The men weigh in, Part I.

My dad (nice preppy guy, age 67) read the whole blog yesterday, and comments:

My clothes idea is simple. If it worked in the 50s -- and it is still in one piece -- then fashion will come back around to it.

Note -- this applies to underwear, socks, collar shirts, chino pants, blazers, herringbone jackets, and London Fog raincoats.

I guess it is easier to be a guy....

I'm not sure I can add anything to that!  Dad likes to do all his own clothes shopping, and suffers lots of grief from daughters and wife about some of his picks. Positive reinforcement appears to work well -- a well-placed compliment can shape future purchases pretty reliably. He does stick pretty close to the categories listed above, and his vendors of choice run to Lands End, LLBean, Norm Thompson,  etc. My sister and mother have purchased some wonderful things for him in the past few years, which he wears with pride. The last thing I bought for him (not counting several t-shirts emblazoned with names of various educational institutions, which are really his uniform of choice) was a particularly hideous argyle acrylic sweater, a Christmas present c.1983 purchased in the menswear dept of Bessie Clarke in Pittsfield, MA. He wore it for several years, bless his heart.

Let me know about your Dad's clothing habits, and his opinions (if any) of yours.

A couple of housekeeping details:

1. You will notice that banner ads have crept onto the blog. Rest assured I'm not doing this for the cash (I earn approximately 1 cent per day, which means I should receive my first $100 check in approximately March, 2039) but rather to see how google ads decided which advertisers to send my way. Specifically, I'm curious if the brands that I mention (and label each post with) get picked up. Any thoughts about this (or rants to abolish the banner ads) are welcome.

2. Paul has informed me that all good bloggers respond to comments with additional comments to keep the convo going. My apologies for failing to observe proper blogger etiquette. (@Erin: This may have prompted your FB question about whether I was actually reading the comments??). From now on, expect comments.

3. Hey all you lurkers out there: post some comments! Or at least send me some email that I can post.

NYT on the twinset

I'm a big fan of the twinset concept, though I note in current closet that I'don't own one. Maybe I've never owned one?? So maybe I'm not a fan. Or maybe they are too hard to find in thrift stores? Or I'm too cheap to buy cashmere (like this Talbots number below)?

Or the Lands End cotton sweater palette never got me excited?

Well, for whatever reason, I'm twin set-less, but still intrigued/tempted, so was glad to see this little nugget in the back page of the NYT Sunday fashion magazine. (I can't get the cool accompanying picture to post, sadly.)

A Double Whammy | The quiet twin set, a British classic, packs a one-two punch.

O.K., so it’s a classic. Some would call it, like the tuxedo jacket or the little black dress, one of fashion’s most iconic pieces. It came to light in the 1940s when, because of the war and burgeoning modern life, items like the floor-length tea gown became less of an option. But it was in the ’50s that the twin set met its moment. Think of any movie or TV show set back then. Did every woman really, truly wear it every day? I find it hard to believe because here’s the truth: yeah, they work if you’re Grace Kelly or January Jones. If your shoulders are narrow and your waist even smaller and you have the sort of radiant beauty that transforms something inherently plain into the epitome of chic. (Tilda Swinton, check! Dame Judi Dench, check! The Duchess of Devonshire, check!) But if you’re a mere mortal like me, wearing a cardigan over a matching short-sleeve sweater risks making you looking like an elderly aunt from the pages of P. G. Wodehouse. Which makes me all the more envious of all those utterly unflappable, self-confident beauties, who don a twin set (like the Pringle of Scotland one at left) and look implacably terrific. DAISY GARNETT

So - are you a fan? Do you own 12 or none? Do you agree with Daisy Garnett that it takes a certain type? (If you're interested, eBay has ~1600 twinsets for sale....)

Meanwhile - stay tuned: The neighborhood clothing swap starts in 6 hours. Apparently ~15 women are coming. Should be interesting...

Origins of The Wardrobe Project

It probably makes sense to rewind and describe how I got here-- "here" being 3/4ths of the way towards achieving my 2009 New Year's Resolution.

I like decision rules. And I like personal productivity and organizational systems. Personal productivity and organizational systems that involve decision rules are the best. In late December 2008 I noticed that: A) I had nothing to wear (I'm sure you've never felt the same way staring into the maw of your own closet), and B) nothing really fit, and C) the pretty small closet I share with Paul was already overstuffed and D) My penchant for chronic overshopping at the best thrift store in the world (I love you Quality Thrift!!) had been curtailed by my move from LA to the East Coast and E) I had never actually accomplished a New Year's Resolution that I had set and thought it would nice to give that a try. It seemed like a natural next step to try an achievable NYR that somehow dealt with The Closet Problem in a gloriously transformative way.

Thus The Wardrobe Project (2009) was born. The two-fold goal:

1. Purchase no clothes (or shoes or accessories) in 2009, and
2. Get rid of 52 pieces (i.e, one each week) of existing wardrobe detritus.

This seemed straightforward, easily measurable, and, as Buffy the Vampire Slayer sings, "brave and kinda righteous." After a Victoria Secret semi-annual sale spree for bras and underwear, I kicked off on January 3.

And - it's been totally easy, 99% achievable (2 minor failures will be reported later), and...not at all transformative. This failure to transform is at the root of my motivation to do the p&pg blog. Shouldn't this exercise have left me with a streamlined, elegant, well-fitting, lovely and timeless wardrobe? Shouldn't the sifting of wheat from chaff and the noble feel-goodness of getting rid of so much stuff have catapulted me into a new era of sartorial splendor? Nah. It just left me with an empt(ier) closet and the horror of confronting some particularly bad decision-making that I've made over the past 10+ years. Thus -- Wardrobe Project, Year 2,  which will be recorded, processed, and mulled over in p&pg.

When I mentioned the Wardrobe Project to friends and acquaintances this year, I could expect one of two questions:

1. How did you not buy any new clothes for a whole year??

or

2. How did you get rid of 52 pieces of clothing??

Which of the two questions was posed usually said a lot about the clothing, shopping, and hoarding habits of the asker. I will admit that #1 was harder for me than #2.  A lot of money and MBA marketing power is devoted to encouraging us (by "us" I mean women aged 30-49 with disposable income) to buy a lot of new clothes every year. And do we oblige? The numbers I could find on annual clothing spending were actually surprisingly low:

"We've already stockpiled enough clothes to last us for years. The average annual shopping haul swelled from $1,550 per household in 2002 to $1,760 last year. That spending spree was prompted in part by what the Bureau of Labor Statistics says was a 30 percent drop in real apparel prices over the past decade. With cheap imports allowing a dollar to buy more, the physical bulk of garb purchased by the average household has risen 18 percent in just five years."

Only $1760 per year per household? While that's probably more than my household spends (and why don't I know what our household spends on clothing, BTW?), I definitely thought the average was higher.  Until  The Wardrobe Project (2009), my annual clothes purchasing behavior looked something like this:

•  About 8 "sprees" at a thrift store or consignment store, during each of which I would buy 4-12 items for a total of about $40-$100 (usually $3-$10 per item.) I would buy mostly casual tops and pants, sometimes a wacky dress or jacket. The low price does create a low purchasing threshold for me -- thrift store items can almost fit, or be almost the right color, or be missing a button, or be so last decade (as distinct from hipster retro), and I'll still buy.  And I wonder why there's nothing decent in my closet...
  
•  1 or 2 tormented purchases of big ticket items like boots, a coat, a suit, a formal dress, etc. These purchases are tormented because I have no faith in my ability to correctly select the right item, and because spending more than $40 on a single piece of clothing or pair of shoes makes me anxious and usually a little a nauseated. I usually take a spouse or good friend along, and try to stick to a few trusted stores like AnnTaylor.
  
• The above-mentioned early January pilgrimage to Victoria's Secret for exactly 3 bras and 8 pairs of cotton undies. Low sale price always trumps color, style, fabric, or, yes, even fit, so this is not a particularly useful way to buy undergarments.
  
• Occasional shoe purchases as needed, usually by mail from Lands End (I'm exactly their Size 7), or at an  upscale shoe store like Benjamin Lovell in Philly or a Dansko/Birkenstock-type store. Unlike the second bullet point above, there is no torment around these purchases, even those that exceed (gulp!) $200, as my Masai Barefoot Technology shoes did.
• [There is a whole second set of purchasing behaviors for the kids' clothes, but I'll save that for another post. I don't buy clothes for Paul, but occasionally attend him on his infrequent purchasing trips...]
  

Now - back to the two NYR stipulations: Don't buy, and purge. Not buying was definitely hard, particularly when within striking distance of a good thrift store or when then J.Jill or Title 9 clearence catalog showed up. On the other hand, it eliminated the angst of the big ticket purchases (well, postponed more than eliminated as I now have a backlog of major items that must be purchased in 2010. Like, a winter coat. Don't have one of those...). Purging was laughably easy, mostly because my thrift store purchases were so regularly egregious that it was really easy to offload 50+ items. I'll do another post on how I actually did the purging -- it's all about frequency filing...)

Ok, that was a bit of a ramble, but if there are any actual readers out there, tell me:

1. Which would be harder for you - the no buy provision, or the get rid of 52 pieces provision?
2. Do you have any sense of what you spend on clothing per year? How is it allocated (new vs. used, catalog vs. bricks-and-mortar, casual vs. work vs. fancy, lots of little purchases vs. big splurges; predictable vs. unpredictable???)
3. Is buying clothes fun or a chore? What makes it so?

Today's outfit: Drawstring jeans from ?QT or another thrift store; brown button down shirt that didn't survive the dryer so well; J. Jill shelf bra cami in ?slate or some other brown - purchased in Carmel J.Jill store on sale. Shoes: Dansko clogs, recently replaced when my friend's dog ate one of them.