24 Feb happens to mark 3 months of not buying clothes or shoes. I didn't know 24 Nov was the day I would stop in advance, I just went to a favourite outlet store with my best friend that day. I think her purchases shocked me- she bought about 8 summer dresses and I know she has a wardrobe stuffed full of dresses.I bought 3 things- one black cami, one cropped shrug black cardy, and one summer tunic with a print front, different print back, and short navy fringing. My friend commented when I tried that one on, "it just looks like one of your tops!". That gave me pause. Around that time I read an on-line article about how to cull or refresh your wardrobe and the first thing to avoid re-buying was "clone" clothing, or as they said, "different but not really".That really got me thinking.
I can count 12 different thin summer-weight tunic-syle tops in my wardrobe.I own others for cooler weather eg one black and one grey shortish merino pinafore. Some are for layering with light tops under, some not. Of my actual summer dresses rather than tunics, the same colours keep cropping up ( turquiose, teal, orange...) It is already hard to find chances to wear them all.
The past 8 years of building a wardrobe after being badly shaken by bullying, losing my sense of self, and gaining a lot of weight around the middle after menopause, have left my closet bursting at the seams. I'm also very sentimental about my clothes. If I still like the item a lot, and have enjoyed wearing it, I am loath to clear it out. I still have my 30-y-old wedding dress hanging in the spare bedroom- flouncy, Princess-Diana-like, now many sizes too small and greyed in colour! My 2 daughters hate it- it's so 80s.But I felt like a fairy princess that day, and the dress made me happy, and I still love my husband...
I'm also quite OCD which is a family mental illness, my Dad was quite a hoarder and I have had diagnosable anxiety in the past.So keeping track of purchases since 2010 plays into my love of lists, so does tracking wears since May 2016 and then working out cost per wear. I would also like to be more ethical in my purchases if I can. I was just horrified by the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh a few years back, and I've been a donor to development programmes, microenterprsie, a child sponsor and so on for over 25 years. I don't beat myself up for "fails" on the ethical front, I'm just trying to be more mindful without becoming obsessed by my carbon footprint or any workers I may be unwittingly exploiting.
I feel my wardrobe of just under 150 clothing items and 50 pairs of shoes is too large. We don't have a walk-in wardrobe, just a custom-designed space in our 16 year old bedroom which we built into the roof in the year 2000. There is storage space behind it( in the roof) where my off-season clothing is stored in bags. My off-season shoes are in boxes in one spare room and my sentimental too-small clothing in a closet in another( that's not counted in the 150 items, that's extra). I would like to clear space, be more able to cull, and wear eveything at least 20 times. Also if possible have a cost-per-wear below $ 5. Those of you who thrift may be able to do the latter easily, but I mainly prefer the feeling of buying new, so need to be more picky about what I actually buy, and wear what I've bought.
This post is already too long, so I will save various lessons for a sequel. If you have read this far and not given up from boredom (this post is not much fun), thank you.