A funny thing happened on the way to a Fall wardrobe planning post: I realized I have a wardrobe to plan around! Two-and-a-half years after I emptied out my closet — moved cross-country to a new climate and culture, had my eyes opened ever wider to the ills of the fashion industry, advanced my knitting and sewing skills, lost and gradually found myself sartorially — I’ve reached a point of normalcy! I’m a person with a functional closet again.
I’m in the midst of a couple of different projects that require me to make outfits, in different contexts and ways. And it being September (albeit still mid-90s here, so who can tell) I thought perhaps I should start thinking about Fall wardrobe plans in conjunction with that. Every season I’ve done this here in the wake of the clean-out, it’s been about envisioning, sketching, queueing — scheming about what I could make (and how quickly) to fill in what was really one giant gap of a wardrobe. For a while there, I literally had nothing to wear.
The way my brain works, tackling these other projects got me wanting to actually inventory my closet, in the form of a photo of each and every garment. And as I started thinking about doing that, and actually doing that, it dawned on me that the panic of the past two years is a thing of the past. That I now have clothes again, and that they add up to a pretty high-functioning wardrobe. And not only that, but they’re largely handmade (full of pride), a little bit small-batch/local, a little bit long-owned well-worn treasures, and only a couple of recent additions come from the fast fashion world. I’d gotten so used to chipping away at this over the years that I didn’t even realize how far I’d come.
So what do you normally do when it comes to wardrobe planning? You look at what you have, think about ways to combine those things, consider a few new pieces to make/buy that will give you new options and freshen it all up a bit. And that’s where I’m at. A whole new normal, to be sure, but so blessedly, happily normal. Which means I’ll be putting together a whole new form of wardrobe-planning post for Fall.
You guys, every garment in the grid above, except for the jeans/pants, was made by me — and this isn’t even all of the handmades. I’m so grateful to so many people for the endless inspiration and encouragement.
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PREVIOUSLY in Wardrobe Planning: Summer 2016 master plan