So, okay, celebrating a martyrdom with a new dress is weird, maybe, but here we are. Not one but two of my secondhand purchases arrived today: this Piko bamboo swing dress (in Small), and an identical purple dress (in Medium) that I'm sure I'll wear soon. Wearing this one with old cheap magenta leggings and thrifted Birk Floridas, plus a cardigan (shown below).
I'm just about finished with my last-minute year-end clothes shopping, preparatory to a no-buy 2022. I have bought:
*these two Piko dresses
*a second pair of bamboo/cotton-blend leggings (in a funky blue/gray stripe)
*two more merino tees (one grape, one blue)
*one more maxi-length skirt (a vintage 90s April Cornell floral skirt in blue, pale yellow, and lavender, that would scratch any Easter-outfit itch, though I can wear it all winter, too)
All this for under $200, and all secondhand. I'm pretty happy with this haul, which will augment my existing wardrobe really well. I feel confident about staying warm enough, should the weather ever decide to feel like winter, but also about having enough warm-weather options to carry me handily through the summer. I have colors I will really wear and feel good in. I have natural, breathable fabrics that I will really wear and feel good in, that let me move some of my old synthetic stand-bys out of the closet for good. I have clothes to dress up in, and clothes to go hiking in. I have clothes that will let me pack in a backpack for a road trip. I can go to Texas and be comfortable; I could theoretically go to Montana, which we do truly hope to be able to do in the new year, and also be comfortable.
I've been thinking today about clothes and wear. Among the lessons I learned by wearing the same dress for a hundred days straight was the lesson that even high-quality clothing in this day and age is not really made to be worn quite that relentlessly. While I don't want or need a whole room full of clothes, I have been considering that I do need enough options to keep any one item from being worn so hard that I have to replace it sooner rather than later. I guess it's a toss-up: you have a minimalist wardrobe in which you wear the same things repeatedly and wear them out faster, OR you have a slightly-less-minimalist wardrobe in which you wear a longer rotation of items for longer. I can see advantages to both approaches and would not argue that one is more correct than the other; at the same time, I'm solidly in the second camp.
I don't mind that most of my clothes look kind of the same. The swing-dress look works for me. I like this dress I'm wearing today, even though it's literally a short-sleeved version of a dress I already have. It works great as an everyday dress with leggings. Because it's on the short side, just as my other Piko blue dress is, it will actually work pretty well as a tunic over a longer skirt or even skinny jeans. It will be perfect for hiking in the summer, over a pair of bike shorts –– the shorter length is good for range of motion. I think I like the short sleeves even more than the long ones, too. Cool when I need to be cool; easy to layer over when I need to layer.
Anyway, I like it. It's soft, lightweight, cool but not cold, flowy and graceful. I think I paid $12, and I expect to get at least my money's worth in wear, in a variety of situations and contexts.
ETA: Another thing I have learned, though, in the course of wearing a dress for a hundred days straight, is how to take better care of clothes. Regardless of what I might have invested financially in a dress –– $130? $12? –– I can choose to treat that dress as an investment, not as a disposable item. That means wearing the apron. It means following the laundering instructions. It means laundering less frequently and/or reflexively when I take something off. It means spot-cleaning and mending. It also means committing to wearing the item for its useful life, which in turn means being sure I want to commit to it and wear it, no matter what fashion trends might happen to come and go. This part gets easier the older I get: I feel that much more liberated to have a style of my own, however eccentric, rather than to be in fashion. This in its own turn means paying attention to what makes me feel good, comfortable in my skin, and attractive.
One corollary, too, to the whole taking-care thing is that I now have this dog who is a work in progress. Everything I own gets jumped on and walked over. Today in the course of a walk I wound up with cheese, the high-value treat of the moment, smeared down my front and in my hair. This is one reason why, although I want to have a nice wardrobe, I feel disinclined to spend a hundred dollars on any one item. Short of sealing myself up in shrinkwrap, I can't take that much care. Life has to go on. I do the best I can, but at the end of the day (though I waffle about what I want or don't want) I have to live my life, and my life is like this.
Today's main event is putting our son on the plane to Dallas. We said goodbye to the married folk yesterday evening, then went out to dinner with everyone else; this afternoon is likely to feel pretty anticlimactic. But . . . that's the way it goes. You look forward to Christmas with such anticipation, and then it feels over so fast, even when it isn't. More and more I think that that's bound to be a feature, not a bug, of the Twelve Days, but it's a challenging feature nonetheless. BUT bringing up children is itself that way: while they're with you, it feels like forever, but then it isn't. At all. Turns out you have a whole other life to figure out.
Which I suppose I must now go and do.
PS.––
In case you've wondered where my inspiration for a no-buy year came from, I got it from Louise, who is heading into a second "no-buy-year-in-principle in principle," as she puts it.
Like Louise, I'm keeping some options open. For example, my plan is not to buy shoes, but I will give myself permission to buy new hiking boots when the right ones come along. I have taken no small pride in wearing the same Vasque leather boots for –– good grief, it'll be thirty years next month –– but they're increasingly hard to wear for long hikes with a bunion. I won't buy new hikers between now and New Year's Day, but I probably will buy a pair sometime this winter.
So, in practice what I think this will be is, as Louise says, a set of filters. What will get through? A few things, but hopefully not anything like the impulse-thrift buys that have been my habit in the past.