So a teenage fashion brand has closed its fitting rooms. Safety fears, they say. A new low in British retail? No. A new low in British sanity. Here we have yet another manifestation of the creeping infantilisation of our society. It seems we cannot trust a teenager with a flimsy curtain and a mirror. What next? Banning scissors from classrooms? Oh, wait. They already did that.
Let us consider the fitting room. A humble space. A place for private deliberation. A place where one confronts the cruel reality of a size 10 dress on a size 12 body. A place of quiet despair and occasional triumph. Now it is gone. Why? Because someone, somewhere, might take a photograph. The spectre of the smartphone has done what neither riot nor recession could: it has killed the fitting room.
But this is not about safety. It is about liability. It is about the triumph of the lawyer over the shopkeeper. It is about a society so risk-averse that it would rather dismantle its own commerce than face a lawsuit. The British retail guidelines under review, you say? I say they should be burned. We have become a nation of cowards hiding behind clipboards.
Historians will look back at this moment and chuckle. They will compare it to the fall of Rome, when the empire grew so paranoid about barbarians that it built walls around its cities and forgot to feed its people. Here, we are building walls around our dressing rooms and forgetting to sell clothes. The parallel is uncanny.
And what of the teenagers? They will adapt. They will buy clothes online, return them, and complain about the fit. They will never know the joy of a spontaneous purchase, the thrill of a perfect pair of jeans found in a cramped cubicle. We are raising a generation that has never known the awkward conversation with a mother through a door: "Does this make me look fat?" No. It makes you look like a product of a sterile, risk-free culture.
Do not blame the brand. They are merely responding to the market. Blame the parents who sue. Blame the regulators who authorise. Blame the zeitgeist that mistakes a changing room for a crime scene. We are living in the late stages of intellectual decadence, where every human interaction must be sanitised, legislated, and monitored.
Rome fell. The Victorians had their prudery, but at least they sold clothes. We have nothing left but safety warnings and empty shelves. The fitting room is dead. Long live the fitting room.
