they appeared splayed like slabs of uncooked chicken.
The only positive thing that could be said about them was that the shaggy, turd-brown shearling versions (£435, mytheresa.com) would be considerably worse. As for the £1,640 hand-painted, bridal incarnation, the term “bird shit” does not come close.
Still would though.
