Here's the year in retrospect. The main thing I conclude from all of this is that I sure did take a lot of pictures of myself, and it's hard to know how to feel about it. Well: embarrassed, a little, but honestly it's helpful to look back. There were days when I felt all schlumpy, but in hindsight I looked better than I felt. And then there were days when I felt I'd hit a home run . . . and maybe I did, but in hindsight, maybe I didn't. My long hair, even when I was sick of it, often looked better than I felt it did. I like having short hair, but looking at photos from the spring and summer sort of makes me want to grow it out again, which is just how that always goes. Anyway, it's all illuminating to me.
I guess the real message is that it takes time to figure out, at each stage of your life, who you are and what that person looks like. You think you're starting to get close, and then things shift, so you're never really there, I guess. It's all experimentation and process. God knows us thoroughly; we know ourselves so slightly, and our whole life is ultimately a matter of getting dressed in the dark.
But that can be an adventure, if you don't mind looking dumb sometimes. It's good not to mind looking dumb. It's good to explore and find things out, and to revel in what you do find out. You can revel in what your closet has to offer you, and to show you about who you are. What your closet has to offer is trivial, maybe, but God is present in small things as in large. And in that eternal divine perspective, either everything is small or nothing is.
At any rate, I bought a lot of clothes in 2023. As I've noted here before, 2022 was (putatively) a no-buy year. This year, maybe not surprisingly, wound up being a major rebound-binge kind of year. This too is illuminating to reflect upon. On the one hand, I bought a lot of clothes. On the other hand, though I bought a lot of clothes, I don't sense that I really overbought. Looking at my closet, I don't think I have too much. The big tip-off is that it all fits neatly in a small space. I have coats on pegs in the back hall, but everything else is right here.
There are things hanging on the drying rack --- I take airing-out seriously! And I haven't tidied my scarves away on their hangers, because I've been wearing them so much. AND I really need to straighten my stacks of sweaters. But even after a year of buying, this is basically it, folks. Even what's on the drying rack has a place in this closet, and nothing is crowded out or overflowing.
That's as minimalist as I'm going to get, as long as I occupy this house, with this closet. If I started living out of my car, obviously something would have to change. As it is, the amount of clothing I own is honestly fine. That is, it handily fits the available space.
But on a larger level, the feeling I have begun to enjoy is the feeling of having really enough --- which is to say, enough of the right things so that I look the way I want to look, instead of continually missing. For so many years, I had at least kind of a vision, but was always making do, in ways that left me dissatisfied with how I looked. And of course that was really a function of what I had, which was too many things I didn't really want, and not enough of what I needed to look the way I envisioned looking. This year, having gone for it in a relatively big way (thank you, little writer's income), I begin to feel that I have what I need to look the way I want to look, every day. I can see progress in that direction from the beginning of the year to now --- far fewer outfits that feel like outright misses (there are a couple of those in the slideshow above), far more outfits that I genuinely love to wear and look forward to wearing again.
And I hope I don't have to say it, but this is all okay. That is, it's morally okay. If you haven't taken a vow in religious life that involves your submitting to wearing a habit; if you're not spending the grocery money on your clothes; if you're not parading about in finery while your children shiver; if you don't buy for yourself but forget to buy for other people, then I really think you're okay. I mean, it's good to try not to think about clothes and appearance all the time. That's its own kind of prison, which I think you mostly avoid by feeling good about how you look and what you're wearing. Still, if you think too much about what you're going to buy next (talking to you, face in the mirror), then it's probably good to take apps off your phone, sign out of buy/sell/trade groups --- whatever it takes to break that little chain. And maybe seek out people doing no-buys, or at least making a conscious effort to wear and enjoy what they have, so that you have moral support. To that end, I might open comments back up here --- I really only closed them because nobody ever left comments anyway, and I was afraid I'd get filled up with spam stuff and not even notice. But if people want to talk about styling what's in your closet and consciously not looking for more things to put in your closet, then I can be here for that.
On top of all that, though, there's the additional level of trying to buy in sustainable and morally conscious ways. To try to avoid exploitation of people and the environment in your purchasing choices, to the extent that you possibly can, is also good. I care about living out Catholic social-justice principles; others might frame their principles differently, but they amount to very much the same set of concerns and resulting behaviors around consumption of goods. I do think that there are a lot of contingencies here, though. People's circumstances inevitably mean that they buy the clothes they can buy, and it's no good talking about what they should buy. What anybody should buy is whatever decent clothes they can buy, to cover the body in accord with their state in life and its demands. I'm not here to preach about anybody else's complicity, or not, in the sins of the world --- it's enough to consider my own moral choices, and also to try to regulate my obvious appetite for pretty clothes, which is not bad in itself, but . . . you know, the regulated appetite is going to serve my soul a lot better than the unregulated one.
But generally, unless you're in religious life, it's actively good to want to look nice. I think that desire is ultimately a desire to glorify and give thanks to God. Some people have it more than, or differently from, others --- I have some very un-vain friends, and it's easy to feel, by comparison, that I'm probably pretty vain, and should not be. But I dunno. What if we just accepted our desires and our pleasures as gifts, basically? You have to be responsible for a gift, of course, and use it well, according to its purpose. But the point is that somebody gave it to you, and they wanted you to enjoy it.
So I plan to enjoy what seem to be my little gifts in this area. I plan not to beat myself up because I didn't get the gift of not caring how I look, in a truly humble and free way of self-effacement. I plan to enjoy what I enjoy, and not to feel like probably a really shallow person because I enjoy it.
At the same time, I think I can stick to some basic self-regulatory parameters for 2024. As I have said (ad nauseam), I'm not making resolutions, but I have decided to give myself two little rules.
The first rule: NOTHING NEW. This does not mean new to me. It means new, as in nobody else has owned it before. Clearly this leaves me a lot of flex room. Poshmark is a click away; Goodwill is just down the road. But still, it's a regulating factor.
The other rule: NO DRESSES. Not new dresses, not secondhand dresses. I simply do not need any more dresses at this time. Period. No thank you. Not today. Not for the next 365 days. Never mind that I wear a dress every day, to do literally whatever I'm going to do in the course of that day. My word for 2024 is DRESSES.
As it is, in the way of dresses I currently own
*8 Wool& dresses in active service
*3 seondhand Not Perfect Linen dresses
*2 secondhand pinafores (i.e., dresses that really can't be worn on their own, as opposed to sleeveless dresses that could be worn as pinafores)
That just seems like really enough dresses to me. Unlucky thirteen, but whatever. Truly. It gives me a nice wide rotation, enough that I wouldn't have to repeat an item for two weeks if I didn't want to. It's enough that no one item will wear out quickly, which as I've noted before is the downside of these wear-a-dress-for-X-days challenges. The dresses I've worn for challenges have been well made enough, but that level of wear has been hard on them. I'm not sure anything normal people can buy, even when they spend more money, is going to be as well made as the two dresses the typical woman on the prairie had --- or as well-mended when the inevitable wear accrues, for the simple reason that many of us are not prairie women whose days are organized around tasks that include sewing. Also, too many of us (myself included) don't sew, other than to put a button on or, under duress, to mend a hole. No Me-Made-May for me, sorry. Novels: yes. Dresses I sew for myself: no. This is not any kind of brag, humble or otherwise. It's just the way it is.
So the number of dresses I have is one mechanism by which I hope to extend the useful life of each dress. I don't mind wearing the same thing a lot --- obviously. I've done it. But I think they'll all last a lot longer if they get a good rest between wears. At the same time, I hope it's going to prove not to be too many for them all to get worn regularly. I don't think it is, but we shall see. I'm not great at record-keeping, but I do track, at least loosely, the number of times I wear something, to give me an idea of how quickly the cost-per-wear for a given item is decreasing. If I make a greater investment in a piece of clothing, what I intend is to reap that investment in many wears, and in the pleasure of wearing that garment.
I've been working on approximate 2023 statistics for my core of Wool& dresses, looking at the total number of wears (as represented on my spreadsheet, given that I miss days here nad there) for the year, divided by the number of months I wore the dress. Some dresses I owned going into 2023; others I bought earlier or later in the year, so I tried to come up with monthly averages that reflected patterns of wear.
Not surprisingly, my Ocean Teal Willow, which I bought in October and wore for a 30-day challenge, was the winner, with an average of 11 wears per month (but over only a 3-month period). I really love that dress and would probably have worn her the most in any case, though. Other frontrunners, with at least 4 wears per month, were Audrey, Fiona, Sierra, and Wisteria Willow. With at least 3 wears per month: Pacific Brooklyn, Camellia, and both Maggies. My least-worn dress was Beetroot Brooklyn, but then I only got her in November, and then wore purple for most of December, so she was a bit out of luck.
At any rate, I've worn them all pretty consistently and steadily in the time I've had them, and will continue to do so, even as I've added some linen to my wardrobe as well. Camellia and Sierra, my original two dresses from 2021, have reached the point of being not as presentable, and have been retired to occasional, in-house, night- and hiking-dress status. But besides those two, as long as there's nothing that's absolutely not getting worn, it's all good.
Meanwhile, at this stage, I have dresses to wear for all occasions, beyond the everyday:
*weddings
*funerals
*parties
*literary readings and talks
*choir events
*date nights
There's nothing, potentially, for which I would need to rush out to buy something to wear. It's all right there, in my closet. And virtually all of it is meant for year-round wear, one cohesive wardrobe that can layer up for winter, strip down for summer. I will want some bits and bobs: maybe another pair of shoes, maybe two more tops to wear under pinafores and with skirts in the summer, new underwear and tights for the fall. But again, aside from the underwear and tights, the rule is nothing new.
I'm also happy, as the year has drawn to a close, to have branched out a little in my color palette. I really didn't think I'd wear brown again, for example, let alone enjoy it, but I find that I love my NPL chocolate-brown Leila dress, and that it actually does nice things for my coloring. That this deviation from my normal palette made me anxious in the beginning is a little embarrassing to admit, but you know, sometimes you just have to step back and wait, and let a new idea settle. I didn't think I was quite that brittle, but apparently I am. Still, I'm glad I did step back and wait, and wasn't too hasty with either a resale or a dye job. The more I consider that dress, the more I like it just as it is. I'm also happy to have added more pinks to the palette. It's all still cohesive, mind you. I don't own anything that doesn't go with multiple other things in my closet. That's the number-one rule, above all others: to ask myself, before I hit "complete purchase," how exactly I'm going to wear the thing I'm about to purchase, and with what that I already own. If I'd have to buy a whole new set of clothes just to accommodate the one thing, then that's a hard nope. But a little broadening of horizons, on the other hand, a little pushing back of the comfortable parameters, is always a positive move.
2023 has been a good year, full of things. It's flown as years do, and even now a new one knocks at the door.
Wearing today, for Mass and then a party to usher in the new year and the great feast of Mary, the Mother of God:
*Secondhand Not Perfect Linen Leila dress (M/L, with alterations) in Chocolate Brown
*Wool& Camellia dress (M), originally Lapis Blue, redyed Royal Blue, as an underlayer
*Snag navy merino tights
*Darn Tough Socks
*Secondhand Birkenstock Melrose boots
I love the neckline of this dress as is, but I think I'm going to add a scarf for warmth, because it's quite chilly --- 27F currently.
A blessed feast and a happy new year to all!