January is over! Here are my final 3 outfits:

1-3: Navy velvet straight legs, lavender pintuck tunic, ivory/pastel fair isle cardi. Inspired by Suz’s lavender/ink combo. I loved this!! I felt like the navy/ink blue kept the pastels from being too “sweet.” I was so taken with the combination that I was moved to get out my blue coat and a lavender scarf, even though the weather didn’t at all warrant the latter.

4: gray raw-hem cropped jeans, rose jacquard top, ivory cardi. This is almost cheating (I wore almost the same outfit before but just switched out the cardi — but I really wanted to try this with my ivory boots. Still getting my eye used to them! I think what I really want to do is use them as a strong contrast to *dark* bottoms in outfits where there is a little bit of light/white in the top half. Very specific, I know!

5: mid-wash skinnies, sapphire/ink popover top, burgundy cardi.

Reposting my favorite outfits from past weeks in photos 6-9. (My favorite from this week was the lavender/ink blue combo).

Some number crunching (all of the below refers to AT HOME clothing only since that was my focus this month):

• Items worn: 42
• Most worn items:
  • Mid-wash cropped skinnies (5 wears)
  • Rose Asian jacquard vest, Black/blue/white Nordic pullover, Burgundy midi cardi (4 wears)
  • Navy velvet straight legs, Black ponte leggings, Teal velvet skinnies, Black skirt leggings, Lavender velvet skinnies, Black corduroy skinnies, Polar bear long-sleeve tee, Light blue pintuck tunic, Plum cowl neck tunic sweater, Lavender pintuck popover tunic, Gray cowl neck tunic sweater (if you count the old one and its new replacement as 1 item), Ivory/pastel cropped fair isle cardi (3 wears)
• This challenge helped my wear my clothes more evenly, which is something I always aspire to. By my rough estimate I wore about 50% of my clothes* 80% of the time. Hooray, I have escaped the Pareto Principle!
• *what do I mean by “my clothes”? I have been dressing from a subset of my cold-weather items that I think of as my “deep winter” capsule — basically everything that seems like the right colors and weight/warmth. Since our cool/cold season is so long and gray here in Seattle I like to switch things up a little bit throughout and vary my color palette.
• I still have the impulse to reduce/minimize and ask myself, do I really *need* all the items I only wore once or twice? Could I make 30 outfits with only my most worn clothes? I think I could, but I’d face more laundry bottlenecks and wardrobe Tetris especially if I wanted to avoid item repeats within the week. Having a larger wardrobe creates a bit more ease, but I think it’s useful to look at those most worn pieces as the “core” of my capsule and think about why they are so important to its function.
• I also have this theory that if you want to dress creatively by shopping your wardrobe, your closet has to have some slack. There has to be some piece that you haven’t been wearing much or making full use of so that you can discover new combinations without shopping. The rose jacquard top was a great example of that here. I remember when I bought it thinking “well this will never be a workhorse, but not everything needs to be and I’ll enjoy wearing it from time to time.” Lo and behold, it turned out to be one of the heroes of the month!
• I did not make any effort to make sure I wore all of the clothes in the capsule and at the end of the month there are a few pieces that remained unworn — worth thinking about why that is.

Overall thoughts:

• I set out saying that I wanted to approach this challenge “with a spirit of curiosity, not self-improvement” and I think I really did that. I’m really pleased about that, it is a real shift for me. I’m noticing what works for me/what I like and then asking how to build habits or take actions that support that — rather than being driven by some notion of what I “should” do.
• My deep winter wardrobe is working well overall. I’ve identified a few pieces to weed out and as mentioned above a few pieces went unworn. I think I’ve succeeded in shifting my deep winter wardrobe towards more colors and lighter tones, which is something I had been trying/wanting to do for a while (dark neutrals are just so prevalent for winter clothes — it can be hard to avoid over-accumulating them!)
• Going forward, I could add more neutral patterns (esp. Nordic/fair isle knits) and mid-tones (most of my colorful items are either dark like burgundy/teal or very light icy pastels. I think one reason that rose top got so much play is that it is one of my few mid-tone colorful pieces in this capsule.)
• Also, since I learned that I love my signature jewelry but I don’t like wearing the exact same pieces/combinations every day, I am going to put some of my budget for February towards a couple pieces of jewelry so I can switch things up a bit more.

What I'm planning next:

• I have two trips coming up this month: one to a warm desert suburb and one to a cool rainy island. So, it’s not a great month for an organized month-long challenge, but perhaps I’ll make an effort to wear and evaluate those un-worn deep winter items between now and the first trip.
• I do think that a month-long no-repeats challenge is a great way to evaluate wardrobe function, so I may do another one starting mid-March when I switch to my cold spring capsule. If I have the bandwidth!
• For now, I am going to continue to aim to dress with intention, keeping up the habit of planning outfits a day before. This is working for me and I’d like to really cement the habit!
• I will also continue to track what I’m wearing. I’ve been wanting to return to tracking wears for a while, and January’s challenge helped me find a routine that works for me and regain the habit. I’m going to keep gathering the data as long as I feel like I’m learning from it.
• I am not committing to taking daily outfit photos. To be honest, I don’t really enjoy it and I’m not great at it. I realize outfit photos are useful for discussions here so I will take them sometimes when there is something I want to share, but I am not obligating myself to doing it daily.
• I am relaxing the no-repeating-outfits rule. Which outfits, if any, will I choose to repeat exactly? That will be instructive/a good data point to find out.
• I am also relaxing the rule to avoid repeating items within the same week. The reason I made this rule is that I generally prefer to dress this way — it gives me the feeling of enough-ness and variety that I crave — and I wanted to see if my wardrobe could support that. Now that I know it can, I will continue to pander to this preference, but not be strict about it. Another thing that often happens is that wearing an item and interacting with it throughout the day will give me other ideas about how to wear that item. So, if I am really excited about one of those ideas and want to try it right away, I can.

Thank you to everyone who commented and cheered me on throughout this challenge! Give yourself a gold star if you read this far!