I had hoped to bestow the DILFITS annually, but, lazy worm that I am, I haven’t. I am happy to announce, however, that there is a winner for the 2012 Spring and Summer season.

Comme des Garcons gown 2012

On days when a woman applies too much eye makeup, and it smears all over her face when she tries to remove it, and rubbing only makes her skin look raw, and she’s knee-deep in used cotton balls and late for work, or a date, and it’s that time of the month, this is surely what she will want to wear to flagrantly and stylishly express her dismay at being herself.

The white boots, which reminded Style.com’s Tim Blanks of technician-wear appropriate for a post-tsunami nuclear reactor melt-down, or “equally….sixties couture a-go-go,” will show off every bit of mud a determinedly self-loathing woman drags herself through.

And, yes, you will look fat in it.
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If you have a nominee you would like me to consider, I’d love to issue further awards. Please use the contact form and include a link to the image as well as your reasons why the outfit reflects, soothes, illuminates or compliments self-loathing.
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…surveyed about 1,000 mothers in their 30s and 40s nationwide and interviewed about 100 for their book. They found that the women broadly fell into two categories: “never enoughs” and “good enoughs.”

Never-enough women felt they had to be the best at everything and often agreed with the sentiment that “I need to be a superstar even if it kills me.”

As a recipe for self-loathing, that’s hard to beat. One of Tugend’s blog readers, Fritz Ziegler, moreover, noticed the Catch-22 of self-acceptance:

… Acceptance includes accepting that sometimes we act in perfectionistic ways about self-improvement, i.e., accepting that we aren’t accepting enough. This can also be said as: Complaining about not being accepting enough is just another version of perfectionism. It’s all so recursive!

Yes, Fritz; it is. You’re catching on.
 

From “T Beauty” magazine, the New York Times fashion supplement, April 13th, 2008.

If you click this picture it will get BIGGER! But, in case you still can’t read it, here’s the text:

The New York-based writer Lynn Phillips is a self-loather and proud of it. “I have an allergy to people telling me to cheer up,” she says. Phillips, who was once a writer on the cult 70′s television show “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” has even written a book called “Self-Loathing for Beginners” (Santa Monica Press) that covers the basics for thoughtful cynics and all those who “respond better to gloomier encouragement.” (Chapter 1 has a section called “Self-Love—Friend or Foe?”) Phillips was kind enough to present the first annual self-loathing awards for this issue (And the Winner Is…” Page 26*); naturally, she turned her weary wit to some of the fashion industry’s worst culprits. She cites a history of people saying good things about dark moods, such as the psychologist William James and the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (center), whom she calls a master of the genre: “He even relocated humanity in the universe so we realized how pathetic and small we are.”

*NOTE: The article to which this squib refers was actually on p. 28, not p 26.