Me on Day 5, I think (or 6?) of my Wool& Hundred-Day Dress Challenge, in the dress I expect to become a core piece in a pared-down closet.
I should begin by describing my recurring anxiety dream. In this dream, there is somewhere I have to be: somewhere important. I'm going to a wedding. I'm giving a speech. I'm receiving a trophy. I'm about to do something very public and visible. And I have nothing to wear.
That is, I have clothes. I have a whole closet bursting with clothes. But nothing is right. As time ticks away –– and I'm wholly conscious of time ticking away –– I pull out one outfit after another, put it on, and hate it. I take it off and pull out another. Tick tick tick, goes the time. The mountain of discarded clothing grows before me. Whatever it is I'm about to go and do, they're starting without me. Tick tick tick. Still nothing to wear.
I am not making this up. It's a real dream. Apparently it is one of those fairly common anxiety-dream tropes, like turning up for an exam in a class you didn't even know you were taking –– which is a dream I've never had, incidentally. The full-closet-nothing-to-wear trope: that's my dream.
It's also a dream I've lived in my waking life. I've never felt confident in my appearance. I've never felt well-dressed. The load of anxiety I attach to getting dressed every day, and especially when I have to go somewhere that's not my own home, is substantial. Decision fatigue: also substantial. So while I am not a minimalist in most areas, and don't at all view minimalism, per se, as a virtue, I have real reasons for wanting to get a handle on my clothing. Paradoxically, all this thinking and writing about clothes is intended to help me not think so much about clothes. This blog represents my process for incrementally hacking my life and my closet so that at least while I'm awake, I don't have to relive the nightmare.
I've already written a good bit about capsule wardrobes, and have experimentally built a few for travel, the beach, and other time away from home. Through all this, I've developed something of a take on the capsule wardrobe and our usual conception of what that entails. Essentially: no "versatile neutral" is going to be a versatile neutral for you if you don't look good in it and aren't comfortable wearing it. Conversely, color is not the antithesis of the capsule wardrobe. Even neutrals are actually colors, so maybe it's just not even useful to think in those terms. What IS useful, I've come to consider, is to identify what colors you REALLY love and feel wonderful in, and to look at how they go with each other. Then –– rather than saying, "I love X, but feel that Y [usually black] would be more versatile and practical" –– build your capsule wardrobe around those colors that you actually love and love to wear.
Nat Tucker of Make It Look Easy (no affiliation; I just find her ideas helpful) notes that you can build an entire wardrobe around four to six colors that are good for you. One color that really looks good on you, as a matter of fact, is likely to go with other colors that look good on you, so automatically, if you're paying attention to your coloring and how you feel when you wear certain colors, you have the key to building a capsule that will work for you and be fun to wear, instead of limiting. This to me was a hugely freeing and inspiring idea.
Now, I haven't done her whole program, so it's not like I have any official "diagnosis" or color-typing to go on. But I do know what I consistently look and feel good in: BLUE. I'm also fairly sure that my skin tone is pink (not peach – no yellow undertone). I have muted, grayed blue-green eyes that tend to be kind of changeable, sometimes greener, sometimes bluer.
Through a process largely of trial-and-error, though with the help of various free style courses, including Nat Tucker's free mini-course (again, no affiliation), I've identified five basic colors or color groups that work for me:
*BLUE: plain blue, royal blue, navy, washed navy, indigo, slate blue, any muted or grayed blue, and periwinkle blue (on the cusp of blue and purple). Cobalt blue is too bright for the contrast level in my coloring.
*PINK: blush pink, rose pink, any pink that's sort of medium in intensity and saturation. I can also wear pinks on the cusp of purple (orchid, for example, or a pinkish lavender). Hot pink, like cobalt blue, is too much for my low-to-medium-contrast coloring and features.
*GREEN: very specifically, sage green or another muted, grayed green. I can't wear kelly green, lime green, etc. But I can wear anything in the sage-green range, from light to fairly mossy-dark.
*WHITE: Nat Tucker's rule of thumb is to match your white to the whites of your eyes. Mine are sort of between bright white and ivory. I can also wear off-whites like bone white, oatmeal, and a light mushroom/taupe.
*GRAY: light gray, medium gray, charcoal, taupe-ish gray
As it happens, any of these color families can work in combination with others. I adore blues with sage greens. I love blues with the pinks that look good on me. I love the pinks that look good on me with sage greens. Any of these colors mixes well with any of the whites that work for me. They all play well with grays.
Now, this doesn't mean that I will only ever buy clothing in these color groups. I do own a dark-brown cardigan that I like. I own a dark-brown suede peacoat that I adore. I might have touches here and there in other colors. What having a core of good-for-me colors means is that
1. I know what looks good next to my face, so that when I get dressed, I reliably look not-dead. (I also know what feels right for my personality).
2. I can then look at what other colors (and they run the gamut) work with those essential colors. I'm not restricted at all, but I do have an organizationaly principle that keeps me from just buying stuff because maybe it's objectively cute. Given that I can't possibly buy everything, it helps me to have some kind of organizational principle in place.
What I've been aiming for in my own closet, since I started really thinking about all this last fall, is to have a small selection of items in each color group –– both solids and prints –– that will readily mix with each other, within the color group (because layering for a monochrome effect can be really nice) and with other color groups. That way I can reach in, pull out a couple of things, and have an outfit that works, for any occasion.
Right now what this means is doing a lot of purging of extraneous items. I don't take my outbox right to the thrift store to donate, because I like having time to think and reconsider, but most of what's in it will go: either it's genuinely worn out and ready to be recycled into rags, or it just is not working hard enough for me to merit inclusion in my closet. That second category is harder to discern than the first, but I'm trying to be both realistic and a little bit ruthless.
What I'd like to aim for, over time, is to add a few more dresses like my Camellia to my wardrobe: dresses that will be hard-wearing and versatile for a huge range of occasions, that will mostly be wearable year-round, and that will not require a lot of laundering (so that they're mostly available in my closet, not hung up in the wash cycle somewhere). It is important to me that they be dresses in colors in the five groups I just listed above. It's also important that I not just outbox perfectly good, hardworking dresses I already own to make room for more Wool& dresses, which seems to be a common impulse. But as things wear out or my size changes (I hope not, really, but you never know), that's the direction I want to go.
My rule: when in doubt, buy blue. I can wear blue every day, with everything –– as indeed this 100-Day Challenge is meant to illustrate. If there's no blue, buy gray. Should they bring back a lilac or lavender, I could go for that as well. I'm always dubious about buying anything green when I can't see it in person –– of all my colors, green is definitely the trickiest. The greens I look good in I look good in. In greens I don't look good in, I'm a corpse. At any rate, with two or three really versatile, hardworking, long-wearing dresses, plus a closet (and sweater bin, and legging/scarf drawer) that represents my five colors, I have at my disposal more outfits than I could possibly wear in a year, that will all look good and be appropriate to whatever an occasion demands.
This is not my nightmare, but my dream.
ANOTHER THOUGHT: I get the idea of organizing your closet into capsules around a color. In one sense, that's why I have set up my closet that way, by color (no, I didn't usetabe this obsessive, but now I am). But unless your color-capsules both work together and look great on you, AND work with EACH OTHER, and look great together, then it seems to me that what you have is potentially kind of limited and limiting –– which again is the problem with the capsule wardrobe. It gets boring. You have a bunch of discrete wardrobes, rather than one integrated one that meets all your needs. And you end up with clothes you don't wear, either in the capsule because it bores you, or clothes you bought because you really liked them, but they don't go with anything in your capsule, so you don't know what to do with them. They're just there, asking to be worn, but also taking up space without working for you. That seems like a recipe for both money-wasting and decision fatigue to me.
MIND YOU, I do have a few of those outliers. The little geometric-print dress that I'm wearing knotted over the Wool& dress in the photo above is one example. It's a little cute thing that I bought at Goodwill for $5. It's too short to wear on its own as a dress, so is of sort of dubious utility. I keep thinking I'm going to get rid of it, especially as it really only goes with blue things (though as I add more oatmeals and light taupes in my "white" category, I could find that I have more items I can wear it with).
I have kept it largely because it is cute, and because I like the print –– and that's really key. I haven't ever worn a lot of prints, but you sort of need them. Nat Tucker's principle for a good outfit is that it incorporates a light, a dark, a color –– and a pattern of some kind. This could be in a scarf, in your shoes, in your belt, even in your jewelry, but it's one of four ingredients for putting together something interesting to wear. When she talks about shopping for your hard-working ideal wardrobe, her process is:
1. Identify the 4-6 colors (she recommends starting with 4) that are your colors.
2. Buy core items (shirt, pants, skirt, shorts, jacket, etc) in each color – and to the greatest extent possible, buy them in both a solid and a print that incorporates that color.
I haven't quite done that (she says it takes two years; I'm not sure I'm ever going to do exactly what she recommends). But I have been conscious of wanting at least to tilt in the direction of this process.
Anyway, the little geometric print dress represents a "blue-in-a-print" item – of which I have more than I have prints in other colors, because I wear more blue than any other color. Prints do keep a capsule wardrobe from feeling limited or boring.
Here's another example of thrifted items that in themselves form a kind of capsule, though they also go with a lot of other things I have. This does not normally happen to me when I'm thrift shopping, but that one time, I hit on a bunch of items that truly looked delicious with each other, and in themselves presented a wide range of outfit possibilities. I haven't been wearing the jeans, because it's just too hot, but I look forward to re-incorporating them in the fall and winter.
FURTHER THOUGHT: I do have something of a purple capsule going, for Advent and Lent, though in reality, I just plan to wear my blue Camellia dress a lot (and hopefully my reward dress, once I have it) with items in shades of purple-ish that harmonize well with this shade of blue. Having ideas about what really can go with what extends the versatility of your wardrobe almost infinitely.