I own too many clothes, and too many clothes I don't like, and too many clothes that don't fit me. I own too few items that make me feel really good about myself. A lot of the problem is the way my weight has yo-yo'd around plus or minus twenty pounds from where I am now. I read that fifteen pounds is generally a size, so I'm spanning three to four different sizes in the last ten years. I'm sitting right in the middle of the range now, which should give me maximum flexibility, but it seems like nothing fits.
I have a single bar for hanging clothes in my closet, about six feet long. It is crammed full of blazers, trousers, shirts, and even a few dresses and skirts. I have a shelf above the bar and there are plastic boxes with clothes I stashed up there several years ago for reasons that escape me. A few years ago I rearranged the furniture in my room and created space to add two three-drawer Ikea dressers to the one tall five-drawer antique dresser my mother gave me. One Ikea dresser is underwear, one is t-shirts, sweats, and fleece, my workout clothes. My antique dresser holds knit tops, jewelry, socks, and jeans and shorts. I just think I have too much of everything. I've been through some marathon laundry the past week, and now that everything is clean, I'm not sure I can put it all away.
I pulled all the shorts out of my dresser to fit in all my jeans and chinos, and was surprised to realize I have three pairs of blue jeans. Why do I have three, when I also have two pairs of khaki colored jeans, two pairs of chinos for Casual Friday at work, two pairs of jean-cut linen casual pants, and two pairs of nylon hiking / sailing tough pants? On closer examination, two pair of blue jeans are size fourteen and the third are the size sixteens I bought at CostCo a year ago when the others were just a bit too tight. (Maybe even a lot too tight.) I tried on the 16s, thinking perhaps they would be too big now, but since they are stretch Gloria Vanderbilts, they actually fit me quite well through the hips and thighs, though I need to cinch in the gaping waist with a belt. I wore them today, and they are quite comfy, so they stay with me for now.
I read this fall about the "Six Pieces or Less" experiment in the New York Times, and have been thinking about trying it. In essence, you pick six pieces of clothes (not counting underwear or outerwear or accessories) and wear only them for 31 days in a row. Normally, for my life, there is zero overlap between my work wardrobe and my home clothes. Every day I stop home to change clothes before making dinner. And almost all of my work clothes need to be drycleaned, and I don't want to risk food stains on them. Nowhere in reading about the experimenters have I heard about their laundry. If you only have three tops, presumably you have to wash everything every three days, yes? Especially since they did this in the summer. If drycleaning is involved, you would be going almost every day. If I am going to change clothes every evening, I'll be doing laundry every night - but only four pieces. This would be way too much work, forget it.
Part of why I own so many clothes is because I don't like a lot of them, and because I postpone doing laundry as long as possible. The more clothes I own the less often I have to do laundry or make the drycleaner's run. But I generally wear the stuff I like best first, and towards the end I'm wearing stuff I don't really care for. Maybe I should try a different experiment: do laundry more often, letting me wear the stuff I most want to wear more often. Always put away the clean clothes on top of everything else, but feel free to dig into the piles to find the stuff I want to wear. Anything that stays put for a couple of months without being worn simply because it was the only choice becomes a candidate for the give-away pile.
A rainy day project I keep postponing is to do a real excavation of my closet. There are things pushed to the back I've totally forgotten about, and I don't know what size things are. It will take time to go through, and it will involve trying things on and deciding whether to keep things just a little too small for me, when I'm planning to get back down there soon...
I have gotten a lot more ruthless about jettisoning things I truly don't care for. Even if I just bought it, if there is something that looks bad on me, or is uncomfortable, or feels wrong somehow, I've got to get rid of it. I've got a fairly big give-away pile, and will need to actually move some of this stuff out of the house. But for now, I am on a shopping moratorium. I need less, not more.
2 comments:
I so hear you on this -- the fluctuation of sizes making the closet stuff too tough. One thing I've found helpful is to forget what I have, sit down and really plot out an ideal wardrobe. "In a perfect life I have 3 pairs of great-fitting pants that would work for a meeting or a client lunch, 3 pairs of jeans, 1 quality black sweater, 1 quality red sweater, 1 quality brown sweater, 3 nice tops and 5 at-home sweaters, 1 black coat, 1 brown coat, yadda yadda yadda." This is totally individualized, obviously. I did this a few years ago when I started making the slow trek down the scale and I did it for 2 season -- warm (late spring in to summer into early fall) and cold (late fall into winter into early spring). Then, I purged everything that didn't fit or was in excess of what I needed and bought in that size in the moment what I needed to fill out the gaps. Then, I keep to that list at all times as the weight goes down. It helps that I have a dynamite plus-size thrift shop (size 12 and up). And I'm a continuos shopper of the larger size racks in Salvation Army and Goodwill. Too many clothes are just as hard as too little, that's for sure.
yup, my issue too
no matter how you get there, it is a great feeling to have clothes you look good in
if you don't feel you know what you look good in, I suggest you treat yourself to a date outfit at Nordstrom -tell them you want something age appropriate for casual drinks after work, and then make them measure you, get you stuff, and listen to what they say
I don't go often (though prices can be pretty reasonable), but my best work outfit and my best cocktail outfit are from there, and once you know what you look good in, it's easier to make keep/discard choices
Liz
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