On Being a Continual Student of Your Own Style: Wardrobe Planning Advice

February 1, 2019 12:53 PM

Perplexed by picking suitable clothing? Need help with paring down your wardrobe? Thinking about learning to sew it yourself? Come be inspired by this longread post from The Knitting Needle and the Damage Done: The Orange Swan Guide to Wardrobe Planning.
posted by MonkeyToes (31 comments total)

Mefi's Own!
posted by carter at 12:57 PM on February 1, 2019 [26 favorites]

This is inspiring. I really want to do a mass clearing, but worry that I'll "need" something after I donate it. This idea of thinking through all the possible clothing scenarios might help with that irrational panic
posted by greermahoney at 1:51 PM on February 1, 2019 [2 favorites]

This is why I've decided to gear this post specifically to female clothing, since men don't really need advice.

I am proof to the contrary.
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:54 PM on February 1, 2019 [1 favorite]

Well, it may not be advice on how to build a wardrobe per se, but in the spirit of "thinking about sewing it yourself," you might be interested in freesewing.org (requires creation of an account, though it is free/no ads).
posted by solotoro at 2:22 PM on February 1, 2019 [2 favorites]

I have so often accidentally ended up knitting things that perfectly matched clothing I already owned, probably because I tend to acquire yarn in the colors that I like wearing? But I wasn't planning it, and then suddenly I'm in the middle of knitting a cowl or a pair of socks...and I look down at the project in my lap and it matches what I'm wearing!
posted by epersonae at 2:48 PM on February 1, 2019 [6 favorites]

I love the whole genre of wardrobe planning and refashioning -- it's all over women's literature from Maria Edgeworth on. (query: earlier? the Safflower Princess?) . There was a delightful blog project of living a year of Fashion on the Ration, now degoogled by a museum show with the same name...
posted by clew at 3:01 PM on February 1, 2019 [3 favorites]

suddenly I'm in the middle of knitting a cowl or a pair of socks...and I look down at the project in my lap and it matches what I'm wearing

One morning years ago, I was sitting in a subway car, wearing an orange t-shirt and knitting a cotton summer top in a very similar shade of orange, and a man came up to me and said it looked like I was quickly finishing up the top I was wearing while on my way to work.
posted by orange swan at 3:13 PM on February 1, 2019 [47 favorites]

I have to say I really enjoy this blog and have recommended it to fellow knitters. I particularly like the pattern magazine reviews--mostly just for entertainment (they are often quite dryly funny) but also for ideas on what patterns to buy/avoid. Thanks orange swan!
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 3:46 PM on February 1, 2019 [2 favorites]

Useful and sensible article!
posted by leslies at 3:46 PM on February 1, 2019

This is really useful. I've had a terrible habit over the years of picking up random-ass sale yarn that's hard to match (even if it's fun to work with, or looks great on its own), or making wearables that require other extremely specific garments I am never going to find or make.

Luckily, the hat I've got in progress right now is going to look good with my best coat. I should probably repair the hole in that coat's lining while I'm at it...
posted by asperity at 7:03 PM on February 1, 2019 [1 favorite]

This is a super helpful essay. Thanks, orange swan.
posted by salvia at 9:27 PM on February 1, 2019

I wonder if "dressing in the French style" came from this book, French Chic which is a really fun and informative read despite being published in the late 80s.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 1:48 AM on February 2, 2019 [2 favorites]

Many men of today still buy their clothes more or less strategically. This is understandable given how uniform men's clothing is compared to women's.

Yeah, my wardrobe (excluding underwear, which is a whole 'nother subject) is almost entirely hiking pants, flannel shirts, "work clothes" i.e. t-shirts and tactical pants, and one suit. Couple of hoodies for schlubbing around the house or doing errands, and then of course lots of layering options for various types of outdoor weather. In the summer I wear poplin instead of flannel, and that's basically it. It's nice to be able to keep things so simple.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 5:21 AM on February 2, 2019 [1 favorite]

I was really struck by her observation that the pace of fashion has slowed dramatically:

Through much of the twentieth century, if a woman wore something even two or three years old, it looked it, and she'd be considered dowdy and out of date, and prior to 1950 or so, women routinely refashioned and retrimmed their clothing every season in order to keep in style. ... When I watch movies from 2003 or thereabouts I often think that it would only take at most a few tweaks to update some of the looks the actresses are wearing, or maybe even that they look quite contemporary exactly as they are, and I have many pieces of clothing that are ten to sixteen years old that still pass for reasonably current.

It's an odd development. Perhaps now that flimsy "fast fashion" is so common, clothing retailers no longer need to rely on constantly changing styles to sell lots of clothes every year? Or perhaps mainstream culture has become less conformist? Fashion designers less influential? Regardless, it's a welcome change.
posted by Kilter at 10:57 AM on February 2, 2019 [11 favorites]

It seems like the rise of rapidly obsolete consumer electronics means people have other status signifiers to blow money on besides fashion, and I'm not sure but it seems like athletic/leisure wear and eyeglass frames are still on a fairly short cycle.
posted by BrotherCaine at 12:43 PM on February 2, 2019 [1 favorite]

Cellphones and consoles look like an large-enough explanation, although -- as there have always been other things to use as status signifiers -- not immediately a sufficient one.

I have another, depressing hypothesis, which is that our clothes are as cheap as we know how to make them* and the fundamental styles don't change because that would require either an invention in how to make them even cheaper, or making them more expensive, which we aren't actually rich enough to support.

* Fundamentally it's all sweatshirts and elastic leggings, though they may have sporty or businesslike signifiers in additional seams or (increasingly) print or applique. There are a bunch of other traits that make fit even less important -- thumbholes on elastic sleeves, hi-low hems, ruching or gathering to hide bad fit to the circumference.
posted by clew at 1:48 PM on February 2, 2019 [5 favorites]

It's an odd development. Perhaps now that flimsy "fast fashion" is so common, clothing retailers no longer need to rely on constantly changing styles to sell lots of clothes every year? Or perhaps mainstream culture has become less conformist?

I'm not a fashion expert by any stretch of imagination, but the trend Orange Swan notes for fashion is also in some broad sense true in the other arts as well. My feeling is that we are in a media saturated age which makes history more difficult to define. By that I mean we are exposed to almost the entirety of history all at once. Clothes and art works from a vast range of eras, cultures, and movements are available for us to see and favor. How we interact with the history of clothes and arts individually no longer follows history as simply a lived interaction where we are caught solely in the trends of the day, but one of personal selection and more random intersection with that which has come before, robbing that history of the same sense of steady progression.

In art, Arthur Danto refers to it as "the end of art". Not because art won't be made any longer or is in any literal sense "over", but because virtually anything now is allowed. In fashion, I suspect something similar has occurred. There aren't the same limits on what is or isn't fashionable because we've accepted anything, in theory, can be in fashion while also accepting that fashion doesn't have to follow narrow cultural trend lines anymore but can be whatever the individual themselves might prefer as long as it "suits" them well. There is likely a corresponding financial/class shift in who gets to decide what's acceptable as well, where authority is no longer the force it used to be in any sphere of culture.
posted by gusottertrout at 2:03 PM on February 2, 2019 [18 favorites]

I think wardrobe planning is especially interesting and tricky for knitters. Knitting trends and general fashion trends often don’t sync up, and there are so many yarns and patterns that are absolutely gorgeous but don’t really work in the context of a wardrobe.

I knit far less than I used to several years ago. Some of that is life changes and a lack of time, but there was also the realization that there was almost no overlap between the knits I liked to make and the knits I liked to wear.
posted by Metroid Baby at 6:31 AM on February 3, 2019 [2 favorites]

gusottertrout, have you read any books on these changes that you could suggest?
posted by Selena777 at 7:41 AM on February 3, 2019

About fashion specifically, not much really. I just started looking into fashion history more closely this last year and I"m still learning more of basics of how clothing has changed over time. My supposition is based on how the few fashion books I've read tend to end in talking about changes in fashion during the nineties and early 2000s, describing the growing range of influences coming to design and wider variety of styles and places new looks are coming from.

That seemed to fit with other things I'd seen and read about fashion and the arts more generally. Arthur Danto has a number of books that deal with his ideas on how we've reached this "end", including one called "After the End of Art" which I quite liked, but it doesn't deal with fashion or other practical arts per se. It also seemed to fit with what I'd come to understand about other forms of popular media arts, like movies, TV, music and so on. I wish I could point to some good book or article that might go into the idea, but I think it's something I've sort of pieced together from a variety of sources on all the arts I'd read over the years more than something from any one place.
posted by gusottertrout at 8:41 AM on February 3, 2019

The Victorians were also markedly magpies of taste, certainly in fashion and other practical arts. The historical and crosscultural references wrapped around steadily-changing corsetry mostly look like corsetry to us, but they were really making them.

Of course, from their point of view, the engraving press and penny post and steam packet meant that they were drowning in information and globalization. Class mobility, new techniques for making cheaper versions of old whatever (survey: what does ``Brummagem'' mean to you?), a whole mishmash of curiosity and tourism and exploitation for every other living culture. But mostly in an expansive period of energy and ecological consumption, so this only fits cultural explanations for our current fashion state, not my declinist economic one. (Although, to go back to the original post, modern clothing consumption is bases on cheap fast fashion, so pretty declinist.)
posted by clew at 3:16 PM on February 4, 2019 [2 favorites]

But mostly in an expansive period of energy and ecological consumption, so this only fits cultural explanations for our current fashion state, not my declinist economic one. (Although, to go back to the original post, modern clothing consumption is bases on cheap fast fashion, so pretty declinist.)

I think your economic explanation fits really well with the broad base of day to day fashion people wear and combined with cultural influence gives some good suggestion of how fashion as a whole works, bottom to top then filtered back top to bottom.
posted by gusottertrout at 7:52 AM on February 5, 2019

Something I have never seen, except in faint adumbrations from novels on Project Gutenberg, is an estimate of how often 19th c fashion was bottom to top. *Most* women made most of their clothes by themselves, mostly from little newsprint sketches or idealized engravings instead of printed multisize patterns. Surely some of them turned the page in the Illustrated News and said ``Ooh, that Turkish woman has lovely sleeves, I could do that.''

People talk about peasant fashion as though it was obvious this happened (Welsh women adopting and then adapting the silk top hat, for instance), but if women with little could do it, women with a little more surely could.
posted by clew at 11:49 AM on February 5, 2019

(Modern novels *set in* early industrial periods usually mention the fashion periodicals more, and hemming less, than old books do. )
posted by clew at 11:54 AM on February 5, 2019

Something I have never seen, except in faint adumbrations from novels on Project Gutenberg, is an estimate of how often 19th c fashion was bottom to top.

It's a good question. I'm sure it must have happened, but how much seems hard to guess in no small part because the "bottom" didn't seem to receive the same kind of coverage as the top or middle in what media we have from the era. The impression some or much of what we do have gives is of there being a more intense social pressure to conform, but that is mostly aimed at the middle classes. With the expense involved in making clothing and the work that was required from the lower classes, I'd suspect there wasn't much opportunity for wild abandon in clothing, but surely there must have been at least the same level of individuality as found in other homecrafts like needlework and quilting, for example.
posted by gusottertrout at 1:56 AM on February 6, 2019

Though it is probably worth noting that celebrity was a driving force in fashion even then and some of the noted celebrities of the day who started fashion trends didn't come from upper class backgrounds, they were more self made women who found the spotlight for their daring whether as performers or socialites of sorts intermittently rumored to eb attached to various important men.
posted by gusottertrout at 2:01 AM on February 6, 2019

I think we over-recognize early celebrity, though, exactly because it's familiar now. Contrariwise we under-recognize the freedom of living in a small society and making your own stuff and if you made weird sleeves, well, your neighbors might be looking for an excuse to mock you, or they might very well think you're a nice person and an inventive seamstress and how did you do that? I know it's taken decades for my idiosyncratic garden to make sense to my neighbors, but it does, now.

There's a strand of counter-narrative legal histories -- The Cheese and the Worms &seq. -- I wonder if there are counter-narrative material history histories. Not outsider art, if we're looking for how fashion bubbled up as well as down.
posted by clew at 11:56 AM on February 6, 2019

It all depends, I think, on what exactly one is trying to capture. I wouldn't doubt that there were fashion innovations or just more unusual choices often made away from the mainstream that didn't get captured by what's been passed down or taken up by larger crowds. At the same time, I suspect there were fashions that may have had humble origins, but which did find their way up and back down the social ladder using celebrity as a vector for growth more than as a starting point. I can't quite remember the names of some women who were seen as trend setters in the 19th century, but some of things I've read credit them with considerable influence in their effect on the larger societal shifts in clothing.

Empress Josephine was a major one, but I was thinking more of the women who came from lower class backgrounds and made a name for themselves and might have brought something of their backgrounds into their choices in styles, which perhaps made them seem all the more daring. I know in the early 20th century Irene Castle was a major fashion icon. She was the daughter of a physician, not from the lowest class, but her husband with whom she found fame as dancing partners, was the son of a pub owner, so they didn't come from high society either, but they became very famous and Irene set a number of fashion trends.

Even in high society circles, there is potentially some distinction to be made between the one choosing the fashion and the one who designed it and came to the idea through other sets of influence. Some of those influences certainly could have come from "below" just as they do today, going from street lived style to stage embellished replica and then spreading back down again from there, but I don't know enough about the working of the designers to offer that as more than a weak possibility.
posted by gusottertrout at 12:41 PM on February 6, 2019

19th c private letters, and 19th c novels written by middle-sorts women for middle-sorts women, just don't care as much about the few people who are still famous as we do.
posted by clew at 12:53 PM on February 6, 2019

Oh, sure, and what I said also ignores the concerted efforts to change clothing styles led by women activists like Amelia Bloomer. It's never just one path of change and acceptance, but a variety of them, and often fought against by men seeking to uphold their ideal of social order.
posted by gusottertrout at 1:00 PM on February 6, 2019

Thanks so much for this recommendation, MonkeyToes, and thank you orange swan for writing it!

one day I browsed through the Ravelry project pages for that pattern, and discovered that it didn't look all that good on any of the women who had made it.

Choral explanations help again! Awesome!
posted by brainwane at 5:58 AM on February 7, 2019 [1 favorite]