Been a while since I did a closet shot. I've been continuing gently to cull items from my wardrobe, which mostly does mean this closet: I have a drawer of sweaters and a bin with leggings, but what you see here is basically it. The outbox is still sitting there, so I have the option of reintroducing things I've taken out, but so far I really haven't wanted to. This no-buy, however modified it's been, has been good for making me see clearly what I do and don't wear, what I am and am not likely to wear --- as distinct from things I don't wear often but am glad to be able to reach for when they're what I want.
*I've been paring back things that just consistently don't look flattering on me in photos, no matter how much I want to like them in theory.
*I've been paring back synthetics to foreground natural fibers. Now, there are some things I just like, and will wear as long as I can because I do like them and they fill some need, but if I haven't really been wearing something, and it's also not a natural fiber: OUTBOX.
So that's left me with a leaner, meaner closet at the end of the summer. This is not a bad thing. It's not a closet that's been cleared to make way for new clothes. It's a closet that's been cleared so that I can better wear the clothes I have.
Scarves, which I'm trying to be more purposeful about wearing, especially as the weather turns, whenever that shall happen. I did like wearing one as a shawl last Sunday and could do more of that now.
Wearing my newly-redyed Camellia challenge dress again today:
I think I'm probably going to need to give it another dose of color fixative. The dye is bleeding a bit, even with the color fixative I used, in the maximum dosage --- I was wearing a white bra yesterday, for example, and while turning it a little blue doesn't necessarily bother me, it does tell me something. Possibly one more rinse would fix things anyway --- I did use an awful lot of dye to begin with, so the fabric is probably over-saturated --- but I'd like to avoid too much additional fading, because I really like the color as it is. I'm also afraid of getting turned blue if caught in the rain. On the other hand, I walked a couple of miles with Dora this morning in the sultry August weather, and although I sweated a good bit, I don't think I've actually changed color.
Otherwise, though, as I said yesterday, I'm really happy with this outcome. The color is beautiful. It's great to reintroduce this dress into regular circulation, after letting it sit unworn because it looked so worn. Also, the good news is that if the color fades dramatically over time, I can always re-dye it. I know I can do it. It's been done. To be able to refurbish a dress and keep wearing it, instead of tossing it aside to buy another, is empowering. It's a good way, too, to understand the idea of an investment in an item of clothing: you have some buy-in, as it were, the upside of the old sunk-cost fallacy, that impels you first to care for the item, then to renew it, so that you can continue to reap the benefit of wearing it.
And again, I'm looking forward to wearing this dress into the fall and winter, in a way that I struggled to last year, when it was light powdery gray-blue. Yesterday I took a few minutes to reorganize and cull my tights-and-socks drawer and while we still have two more months before anybody in North Carolina can really expect to wear tights, I'm excited to pair this vibrant dark blue with sage green, for example, or burgundy, or navy, or any of a variety of grays from light to dark. I'm excited about cardigans and pullovers and boots and scarves.
What I'm not excited about at this precise moment is writing poetry essays, but it's what I have to do if I don't want to find myself working on Sunday. There's style consciousness, and there's procrastination, and I can kind of tell which is which.
LATER:
And done: short essays on Countee Cullen, George Meredith, and my friend the contemporary formalist poet Jane Greer. I'll need to write on Dorothy Parker and Robert Herrick in the early part of next week, so I don't have work hanging over me while I'm on the road, but it's good to have the better part of two weeks' writing written.
Think I'm going to take a break and wash my hair before taking Dora out again. Going to employ my turban so my hair doesn't drip on my dress and make the dye run . . . that worry is truly the ONLY downside of having redyed it!
STILL LATER:
I did take my dress off and rewash it (cold, delicate cycle, half a half a strip of Tru Earth detergent), because the dye situation has been a little dicey. Rubbed off on my white living-room couch slipcover last night while we were watching the first episode of the new (ish?) season of Endeavour, which by the way was like a reunion of old friends, albeit one in which murders took place. Fortunately it didn't rub off MUCH, and the couch cover really needs washing anyway, which I've been saying to myself for roughly the last eighteen months, so enjoyable is the operation of removing, laundering, and replacing presentably the loose-fit skirted white canvas slipcover with separate seat-cushion cover upon the amply-stuffed couch, late of my mother's house.
So I'm squinting at it now and saying, "It's really not that blue, that spot where I was sitting." But it kind of is (though you really can't tell unless you're looking at it closely and know that the blue is there), and eventually I'll have to do something about it, but for the time being it was easier to wash the dress. It's hanging up to dry, which should help it lengthen back out a little after yesterday's shrinkage, and my plan is to wear it to Mass. I am curious to see how the color will look after this go-round --- it seems a little lighter and brighter, though still that intense midnight blue. But it's not dry yet.
Terrible lighting: it was hard to find a spot to hang the dress where I could get a good, full shot. This is my closet door, where the scarves pictured above normally hang. There's a window right next to it, so the backlighting is, again, not as helpful as it might be.
Comparing the blue of this re-dyed dress with my marine-blue Maggie:
Again, not great lighting. I think everything here looks grayer than it actually is. But you can see how much darker the marine blue is at this stage than the royal-blue dyed dress. In real life, as I've said before, that marine blue is absolutely luminous. It's not a boring, flat navy, despite appearances here. It's just gorgeous, 10/10 would recommend. Camellia by herself still looks pretty dark, but next to marine-blue Maggie, she doesn't. She's still not all the way dry, so I imagine she'll look even lighter and brighter when she does --- but still a lot darker and more intense than her original color, so we're all good here. And if we don't go around rubbing blue off on everything we touch: double score.
LATER YET AGAIN (EXPONENTIALLY LATER?):
I do persist in feeling that this little adventure in dyeing has been important to my whole no-buy-year thing. Anyone reading this blog for the last couple of weeks (or months) cannot have failed to notice how much I think, and therefore write, about things I'd like to buy. The good thing about dyeing a worn dress is that it then feels like a new dress (cue dopamine hit) with a whole new range of possibilities. This refocuses me on things I have --- because now it's fun to think about how I'm going to put things I already own together. That can occupy space in my mind for a while, rather than the whole infinite category of Things I Don't Have.
This comes as something of a relief. On the whole, I'm really proud of myself over this whole no-buy thing, though it wasn't a draconian no-buy thing. It was only clothes, and there were exceptions, and I have bought a couple of things not on my exemption list, as it happens. But really, as a big-picture situation: I've stayed out of the thrift stores. I haven't gone shopping online and hit "complete order" --- at least, not without serious thought beforehand, but mostly not at all. It's AUGUST --- almost the middle of August --- and I have not just gone shopping for something to do, either in real life or online. It's funny how I don't really even want to do those things, especially the real-life visits to the thrift stores, because the kinds of things I have in my sights to buy are very particularlized: natural-fiber (especially wool), high-quality items I've discerned that I actually NEED, rather than things I buy because I just felt like buying something, and somehow just buying something at Goodwill is different from and more virtuous than just buying something anywhere else.
The effect in my life is that a) I don't thrift-shop recreationally anymore, but also b) I'm a lot happier with and less anxious about my clothes. I can put something on and go out feeling good, because I know I look good, like I don't have to expend a lot of energy worrying about how I'm presenting myself. I might not look like the cutting edge of fashion, but then I was never going there anyway. When I say I feel good because I look good, I mean that I feel comfortable, that what is attractive about me is enhanced by what I'm wearing, that there's no major dissonance between what I'm wearing and who I am.
Fortunately, it turns out that I don't have to go shopping a lot to achieve this sensation. It might not be a dopamine hit, but it's okay. AND now I have this dress that feels new, even though it isn't, and can have fun playing with everything else I already have in the course of enjoying it.
On Day 224, that's not a bad feeling to have.