It started, as many questionable decisions in my life have, with a late-night online shopping session and a glass of wine. I was scrolling through my emails, deleting the usual barrage of promotional messages, when a Boden sale announcement caught my eye. 50% off selected items. Free delivery. Returns extended to 60 days. The holy trinity of online shopping temptation.
Now, Boden and I have a complicated history. My mum’s been a devotee since the ’90s—their catalogs used to arrive at our house with the reliability of the seasons changing, and she’d circle items in pen before calling to place an order on our landline. (Remember landlines? Remember catalogs? God, I’m ancient.) For teenage me, there was nothing less cool than Boden. Their cheerful prints and sensible cuts represented everything I was rebelling against in my phase of black eyeliner and charity shop slip dresses worn over baggy band t-shirts.
“You’ll appreciate Boden when you’re older,” Mum would say, as I rolled my eyes dramatically enough to strain a muscle.
The problem is, she was right. Somewhere around my late twenties, I found myself lingering over a Boden jumper in a particularly pleasing shade of mustard. By thirty, I’d bought my first Boden dress—a navy wrap style that became an immediate workwear staple. Now, at thirty-five, I own… well, more Boden than I’d care to admit to my former teenage self.
But even with this gradual conversion, I’d never gone full Boden. Their clothes were mixed in with my Cos basics, my vintage finds, my occasional Zara impulse purchases. Boden pieces were supporting actors, not the star of my wardrobe show.
Until that night, three glasses of Malbec in, when a wild thought struck me: What if I wore nothing but Boden for a week? What would happen to my sense of self? Would I suddenly develop an overwhelming desire to move to a Georgian townhouse in Chiswick? Would I start saying things like “gosh” and “rather” without irony? Would colleagues notice I was dressing differently, or would the clothes blend seamlessly into my existing style?
Before I could talk myself out of it, I placed an order for five new pieces to supplement the Boden I already owned. The total made me wince slightly, even with the discount, but I justified it as a professional experiment. Research, if you will, into one of Britain’s most successful clothing brands, one that seems to inspire both devotion and mild derision in equal measure.
My rules were simple: Seven days of wearing exclusively Boden clothing. Shoes and bags could be from other brands (I’m not made of money, and anyway, Boden footwear has never quite convinced me). Accessories could be from anywhere. But every main piece—tops, bottoms, dresses, knitwear—had to be Boden.
Monday morning arrived along with my order, which I’d paid extra to have delivered on Saturday. I laid out my first outfit: a berry-colored corduroy pinafore dress over a striped Breton top, paired with black tights and ankle boots. As I looked at myself in the bedroom mirror, I felt… fine? Good, even? The pinafore fit perfectly, the fabric was substantial, and there was something cheering about the rich raspberry shade against the gloom of a February morning.
The first test came at the editorial meeting. I slid into my usual seat, notepad ready, feeling slightly self-conscious. Was I giving off major “yummy mummy” energy? Would someone make a joke about whether I was heading to pick up Tarquin from cello practice after work?
But nobody said anything. The meeting proceeded as normal. Pitches were discussed, deadlines confirmed, the usual Monday panic about filling pages established. It wasn’t until we were breaking up that Sasha, our beauty director, paused by my chair.
“New dress? It’s a great color on you.”
Not “very Boden” or “looking mumsy today.” Just a normal compliment on a nice dress. Interesting.
By Wednesday, I’d worn wide-leg cropped trousers with a silky blouse (both Boden), a knitted dress with boots (Boden, obviously), and was currently sporting a midi skirt with a merino jumper (guess where from). My confidence was growing. Nobody had clocked that I was wearing the same brand constantly. In fact, I’d received more compliments than usual.
“You look very put-together this week,” my desk neighbor Priya commented over lunch. “Doing anything special?”
“Just trying something new,” I replied vaguely, feeling like I was engaged in corporate espionage rather than a silly fashion experiment.
The real test came on Thursday evening—a press dinner for a new beauty brand launch at a painfully hip restaurant in Shoreditch. The guest list would be full of fashion and beauty editors who actually paid attention to what people wore, unlike my generally oblivious colleagues.
I chose my most expensive Boden purchase—a silk midi dress in a dark green floral print that cost more than I usually spend on a dress but less than a comparable designer version. I added my non-Boden gold heels and a vintage beaded clutch, plus red lipstick to cut through any potential preppiness.
As I walked into the restaurant, I felt that familiar flutter of insecurity. The room was full of women in black, in interesting silhouettes, in pieces I recognized from recent runway collections. And there I was in my Boden dress, basically wearing the clothing equivalent of a Waitrose ready meal. Premium, yes, but still mass market.
I headed straight to the bar and ordered a gin and tonic.
“Love your dress,” said a voice beside me. I turned to find the digital director of a major fashion publication—someone whose style I’d always admired—smiling at me. “Great print. Vintage?”
I hesitated for a millisecond. “It’s Boden, actually.”
Her eyebrows rose slightly. “Really? It’s lovely. I haven’t looked at their stuff in ages.”
And just like that, my Boden anxiety dissolved. The rest of the evening passed in a blur of canapés, champagne, and shop talk. Nobody else commented on my dress, either positively or negatively. I was just another woman in a pretty frock at a London event, neither the best dressed nor the worst.
By Friday, I was genuinely enjoying my Boden experiment. There’s something liberating about having parameters around your clothing choices—it eliminated the usual morning dithering about what to wear. I knew it would be Boden; I just had to decide which Boden.
For my final day, I went with what is perhaps the most stereotypically Boden outfit possible: a striped dress with a colorful cardigan over the top, paired with flat pumps. I was leaning all the way in. As I waited for my coffee in the office kitchen, our creative director—a terrifyingly stylish woman who exclusively wears architecturally interesting Japanese labels in black, navy, and occasionally very dark green—looked me up and down.
“You know,” she said, stirring her tea thoughtfully, “you’ve looked really nice all week. Very… colorful.”
Coming from her, this was the equivalent of being booked for Paris Fashion Week.
So what did I learn from my week as a Walking Boden Catalog? Several things, actually.
First, clothes from a single brand can look remarkably different depending on how you style them. The same Boden cardigan wore differently with jeans on work-from-home Tuesday than it did over a dress on in-office Friday.
Second, most people genuinely don’t notice or care what brands you’re wearing, as long as you look relatively put-together. I had built up this whole narrative about Boden having a specific “look” that would be immediately identifiable, but the reality is that most busy Londoners are far too preoccupied with their own lives to analyze your outfit provenance.
Third, there’s something pleasingly uncomplicated about Boden clothes. They fit consistently (at least on my body type), they wash well, they don’t require special undergarments or double-sided tape or any of the other engineering sometimes necessary for more fashion-forward pieces. And after years of minimalist, boxy clothing dominating the landscape, there’s something almost refreshing about clothes that actually nip in at the waist and have defined shapes.
Fourth, and this is the one I’m slightly uncomfortable admitting: I felt prettier than usual that week. Not more fashionable or cooler, but prettier in a conventional, accessible way. The cuts were flattering, the colors brightened my face, the prints made me smile. There’s probably a whole essay to be written about why feeling “pretty” rather than “edgy” or “interesting” makes me slightly uncomfortable, but that’s for another day.
When Saturday finally arrived and I was free from my self-imposed Boden obligation, I stood in front of my wardrobe feeling weirdly reluctant to break the streak. In the end, I pulled on jeans from one brand, a t-shirt from another, and a jacket from a third. It felt a bit like returning to reality after a brief holiday in a parallel universe—one where everything coordinates nicely and there are probably Labradors and Agas and children called Poppy and Hugo.
Would I do it again? Switch to an all-Boden wardrobe permanently? No, probably not. I still love my weird vintage pieces and my occasional high fashion splurges too much. Fashion, for me, has always been about experimentation and self-expression, not finding a uniform and sticking to it religiously.
But I will wear those Boden pieces I bought regularly. They’ll slot into my existing wardrobe, adding shots of color and print among the more austere pieces I tend to gravitate toward. And I’ll think of my mum every time I put them on, acknowledging once again that she was right all along.
Maybe that’s the real appeal of Boden—it’s clothing that your mother would approve of, in the best possible way. Not cutting-edge or revolutionary, but well-made, cheerful, and designed to make the wearer feel good rather than merely interesting to look at. In a fashion landscape that can sometimes feel intimidatingly cool or prohibitively expensive, there’s something rather lovely about that.
Oh god. I just used “rather lovely” unironically. The Bodenification is complete. Someone send help. Preferably wearing a striped Breton top with a sensible cotton cardigan.