I've been musing about clothing this week.

I've been under shelter-in-place rules for 32 days now. My own situation is fine (plenty of toilet paper!) and most importantly, the people around me are safe and healthy. I'm twice as busy with work, somehow. Teaching (now online)... very minor contributions to some covid research (mostly writing grant proposals)... trying to help my lab be productive from home (but only when it's helpful for their morale)... there's a lot going on. Many days with 8 hours of zoom meetings! I can't even imagine how all my colleagues with children are coping.

I've gravitated towards a uniform for my new lifestyle:

• Black R13 'boy skinny' jeans, slouchy and low rise. I call them my quaran-jeans. I'd been wearing high rise jeans recently, but when I'm sitting in a chair all day, it's nice not to have anything digging into my waist. They don't squish my tummy, they stay clean forever, and I have a few pairs to rotate between.

• Black t-shirt, usually an old Everlane u-neck tee. I own mostly cropped tees to go with the higher rise jeans, but these are long enough for the low rises. It's a silhouette I wore all the time five years ago, and with the slouchy low-rise jeans it still feels stylish.

• Black cardigan, usually an old men's Margiela cardigan I bought second-hand, cotton-wool with suede elbow patches. It's lightweight and oversized and effortless, and combines well with the jeans.

• I wore my comfy old flip-flops for four weeks... then I got fed up with how they looked and bought a pair of Birkenstocks I'd wanted for years. Birks are more boho than my usual look but in black they have a sort of cool minimalism.

For the most part, I've been too busy or distracted to notice clothing. I wear buttoned shirts some days when I teach. I have a few more interesting tees, like a boxy mock-neck one I got at Zara just before all this. For one important zoom presentation, I wore my new favorite silk shirt. But five weeks into this, I'm starting to feel the fashion itch!

(Two funny thoughts: with the low rise jeans and my new sedentary life, I'm afraid I'll come out of this and find that my high rise jeans don't zip anymore! And it turns out Zoom has a setting to touch up your face, so I've been staring at my talking head all day and thinking my skin looks so nice in the natural light of my house, when all along it was a lie!)

I hope you're all as well as can be under the circumstances!