Caroline O'Donoghue: How to get back that teenage feeling when you feel old

Revisit the clothes you couldn’t wear when you were young, but desperately wanted to, either because you were broke or insecure or because Cork didn’t have a Topshop yet

I was at a birthday party the other day when I was stricken with a deep flush of clothes envy.

Sitting in a box, all shiny and new, a gift to the host from one of her friends, was a pair of glitter jelly mules studded with plastic daisies. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. They were like something an eight year old would have, but for a grown woman.

I didn’t get home until 1am that night, but when I did, I immediately went on my laptop. It didn’t take long to find the shoes. They were on ASOS, and only £20. I bought them, and then quickly got offline, in case I also bought a Trolls backpack and a pair of light-up Barbie trainers.

I’m no fashion journalist, but I think we’re at the beginning of a dressing-like-an-eight-year-old revolution. No one is coming out of lockdown feeling younger. In fact, most of us feel like we’ve had the last vestiges of our diminishing youth stolen from us. I feel bad for the Zoomers most of all. When I was 16, I felt so oppressed by what 16 was supposed to feel like. Sixteen was supposed to be Kelly Kapowski from Saved By The Bell, gorgeous in her cheerleading uniform, lying on her bed with one leg in the air, doodling her fingers around her phone cord. Sixteen was supposed to be riding in a convertible. For every minute I was 16 I felt like I was wasting it by not being Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and so I can’t imagine what that feels like for 16-year-olds today, who have spent that precious, coveted year watching Bridgerton with their mum.

I’m 31, and so this next sentence is going to be extremely annoying to anyone over 31, but I’ll go ahead anyway: I feel old. I’ve never been fussy about photographs — when you work in the media, there are always a lot of crappy ones around, and you learn to accept them — but lately I’ve become a bit hyper. I took a selfie with a friend the other day and recoiled when I saw the crinkles around my eyes, the new lines in my forehead.

“It’s just because you’re smiling,” she said. “It’s just your face is a little red, you’ve been in the sun.”

I continued to gape at the picture. Who IS this hag, I thought, with her hollowed-out, piggy little eyes.

“You look really happy,” she pressed. “You look cute.”

“You’re only saying that,” I replied, testily. “Because you look hot and you want to post it.” Silence.

“Alright, we’ll post it,” I finally said, because she is single and I am not, and we must do these things for our single friends.

I don’t like that these things bother me. I want to be above all this. Ideally, I would like to skip the part where I am noticing small changes in my face and body, and simply arrive in a time zone where all these changes have already taken place and I’ve become fine about them. I want to be young and hot right up until the point where I am eighty and wise, with a long rope of grey hair and eyes that can predict a natural disaster.

It’s an unreasonable request, but good God, haven’t so many unreasonable requests been made of us, in the last two years? When are we allowed to have some unreasonable requests of our own?

But ageing, like everything else worth doing, is a thing that happens slowly and uncomfortably. You acquire and discard new clothes, new insecurities, and new vanities. But there are positives. You tend to have more money, certainly more than you did at 16.

You get to revisit the clothes you couldn’t wear when you were young, but desperately wanted to, either because you were broke or insecure or because Cork didn’t have a Topshop yet. When I was very young, I was obsessed with the 90s fashion in Clueless and Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion: the bubblegum colours and the flower prints, the faux fur and the jelly mules. I never got to wear those clothes then, but they are slowly taking up my summer wardrobe now. Everything is Barbie-pink. Understatement and any attempt to look like a tasteful French woman has gone clean out the window. I want to dress like the 16-year-old American teenager that my eight-year-old self wanted to be, and I don’t really mind how ridiculous it looks.

You might never be 16 again. But with a little effort and time spent browsing the Asos site, you can get back a little of that teenage feeling.