CHANGING rooms are carefully designed to make you feel repulsed by yourself, the items you are considering buying, the whole concept of clothing and the world, it has emerged.
Along with maddening layouts and disdainful staff, the harsh overhead lighting is chosen to confuse, demoralise and shatter all self-esteem, making shopping less a leisure activity and more an existential assault on the soul.
Changing room designer Eleanor Shaw said: “We pick ultra-harsh light fixtures usually associated with evening sporting events and position them six inches above you.
“The resulting aggressive glare makes your semi-naked body look as dusty and cratered as the surface of the moon while casting shadows on your lined face that make you look at least a decade older.
“The longer you stand starkly illuminated against a dun wall like a prisoner of war, the lower your will to live. You’ll move from asking why this dress makes you resemble sweating cheese through abandoning all social events to never leaving the house again.
“We want our customers to feel like disgusting little blobs in petri dishes being observed through microscope by judgemental gods who will write them up for the Mail’s sidebar of shame.”
Customer Hannah Tomlinson said: “I really appreciate how changing rooms put me off ever buying or wearing clothes again. However I’m unsure about it as a business model.”
