Daily Mail journalists select and curate the products that feature on our site. If you make a purchase via links on this page we will earn commission – learn more
It was a Saturday morning when I realised I had become an online shopping addict. Lounging in bed with a pot of coffee and the newspapers, sunshine outside the windows and plans for the weekend, I had this feeling that something was missing.
then it dawned on me – I was not expecting a single parcel to be delivered. There was no Amazon, DPD, Royal Mail, Evri or any other of the many couriers scheduled to ring the doorbell with some purchase or other. This didn’t induce the physical craving of going without alcohol or coffee, but a nagging sense that there was a hole to be filled.
Looking back, I realise that I have always enjoyed buying things. A new purchase gives me satisfaction. Perhaps it started when I was a young child and my father would take me, with my brother and sister, out on Saturday morning down London’s Kings Road to buy us a gift. We could choose a comic from the newsstand and something small – a paperback or a 45 rpm single from WH Smith (this was back when there were record booths in shops, so you could hear what you were going to buy). It was the highlight of the week.
As I grew up, going shopping with my pocket money was a favourite way to spend time. Not high-end, luxurious shopping but rooting around in places like the charity shops in Hereford, where we spent school holidays, or London’s patchouli- and sandalwood-scented emporiums selling imported Indian scarves and joss sticks. I chose Sussex University on the basis that Brighton had great vintage shops, rather than for the course.
Later, when I had begun working in magazines, there were weekend forays to Portobello and Camden markets to buy a second-hand dress for that night’s party or a piece of pottery or some fabric. With every purchase would, and still does, come a (short-lived) belief that my life would be better in some way by owning it. A new lipstick is not just colour in a tube – it is a passport to a new, improved me.
The online shopping that fills many of my hours now is a very different experience. I was a late adopter of website buys and can remember arguing with Tom and Ruth Chapman, founders of luxury retail site matchesfashion.com, that it was impossible to buy expensive clothes online. How wrong I was.
To add a little context, I was editor-in-chief of Vogue for 25 years and was surrounded by stuff. Just masses of objects people wanted the magazine to promote. The beauty cupboard was stocked with every imaginable product and if I wanted a specific thing, the beauty editors would offer to call it in. I didn’t have access to all the free clothes people think magazine editors do, but designers were always happy to help me find things to buy and often gave discounts.
I loved looking at the merchandise that we suggested to readers in our issues, and I still enjoy flipping through pages of homeware, beauty products, best summer edits and so on – generally believing in the authority of the teams who put them all together.
But I hardly ever bought online, even though e-commerce was flourishing by 2017 when I left Vogue. Now I waste hours trawling websites introduced on Instagram, or following up on the compelling emails that appear in my inbox reminding me that something I was looking at previously is now discounted. Even writing this, my attention has been diverted by a Proenza Schouler checked poplin skirt and top that have shown up on my Instagram feed. Before I went to sleep last night I glanced again at a Dries Van Noten skirt I have been dithering over on mytheresa.com. So far I have resisted.
What I now understand is that this shopping has little to do with actual ownership and much more to do with the moment of pressing ‘buy’. That small action is almost a release, like picking a scab. Looking at the list of purchases I have made over the past few months, I would say the hit rate is about 50/50 in terms of them working out once they’ve arrived. So little of what I buy online has been something I set out to find – shopping this way often means a speedy, compulsive buy, and it can be much more of a gamble. Take last month’s Rosa gallica, which I had envisaged being the glorious pink climbing rose seen the previous weekend in a magnificent Yorkshire garden. When it arrived the next day (so impatient was I to get it planted that I paid extra for that delivery), it turned out to be a shrub, and not the colour I had thought.
When I saw the navy satin Dôen trousers with their fringed hem on net-a-porter.com, I imagined them as my go-to for smart summer evenings. I couldn’t wait for them to arrive, but when I tried them on they were far too long, the fringe literally sweeping up the dust on the floor. So back they had to go.
While I am a white-shoe obsessive, I have to accept that the white Havaianas flip-flops have almost immediately lost their sparkle and are grimy after a fortnight. But other buys have been perfect, like the Adidas Summer Glow woven track top, which ran true to the colour it was online. Colour is one of the trip-ups, as websites tend to overlay a flattering filter and what should be a magical indigo is, once unwrapped, a sludgy black.
The AA mantra ‘one is too many, a thousand is never enough’ applies. No matter how successful the purchase, it doesn’t stop me wanting to buy something else and there’s a whole world of stuff out there. Not just clothes but plants, stationery, technology (I needed to buy my first laptop in ten years), beauty products. Oh, and books: the ability to instantly order a title I have just read a good review of is the reason why we have a wall of unread books at the end of the bed. Then there are the various top-up foodstuffs from Zapp, a well-curated immediate delivery app.
As with every addiction, I have moments of attempting to stop. If I manage to hold back on a purchase I add it to a mental tally of money I haven’t spent. So the price of that as yet unbought Dries Van Noten skirt is at the moment sitting in my imaginary account, available to be spent at a later date. Yes, I’ll probably buy something else, but at least I’ve held back from the ‘buy now’ impulse that the online shopping world so easily lures us into, giving both pleasure – and regret.
