Unsolicited Advice: A Love Letter (Sort Of)

There are many ways people show they care. They bake you cookies. They check your seatbelt. They tell you- completely unprompted that they liked your hair longer...

…and if you’re a woman, no doubt you’ll have been on the receiving end of "Have you thought about smiling more? You’re so much prettier when you smile." (It’s giving 1952. It’s giving No.) I myself have collected enough unsolicited advice over the years to fill a coffee table book. Working title: Nobody Asked, And Yet Here We Are.

There was the time that Garren - yes, the Garren - decided to cut my hair with a Karen Elson-esque fringe (particularly de reguer in the late 90s, and if Garren thinks you can pull it off, you do not argue with Garren) which I ended up sporting on the cover of Time Magazine (long story) which compelled my Aunt Lucy to write me a letter to tell me she really didn’t think much of ‘the haircut’. A public service announcement, apparently for an audience of me.

I once made a desperate post-partum-weight-drop pilgrimage from London to the Dries Van Noten flagship store in Antwerp, that first year when he did those heavenly Spring florals, and was dissuaded from buying anything by my friend Gill who told me I looked like I was wearing a bedspread. (To be fair, I probably did, but the timing was particularly devastating, given I had burned my pregnancy clothes in a barrel before leaving for the airport.)

Two weeks ago, a viewer of my Instagram Live DMed me- in what was clearly meant as ‘constructive feedback’ to tell me that my last livestream ‘felt like a chore’. Dead serious. And ironically, I had been smiling all the way through it.

The unsettling thing? Nobody tells you that unsolicited advice is like glitter: It’s going everywhere, whether you want it to or not. It stays with you, not necessarily because it’s true, but it’s just so bizarrely bold. Passive aggressive comments? Invasions of your mental space? Who asks for these? (Apparently just by existing, we all do).

I bet it’s not just happening to us normal people. Imagine the unsolicited advice floating around the upper echelons right now:

Somewhere, someone is telling Taylor Swift “Maybe next album, you just don’t mention an ex. Not even in a coded lyric. Just one clean, breakup-free record”. A 26-year old management consultant is suggesting to a Fortune 500 CEO that they ‘lean into authenticity’. And hey, all over Instagram, it’s hard to escape the coaches of all kinds who are earnestly explaining now we can improve ourselves. Unsolicited advice is democracy at its weirdest: everybody has a voice, but not everybody knows when to keep it to themselves.

Here’s the thing- it’s up to you to take it or leave it (or you can buy the flowery Dries top, twirl once for the haters and go to dinner in it anyway). Because at the end of the day, unsolicited advice says a lot more about the give than the receiver. And that is the real takeaway that nobody asked for.