Auckland floods destroyed fashion editor’s wardrobe, here’s how she built it back

Until now, I thought I was. Yesterday, the guy from the council stood with us in what had once been our backyard and was now a mud mountain and told us he was surprised at how calm we were. “Most of the people we see can’t speak because they are in bits,” he said. “The ones that can speak tell us to f... off.”

We don’t tell him to f... off. We say “thank you” when he slaps a yellow sticker on our front door. The insurers have told us a yellow sticker will make it faster to process our claim. We don’t say f... off to the insurers, either. We are struck by how kind they are when they eventually answer the phone after a wait of more than three hours. We are grateful we even had a policy – because we really weren’t sure we did, or what it covered – and half the people in our street, comprised mostly of state house tenants, don’t have any insurance at all. With no cover, despite the warnings from the council blokes about contamination, there were people scrambling to salvage stuff out of their houses until a couple of days ago, when word spread that the neighbours two down from us had wound up in hospital with E coli. So now, our street is a ghost town and everything that was once inside our homes – furniture, carpet, clothes, books, childhood toys – is piled up along the berm. It looks like what it is. A natural disaster.

“Are you ready?” My boyfriend lifts the first box up and I hold the camera poised to take the insurance pics. I steel myself like crazy Tanya in The White Lotus, teetering on her heels on the railings of that super yacht in the final episode. “You got this!”

“Yup. Ready. Open it,” I confirm, but before he can even use the Stanley knife on the sodden cardboard, it disintegrates in his hands and my clothes come tumbling out in a sloppy heap. Until now, I have been pragmatic, almost Buddhist-like, in my insistence that “stuff is just stuff”. Material possessions don’t matter. Now a gasp of grief catches in my throat.

I didn’t know what was inside the box until now. I see my silver Balenciaga boots, the ones I walked through a snowstorm to buy at Selfridges on the day my divorce was finalised, and beside them the ultra-rare Prada bamboo scaffold heels I bought at Fred Segal on my way to an interview with Karl Lagerfeld. There are my Karen Walker denim flares I wore when she and I travelled together to London for Fashion Week, and my fake goatskin coat that looks so real it got me thrown out of a vegan restaurant in Berlin.

I take the photos and leave the clothes on the floor in the filth. As we walk out of the house, for the first time since the flood I cry.

After the flood, we think of things as good luck versus bad luck. Good luck that we all escaped unharmed, including the pets. Bad luck that we were building a walk-in wardrobe, so all our stuff was on the floor when the water rose up from beneath the carpet like something out of The Shining.

“I don’t want to shop yet. It feels too soon,” my boyfriend says. But we’ve been mooching about in the exact same clothes for two weeks now and we have no choice. We have to shop.

And that is when I realise: what the heck am I brooding about? This isn’t a tragedy. It’s an opportunity. How many times in your life do you get a clean slate, an insurance payout, and you are literally forced to go shopping? Suddenly, my nightmare is everyone’s dream scenario. Honestly, who wouldn’t want to ditch all their clothes and start from scratch?