A year or so ago, as Ash Wednesday was approaching, I sat in a bar with one of my parishioners talking over what we might give up for Lent. 

The idea of sacrificing ‘non-essential shopping’ crossed my mind. During the overcast and lonely months of early 2006, shopping had become increasingly necessary to me: a false comfort that plugged me into the buzz of an enchanting and airbrushed world, an escape from the hum-drum, awkward, and sometimes wretched reality of parish life. 

'Shopping!' I eventually said to my friend. 'Shopping has got to go!'

At which point, she began to confess to me her insatiable desire for that one perfect outfit that would complete her wardrobe and, indeed, her life. 

Shopping had to go.

This Lent it did.  Indeed, dropping shopping was all the fashion.  Numerous friends broke off their relationship with their fashion-idol. Giving up has been the sacrifice of the season, darling!

There is much to be said for taking time out of our relationship with the High Street, for spending some time in the retail wilderness, putting aside the images that tell us who and what we should appear to be. 

Forty days of retail fasting can be liberating: a time to free oneself from the tirade that tells us we’re not quite complete yet... because we just need an extra... which will make us feel so much more...

And it can be a time to ask questions. In particular, who, exactly, is controlling whom? 

Why do we feel the need to cover up with images distilled from the pages of Vogue and Grazia? Why are so many people, men and women, enslaved to this pursuit? Are we driven by some inner insecurity that is allayed, albeit temporarily, when a brand convinces us we are worth it? Are we the empty suits that fashion has to fill?

The perils of fashion are well charted. But perhaps there are possibilities too. Perhaps there are opportunities beyond the insecurity and enslavement. Perhaps fashion can liberate.

One of my students remarked recently: 'The thing about fashion is that we were never meant to look like someone else or be someone else.'

There is immense relief and a genuine sense of freedom in this insight. Fashion can offer us the chance to delight in finding and expressing the uniqueness of our own creativity. Fashion can free as well as fetter us.

That is not, alas, something I generally observe among the young people with whom I’ve worked. Many friends comment how much they would worry about coming to the London College of Fashion. They ask me how intimidating it is measuring up to all these fashion students. 

Yet I love walking down the LCF corridors. It is, in truth, far more liberating than a stroll down Oxford Street. Students ooze flamboyance and creativity that still raises my eyebrows but they express real freedom and, critically, an ease in making the fashion fit the person they know themselves to be – rather than the other way around.  Unlike Oxford Street, here there is no assent to One Look.

Is fashion a force for good or ill?  Like all complex questions, there is no simple answer.  Fashion captivates, enchants, entrances. It can undermine us, dehumanise us.

But somewhere beyond Oxford Street, in the wilderness of Lent, we can also catch a glimpse of the dazzling possibilities of being human that it can also offer us.

Joanna Jepson is Chaplain at London College of Fashion