Jacey Duprie - Liking Myself Back: An Influencers Journey from Self-Doubt to Self-Acceptance

Praise for
Liking Myself Back

Liking Myself Back is a refreshing and never before seen look behind the filter of life at the forefront of the fashion influencer space. It is a must read for anyone who is interested in fashion, the world of social media, or what its like to live a life online.

Amanda Kloots, CBSs The Talk cohost and New York Times bestselling author of Live Your Life

Im so proud of Jacey for opening up so bravely about the mental health struggles that so often accompany life in the public eye. By the end of Liking Myself Back, I was cheering her on with tears in my eyes. It is a remarkable story well told.

Rebecca Minkoff, fashion designer and author of Fearless

Everyone who dreams of starting their own business could benefit from Jaceys story of going from a farmgirl to creating her own lifestyle brand, all while overcoming countless universal and very personal struggles. I loved this book.

Kelly Wearstler, founder and principal of Kelly Wearstler Interior Design

Jacey Duprie is a digital entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of the fashion and lifestyle brand Damsel in Dior. A leading lifestyle influencer with millions of followers, she has been featured in Vogue, Vanity Fair, Harpers Bazaar, Forbes and others, and has partnerships with numerous brands. She lives in Los Angeles, California, with her family.

www.DamselinDior.com

Twitter @DamselinDior

Instagram @JaceyDuprie

Facebook /DamselinDior

Liking Myself Back

An Influencers Journey
From Self-Doubt
to Self-Acceptance

Jacey Duprie

with Jodi Lipper

To my parents for letting me share my early chapters.

And to Grant for the ones weve yet to write.

Contents

BEFORE STARTING MY BLOG , Damsel in Dior, before traveling around the world to fashion shows and working with designers, and even before Instagram existed, I was a farmers daughter from South Texas. The cotton harvest season fell in the middle of summer, and there was a constant film of humidity that stuck to the wind and blew through the fields. I rarely wore shoes, and my messy, sweaty hair was held back in a baseball cap. On my familys fifteen-hundred-acre farm, there wasnt much to do. I spent my days circling the farm on my four-wheeler, raising hogs for the 4-H club, or digging mud castles in my backyard without a friend or neighbor in sight.

Most often, I escaped into the vivid world of my imagination. I especially loved playing dress-up. With the right costume, I could sing at the Grand Ole Opry, I could fight pirates at sea, I could tumble down a rabbit hole as Alice in Wonderland, or I could be a princess finding her happily-ever-after. For a while, it was fun and carefree and innocent, a way to pass the time and stretch my mind to imagine lifes possibilities beyond the endless white sea of cotton that surrounded me.

As I got older, my life grew more complicated, and so did my relationship with clothes. Alcohol was a big part of the culture I grew up in. As a child, I rarely saw an adult who wasnt holding a drink, and every pickup truck seemed to contain an ice chest filled with beer. The words alcoholic or addict didnt punctuate the vocabulary of the people in my hometown, but drinking was a big part of most farmers identities. While most of them drank socially without it negatively affecting their lives or livelihoods, alcohol slowly but surely took complete control over my dad. By the time I was in my teens, he was a full-blown addict, my parents marriage was crumbling, and my idyllic childhood had spiraled into chaos.

At that point, my life at home became something I truly needed to escape fromnot just for fun, but in order to survive. And I found myself playing dress-up once again, but this time with carefully curated items that presented an image of perfection to the outside world. I fell in love with fashion, glamorous, high-end, brand-name fashion, because it gave me a chance to be someone besides the lost little damsel in distress I often felt myself to be.

People always say to dress for the life you want, and I believed that if I was wearing the right clothes, I could transform myself from someone who was deeply scarred by my childhood into a confident, self-assured young woman with a beautiful, happy life. When it felt like everything was completely out of my hands, I controlled the narrative the only way I knew howby presenting a false image of perfection to hide how I truly felt. My clothes, hair, and style were on point, while inside I was, quite honestly, a mess.

Ironically (or not!), this basically became my job. As a blogger and influencer, my job is to share my life with my followers on my blog and on social media and to make things look pretty and perfect, regardless of what is really going on behind the scenes. I had unknowingly been preparing to be an influencer my entire life, long before such a job ever existed. But, funny enough, dressing as a confident, empowered, professional woman and sharing these images with the world didnt heal my wounds or change how I felt about myself inside. And no number of likes or follows or shares made me feel any closer to the person I was pretending to be.

In fact, living through such a public lens and putting so much focus on how I looked and what I wore took an enormous toll on my mental health. For years, I suffered from crippling self-doubt and depression as I lived my adult life as if I were still a traumatized kid trying to escape from home. I had everything Id ever thought I wanted: front-row seats at fashion week shows, free stays in luxurious hotel suites around the globe, and a closetful of high-end labels. But none of it mattered. Until I looked at what was hiding underneath all those beautiful clothes and filtered pictures, I could never be truly happy.

It took almost losing my marriage for me to wake up and start peeling back the layers to find out who I really was and what I really wanted. I did the workthe unglamorous, daily slogof healing from my childhood. I set healthy boundaries between my life and my work to protect my mental health. And along the way, I slowly found my way back to that innocent love of fashion Id had as a young girl, who saw the world with a sense of wonder and infinite possibility.

Instead of hiding the truth of who I am or creating a false image, my clothes now show off the real me. No, Im not perfect, but Im done trying to be. Instead of finding my worth in labels and metrics, Ive reclaimed what is authentic and meaningful, away from the glossy sheen of my online life. After years of self-doubt, self-criticism, and even, at times, self-hatred, Im finally liking myself back.

Filtered

I SWITCHED MY PHONE out of airplane mode just moments after we touched down at JFK and scanned the influx of texts, looking for a message from my husband, Grant. When Id left that morning, wed been arguing about him coming with me. Or, more accurately, him not coming with me. We were four years into our marriage, and Id mostly given up on asking him to join me when I traveled for work, which was pretty much constantly. But this time, I really wanted him there, to be with me as a part of this world Id created for myself.

This trip would keep me away from our home in LA for a total of twelve days, including my time in New York for meetings and my final stop in Paris for fashion week. I was speaking on a ShopStyle panel in Paris and hoping for a last-minute invitation to my very first Dior show. But instead of feeling excited, I was just empty. For so long, Grant had been my life partner and my best friend, but now he was slowly slipping further and further away from me.