From my office window, the late-August morning light catches in the end-of-summer trees.
In an instant, the clouds shift, and everything is full of gold.
Sunday morning, two hours before we leave for Mass. Everyone else --- by which I mean the husband and the dog --- is still fast asleep. I've had coffee and some flatbread I made yesterday: spent-grain flour, rolled oats, kefir, unflavored raw whey protein powder, an egg, salt, oregano, and feta cheese, baked on a parchment-paper-covered sheet pan till firm. I didn't reheat it this morning, just spread a cold piece with fig preserves and ate it with my coffee.
I bought groceries yesterday, but spaced the eggs and coffee (and was proud of myself for how relatively low the bill was . . . which I guess tells me something about our expensive habits, though you wouldn't have credited eggs with being a luxury, would you?). Guess I'll be stopping at the store on the way home.
The husband has Matriculation again today (they have to do it in two batches to fit the whole freshman class into the basilica) and plans to stay on at school after the morning's Mass. So we'll take two cars, I'll come home, and then I'll go back to meet him for dinner tonight. In between I'll walk with Dora, piddle around, read on the porch swing . . . in other words, I'll do my best to enjoy a Sunday afternoon of no servile labor.
While I have the time right now, I'm thinking about outfits for the week. I've been sketching a weekly plan for the last --- month? I can't actually remember off the top of my head when I started this, but it was sometime after we came back from Norway. Anyway, I'm finding it hugely helpful in keeping me out of styling ruts (though I do repeat things) and in ensuring that my whole closet, at least the seasonally appropriate part of it, gets worn.
*Today for Mass: on last week's list I have my Wool& Marine Blue Maggie dress with my Trades of Hope kimono. I could wear Birk Papillios or my new-to-me Earth Shoes Mary Janes. I might try the second option first, since it's new, and see how I feel about the look of things.
I might keep this outfit on all day, OR change into one of my Wool& Brooklyn dresses for the evening, because the husband does so like those dresses, and I like wearing them, but not always to church unless I can layer them.
We're looking at a week of highs in the low-to-mid 80s Farenheit, which is nice.
For the week (in no particular order):
*Floral pinafore dress with teal Devold merino tee and Stegmann clogs
*Not Perfect Linen Smock dress, possibly as a pinafore over a tee (pink stripe Smartwool --- haven't worn that cropped tee in ages --- or blue WoolX cropped tee) with Stegmann clogs
*Wool& Willow dress in Wisteria with Birks. If a Mass day, add maxi skirt (probably blue floral rayon maxi, but possibly tuck dress into green Garnet Hill lantern-hem maxi, because that green would be delicious with periwinkle)
*Flax linen skirt with pink merino tank and Mary Janes (pick a pair, any pair), add cardigan if a Mass day
*Wool& Fiona with Earth Shoe Mary Janes
*Ordination Mass and reception on Saturday: Wool& Willow dress in Ocean Teal with navy linen long cardigan and either Birk Papillios or Earth Shoe Mary Janes
*Sunday Mass next week: NPL Leila dress in Chocolate Brown with teal cashmere cardigan and floral Mary Janes
As always, I'm not bound to this plan. I can tweak and change however I like. I do not have to wear these outfits in the order listed --- this is simply the order in which I thought of them. Often I do just go down the list, because that's easier than thinking about it, but I don't have to.
Trying to think what I have on for the week, too.
*Dentist appointment Tuesday at 10 (the one I had initially thought was a week ago this past Thursday . . .)
*Essays to write
*A little fall cleaning, maybe, as I begin to have the house to myself for some hours again
*A look at my Poshmark closet, to try to move some of these things I'm reselling. I have sold a few items over the last several months (and amassed a little credit, which is nice), but I'd truly like to move these remaining pieces on to new homes.
*I'd love to write 2,000 words of fiction by the end of the week --- OR finish a poem draft to my satisfaction. Both those things would be great, but we'll see.
*Pub night Thursday
*Coffee with a friend on Friday
*Priesthood ordination Mass for Br. James on Saturday
Meanwhile, I was interested in this piece from the Guardian about secondhand shopping. Part of me thinks: We can't have anything nice, can we? Not even our little frugal sustainability-framed indulgences? But another part of me thinks the writer has a point.
The chief point I think the writer has is this: If you're creating a secondhand market for this past season's fast-fashion crap, so that Amazon unboxers can just buy up stuff they're not going to wear more than once and then resell it at the end of the season in order to buy more, then yes, that is a problem, and you might be part of it. You are not really applying any kind of tourniquet to the economy that flows from slave labor and dodgy environmental practices.
Secondarily, especially if you're spending a lot of time in thrift stores, then you're that much more inclined to engage in impulse purchasing --- buying what's there, instead of what you really want, which usually isn't there. She notes how fragmented her wardrobe had become, with lots of individually nice pieces, maybe, but no cohesion. That's a situation I remember all too well from my days of Goodwill frugality that wasn't so frugal after all.
Things I think about this problem, as she poses it, which might or might not overlap with her own thoughts:
Her ultimate solution was to have her Spanish husband, whose family are apparently all in the fashion industry, choose her clothes for her. I guess what he's choosing are slow-fashion investment pieces; she mentions now having a capsule wardrobe she likes wearing. That's great, but I don't know how replicable those results would be. Even those of us who have perfectly nice husbands who notice our appearance don't quite have that husband. Mine has colorblindness. It would be interesting to let him choose all my clothes, but I'm not sure how happy either of us would be with the outcome.
But I think there are ways to help mitigate the problem she outlines, which I accept is a plausible problem, without renouncing secondhand shopping (which for many people would mean to renounce clothes shopping altogether, which seems like not a realistic move):
*Don't pay attention to trends. Simply don't. They are ephemeral. They evaporate. You don't need to ride them. If you like a particular look, you can judiciously buy something that contributes to that look, but be willing to keep wearing it next year, when suddenly everybody else is wearing something totally different.
*The key here is to be sure that you feel good in that silhouette or detail or whatever it is, enough that you'd keep wearing it simply because it's you, even if it's not in style. And the key to this is paying attention to what you really love and feel good in, not what everyone else is wearing. Think about clothes you've really loved in the past. Think about, even, your favorite outfit from 8th grade, or whenever you were conscious of what you were wearing and of feeling good about it. Move in the direction of whatever has made you feel good and beautiful.
*And one key to that is to buy vintage. I had long mourned the passing of beautiful 1990s garden-party dresses, in flowy fabrics (often rayon, but not always). I really loved the loosely set-in waists: these weren't shift dresses, with no waist, but the kind of soft A-line 1930s-inspired dresses that a person with a postpartum body, as mine was in the early 1990s, could look good in without effort. I don't know whether these dresses have always been hanging around on Ebay and Poshmark, but the whole cottagecore/1990s-resurrected trend has made them more visible and created a market for them, the same exact dresses and skirts we were wearing 30 years ago. And so I am happy to buy them (judiciously). I had a long linen Liz Claiborne dress that I finally resold because it never fit me that well, and in two years I hadn't taken it to be altered --- but I'd love another in that vein. And I have my vintage April Cornell skirt, in the kind of floral pattern I loved so much way back when, as well as my vintage floral pinafore from the same era.
Your era might be another one, not the 1990s, but if you're dedicated to looking, you can find things. And buying good things made decades ago does not play into the current fast-fashion market. You are not driving demand for new things. You are driving demand for the reuse of old things and sending business to vintage resellers, not to the cycle of buy-new-sell-fast-buy-more.
*Consider carefully what you're looking for. Now, this should come with some caveats. We all know that we're better off avoiding impulse purchasing, especially as a reflexive habit (say because we're craving dopamine). But any time you're browsing, whether in a physical store or an online resale situation, you can run across something that wasn't on your immediate bingo card --- but is something that's been on your list.
CASE IN POINT. Here I am going to confess to breaking a rule I have been very proud of not breaking. I was doing some browsing, just because I wanted to see what items from a brand whose designs I like (April Cornell) might be available secondhand. I have that one skirt that I bought three or four years ago and love, and I'd seen some new dresses of theirs that caught my eye, and I wondered what was out there in the realm of secondhand things, because I'm not buying new.
This was maybe a mistake --- just looking is a perilous situation if you don't want to buy something. In fact, for me just looking generally means that if I see something I really like, I'm probably going to talk myself into buying it. On at least a subconscious level, I knew this going in. Yeah, often I do look and add things to my like list, just to see if the seller will come down enough on the price to make me consider the item seriously. Sometimes that happens. I bought my Stegmann clogs because the seller came down to $13, and I knew I'd never see that deal again. Zero regrets --- I love those shoes, and they are beautiful and high-quality. They weren't immediately what I was looking for. I was looking for Mary Janes (and oh, boy, did I subsequently find Mary Janes). On the other hand, sometimes when the seller makes an offer, I just delete the notification email, and often I go back and unlike the item, because I'm not buying right then, and I need to remove it from view.
So, perilously, I was just looking at April Cornell dresses, out of innocent, detached curiosity, when I came across a vintage 90s 100% silk --- it looks like that late-80s/early-90s washed silk, which I used to love --- plum-colored maxi dress. It's a large, and I'm dubious about the fit, but the color is great, and I have, at least somewhere on my list, been thinking about silk as another natural fiber to wear year-round. The price was low-ish, but then the seller made a really low offer. I had some credit to make it even cheaper.
So I bought it. I bought it because I knew I'd never see that exact dress again, and it was something I really wanted to try.
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Now, my rule for 2024 has been NO DRESSES. And I have kept that rule fastidiously for eight months straight. I'm not going to rationalize this purchase: I broke my rule because I wanted to. The end.
BUT. Well, first of all, this dress is a large and might not fit. It might not be something I can have successfully altered. I might just resell it. Or I might add it to my bag for the Texasgirl, because that's a good way to keep things I'm not wearing in circulation. I won't be out much money either way, and them's the breaks. So there's that: I might not actually end up with another dress.
On the other hand, I've already identified things to wear this dress with, summer and winter, in my closet. I had been thinking about a second purple dress for Advent and Lent (to add to my Wisteria Willow dress), and I had been considering buying, at some point, maybe for Christmas, a purple NPL dress in addition to the emerald-green one I want to give myself for my birthday/book launch events. If this purple dress works for me, I won't feel compelled to buy a far more expensive purple linen one. So although I decided fairly quickly to take a gamble on it, it wasn't a random impulse purchase. I had a reason and a vision for buying it.
It's a lot like a purple Pact cotton-knit sheath dress that I had some years back and hung onto for a long time before finally passing along. But this dress has a set-in waist, which I think will make a difference in how it hangs on my body. Plain sheath dresses don't do much for a pear shape, especially not in a heavy, relatively stiff fabric. But this has some obvious flow, and I have my fingers crossed that it won't just swallow me. The armholes are a worry, because they look big, but then I wear longline bralettes/crop tops under everything, so will have some coverage even when I wear it sleeveless, assuming I do end up keeping it. I can explore the possibility of alterations, too, depending on how big is is in the bodice and how easy it seems to take it up and in. If it needs altering and is alterable, even with the (usually small) added cost, it would still be a very good deal. In any case, I'd also be doing a lot of layering for a lot of the year.
And again, I had been thinking that I really wanted some silk. It wasn't up there at the top of the list, and I wasn't necessarily thinking dresses, but it's been there in my mind nonetheless. So if this gives me an opportunity to try out silk as a third natural fiber in my wardrobe, with its thermally regulating and antimicrobial properties, then that's good. It's a pretty low-impact experiment financially (again, thank you Poshmark buyers for the bit of credit), and in buying vintage I haven't contributed to the fast-fashion market.
Also . . . just generally, it helps that my search terms are pretty precise. I'm usually looking for a specific brand, or a specific fiber. I won't consider synthetics (anymore): no polyester content, no acrylic, no rayon, though I have bought linen-blend cardigans that also had rayon content. Cotton I will take under advisement, but it's not something I'm consciously looking for. Yes to tencel, bamboo, and modal, at least for now. Yes to some nylon content in wool jersey items, because it's just really hard to find wool tees, for example, that don't have at least a little nylon. But as a general rule, I am looking for the following: linen, cashmere, alpaca, sheep's wool, hemp, and silk. I feel as though I'm pretty flexible, but still, my focus on those materials narrows things down a lot.
Again . . . not an excuse for breaking a rule I'd made. But it is an illustration of how I have learned to make purchases, and the kinds of things I think when making those purchases, regardless of what rules I've set myself. AND if it works for me, it'll fill a bit of a gap, the gap where I didn't have a purple dress.
So that's something. As always, I'm not going to beat myself up. I made the rule, I kept the rule, then I decided, in full knowledge of what I was doing, to break the rule, and there it is. Let's sit here together and watch the world not end.
MEANWHILE, WEARING TODAY:
*Wool& Maggie dress (M/Long) in Marine Blue, bought May 2022, last worn August 1. Total wears this year so far: 14
*Trades of Hope kimono, bought May 2024, last worn July 14, so it was really due for an outing. Total wears this year (since May): 11, including as a scarf
*Secondhand Kalso Earth Shoe Mary Janes, bought August 2024, last worn August 15
This outfit probably would have looked better with Birk Papillios and the wedge heel, but I felt like these shoes, which I love.
Hanging out, enjoying Sunday afternoon, maybe going to watch some more George Gently.