Fashion or clothing or getting dressed or whatever you like to call it is kind of a weird hobby, because in order to engage with it you need to be going somewhere and the occasion needs to permit sartorial fun. Unfortunately, my life isn’t exactly full of those occasions right now.
My lifestyle, which involves a lot of sitting at my computer in my living room, going for walks in my neighborhood and hiking, isn’t conducive to great fits. You’d think walks would be the ideal time to flash a fun fit but no! I’m a hair too precious about my clothing to risk putting unnecessary miles on nice shoes and wearing through delicate pants and staining pretty tops with coffee dribble. When I do go somewhere, getting dressed involves a conflict between my desire to don my interesting clothing pieces and my preference to blend in. Sometimes you want to serve looks but you don’t want to receive looks, you know?
But the thing about being an ambitious shopper and a slack dresser is that the more difficult items in my wardrobe go unworn and, worse than that, I feel disengaged with the best part of this hobby: making outfits.
I’ve been mulling over a new opinion for the last few years, since the beginning of Covid, that an insatiable interest in fashion coupled with a lack of opportunities to style outfits results in more internet shopping. It’s a math equation, really. More time spent on internet looking at new clothes - occasions to wear existing clothes = buying internet clothes that go to waste when they become a physical reality in your closet. Fashion has become largely an internet hobby for me, which would be fine if I wasn’t spending IRL dollars for IRL items to wear IRL.
If my math is right, then the solution might be to dress up more often for fewer reasons. Reasons are helpful in providing parameters for getting dressed but isn’t styling an outfit the most creatively fulfilling when you don’t have any boundaries? Or when you can set your own? (I only half believe that.) I’ve started an experiment, partly out of necessity to create content for this newsletter, to dress up most days for the sake of dressing up.
I used to think I shouldn’t waste a good outfit on an uneventful occasion, but now I just view it as practicing.
I tried it out this week and gave myself a few parameters. One morning I vowed to make outfits around the same base (a gray Uniqlo Heattech turtleneck and black jeans and black leather boots) and another morning I set out to style some of the most challenging items in my closet.
Here are some outfits with the same base:
Now onto styling some of my more challenging pieces:
Obsessed with the buckle boots, wish there was a link but I know there’s a high chance they came to you second hand. Really love how you used the same base with most of the fits 🫶
I applaud you for being brave and committing to wearing your creative outfits. I think many of us find ourselves in a similar position, we have the clothes but no where to really go. I now live in a casual mountain town that trends to fleece and doc martins but I have a vast collection of vintage and secondhand clothes and I have been on a mission to wear them-to do the marketing, the library, tea with friends. This fall for example I plan to wear a beautiful tuxedo jacket that I have never worn, maybe with jeans and a long sheer Victorian skirt over bike shorts. So thank you, and please wear that hat! The yellow jacket combo was smashing.
Obsessed with the buckle boots, wish there was a link but I know there’s a high chance they came to you second hand. Really love how you used the same base with most of the fits 🫶
I applaud you for being brave and committing to wearing your creative outfits. I think many of us find ourselves in a similar position, we have the clothes but no where to really go. I now live in a casual mountain town that trends to fleece and doc martins but I have a vast collection of vintage and secondhand clothes and I have been on a mission to wear them-to do the marketing, the library, tea with friends. This fall for example I plan to wear a beautiful tuxedo jacket that I have never worn, maybe with jeans and a long sheer Victorian skirt over bike shorts. So thank you, and please wear that hat! The yellow jacket combo was smashing.