Looking uphill along the loop road that circles the ravine in my neighborhood. I live across from a community college with a lot of coming and going, but literally one minute from my driveway I can be walking in the woods. It's lovely to walk this loop through the seasons, with the changes in the trees. Right now I'm almost panting for late October and the blaze of autumn color.
Went to the Urgent Care yesterday afternoon and came home with a prescription for antibiotics, which I rarely take but hope in this instance will do some good. What I have isn't Covid --- remember other illnesses? --- but most likely a sinus infection that's moving down into my chest, so I need to try to knock it out.
Spending today prepping for tonight's online reading with Jennifer Reeser, for Belle Point Press: 7 Central, 8 Eastern Time. I'm also still working on recasting a long poem into Horatian alcaics (just to see what happens) and researching for the two Sun essays I need to write this week.
Since I seem to keep wearing this pink micro-striped merino tee, I thought I'd create a little challenge for myself this week: a "Wear-It-Forward" challenge, in which the idea is to repeat one element of the previous day's outfit the next day. I've done something like this before, though it might have a different name --- anyway, it seemed like a good way to prod myself to be mindful of what I'm wearing, and to wear more things in my closet more creatively.
Yesterday I wore the merino tee with my Sierra dress. This actually was a repeat from the day before, but with the tweak of wearing Sierra as a jumper over the tee instead of the tee knotted over the dress. Anyway, I like this tee a lot, and there it was, hanging on the drying rack when I got up this morning, so I've done the same kind of outfit idea with my Camellia wool dress:
Dress over tee again; Birk Madeiras on my feet. The weather's really muggy, and this was almost too much when I went out to walk the dog, but it's okay. Anything not to feel quite so stuck in summertime.
I will tweak this slightly for tonight's reading. I'll probably take off the tee and add a sleek cardigan over the dress for a more professional, polished appearance. Tomorrow I will give the tee a rest and repeat some other outfit element: either the dress or the shoes. And so forth through the week.
It planted itself there --- it plants itself everywhere. I'm encouraging it there because it's a great native pollinator plant, with seeds that sustain a range of wildlife species as food. Besides, although the blooms are very small, it is pretty, especially in a big mass like this.
I pull it up other places, because it will take over any space it occupies, but in its designated area, it's a welcome early-fall wildflower.
LATER STILL:
Having heard about the Project 333 Challenge, I decided this afternoon to find out actually what it is. Obviously I did find out, since I just linked it, but anyway . . .
Given that I really don't accept "minimal is better" as a starting assumption --- that "minimalism" as people currently talk about it, especially as an ultimate objective, is a kind of ersatz gnostic virtue --- I think there are definite advantages to minimizing your clothing collection.
*There's no point in owning clothes you don't really like to wear, especially in multiples (five little black dresses because none of them really suits you, but you keep hoping that one day you'll stumble upon one that does). This means clothes that don't fit well, clothes in colors that don't do you any favors, clothes that need to be ironed when you hate to iron, so that they spend most of their useful lives in a basket waiting for you to render them wearable.
*There's no point in owning more clothes than you can reasonably wear in a given season (obviously if you live where I do, you're not wearing tights in the summer, but that doesn't mean you should get rid of your tights).
*There's no point in creating overwhelm when what you want is to be dressed (well) and out the door.
I'm a person who does well with fewer choices --- as long as the choices available to me are good choices, meaning things I want to put on my body, things I feel reliably good in once they are on my body. Too many choices, and I'm overwhelmed. On the other hand, too few choices and I'm bored. I like having a recognizable style, and things I consistently wear, but I don't actually want to wear a uniform day in and day out. There's a reason why I didn't join the Army (which is not necessarily THAT reason, but not wearing the same thing every day is one reason I'm glad I never entertained a vocation to military life --- or religious life, either, for that matter).
At this moment I have, I think, 34 items hanging on hangers in my closet. That's not counting shoes, sweaters, leggings, and accessories. I have just provisionally outboxed a handful of things I'm not wearing, including, with some reluctance, this duck-egg blue cotton button shirt. I love the color, but see needs ironing, above. It's just not getting worn. And when I do wear it, it's often kind of awkward: cut really fully, almost like a maternity shirt, so it doesn't tie that nicely. As with the chambray tencel shirt I outboxed the other day, I'd like something in that color, but I'm not sure that thing is the thing I really need. It might on the other hand be the exact thing somebody else needs.
Meanwhile, whether you follow the rules exactly or not, the procedure for the challenge is helpful.
*It's good, when you take an inventory of what you have, to lead with the things you know you love.
*It's good to take things season by season --- the official challenge is meant to be enacted every three months, so basically you're planning, say, your fall wardrobe as a flexible capsule.
*It's good to have to take a good, hard look at your clothes, season by season, to determine what shape even the things you love are in at this stage. There's nothing really virtuous about showing up in things that don't fit, have stretched or worn out, have developed mysterious grease stains despite your best effort, and so on. You don't have to have a LOT of clothes, but an important corollary to not having a lot of clothes is that the clothes you do have will not embarrass you to wear in public. You can be minimalist, if you must, but you don't have to look like the church jumble sale, even if in fact that's where you got your dress (and more power to you if you did).
I was ruminating yesterday on what the next stage after my putative no-buy 2022 is going to look like, and I think this is an important piece to that puzzle. I was thinking I'd have a purchasing window every quarter, basically --- that's every three months, which seems pretty often, but then again, it does correspond with the change of seasons. Maybe I should call that a "possible-purchasing window," because really, what I should do is evaluate first --- what do I love that I know I'm going to wear, what do I have to go with the things I love, what don't I have to go with those things (because what I have isn't serving me, OR because I don't have the thing at all) --- then decide what, if anything, I'm going to buy for that quarter.
The other piece of that, of course, is to focus on investment pieces from sustainable brands in natural fibers I like to wear. The more expensive it is, obviously, the less likely I am to buy multiples of it, or to buy a lot (as opposed to loading up my cart at Goodwill because it was all so cheap). I can't go overboard, but I can buy a couple of dresses in the hundreds of dollars over the course of a year. I can buy one pair of hundred-dollar shoes or boots that will really serve me for a long time, if I discern that need. I can fit in other items to go with basic things as I have the budget . . . and there might be seasons where I honestly don't need anything and can resist the temptation to buy just because I want the rush of something new.
I can also target things I know are worth looking for secondhand, on Poshmark or Etsy. Wool& dresses aren't generally worth that amount of effort, because the markdown for dresses in good shape is negligible --- the one exception would be if a style in a color you want is discontinued, but you'd want to prepare to wait a LONG time for the right one to come along. Things like Birkenstocks, conversely, are relatively easy to find in decent condition at good prices. This reminds me that I need to reglue the sole on one of my Birk Floridas, which have been waiting a long time for me to get around to refurbishing them. Anyway, there are high-quality things I can look for secondhand (Birkenstocks and other good shoe brands, plus wool tees and possibly cardigans) and not spend a mint on, and that would be an option in play each season as well.
I am feeling that temptation a lot right now, in case I haven't made it clear! But at this time of year, I generally feel bored with everything, not just my clothes: bored with the weather, bored with routines, bored because the new season of Shetland isn't on BritBox yet . . . So it's good to remind myself that my general feeling of ennui is not really going to be vanquished by the purchase of a clothing item. AND it's good to pull clothes out and play with them a little as a means of refreshment. Here are some random things I love that I pulled out earlier:
My dependable wool dresses, but also this linen maxi, which I haven't worn in a while. I generally relegate it to the category of the Sunday dress, but I might try putting it on one day this week for a change of pace, with casual sandals and a light cardigan (again, here's where I wish the tencel chambray shirt weren't so big --- I want something like that to tie over this dress, but that shirt is just too voluminous to work well, as many experiments have shown me, over and over again). I'll need to plan this in my "wear-it-forward" week, since I don't think anything I have on today would be great with that dress, but if I wear the right sandals tomorrow, I could do it Wednesday!
It's also worth reminding myself that while I wouldn't need five little black dresses, or even one, I don't mind having a lot of blue dresses, because that's my color. Sometimes multiples are good, if they're a color or style you reach for all the time and feel great in. Why wouldn't you have a rotation of something that works, when the alternative is to wear one thing all the time until it falls apart?
(on the other hand, as I've gone through my closet, boy howdy do I keep thinking what I could wear with that black-heather Audrey, which is a smudgy dark charcoal, not a full-on black. I've made so many outfits in my head since I started thinking about that dress).
OK, back to work . . .