This is 30 days of outfits, fashioned from a total of 27 garments and 5 pair of shoes. (See the closet inventory for details.) There are also probably another 10-15 to be had simply by swapping out, say, one of my other two camisoles for the green one pictured, or a different pair of the wide-leg pants in nearly any scenario. These also range from not really warm at all (fine at the moment) to too warm if there’s really no cooling trend in the next 30 days, but I think I’ve given myself a fair chance of not having to think about getting dressed until the end of October. And with the light layers and sweater vests and closed shoes, and a little bit of sleeve action in there, most of these outfits do give me at least a hint of that Fall feeling. Hopefully that will keep me content until actual sweater weather arrives! (Although I should note that 6 of these involve the faded old jeans that are currently at Indigo Proof, so those combos are fictional until the jeans come home to roost.)
I believe there are only 5 garments here that have not factored into previous rounds of Closet Rummy™, and 2 first-appearance pairs of shoes (although one of those is just a replacement pair of white sneakers, so not exactly a paradigm shift), and yet I think there are only 2 or 3 outfits out of the 30 here that I’ve ever worn in these exact combinations, and then only once. It’s not that I’m averse to repeating outfits within a span of a season or whatever — this summer I’ve basically worn the same five outfits over and over and over again — but this is really the central challenge of a slow-turnover closet for me: forever finding new ways to put the same things together, as I am a person who is easily bored and who also finds joy and creativity in getting dressed.
One of my favorite things about this exercise is that, once I have a given set of garments laid out in a grid like I do, I can see things I never would have thought of. Like in the top row up there: a Wiksten Kimono + Fen Top twin set! We’ll see if I ever actually wear it, but it amuses me greatly. And the more I’ve done this, the easier it is to also just glance at the grid and spot combinations without needing to actually spell every one of them out like this.
I’ve had a lot of questions lately about how I do this, and I truly have found it to be the most beneficial thing in understanding my closet and choosing more wisely about what to add and subtract from it, so I’ll dedicate a whole blog post to it during Slow Fashion October.
PREVIOUSLY in Fall 2018 Wardrobe: Not-quite Fall closet inventory