Wardrobe Planning I: In which I talk about the reason I am interested in planning my wardrobe

Counter-intuitively, while mostly confined to my sofa in PJs due to illness, I have spent a lot of time over the last couple of weeks revisiting some of my thoughts about wardrobe planning. I will probably write a few posts on the topic, so, you know, fair warning, feel free to skip past etc. etc. Today, though, I'll just give a bit of background on why I am writing about it at all.

I became interested in wardrobe planning specifically more or less at the same time as I started sewing. This interest was really born of a lot of frustration and the desire to Be Better At Getting Dressed. I go round and round the feminist and moral implications of worrying about whether I am good at wearing clothes (mostly, these implications are not good), but the fact is, no matter those moral implications, I don't consider it to be among my major talents and have long felt I needed to work on it. As I've grown older, I think I've become less confident, through increasing cynicism and experience, that the sheer force of my winning (!) personality and excellent ideas will carry the day at work even if I am badly or inappropriately dressed when I present them. The problem is therefore that I've been forced to try to figure out, rather belatedly, what dressing well and appropriately means for me personally and what I'm prepared to do about it.

"What do you mean you don't want a tunic with butterflies on it? Isn't that what EVERY fat woman wants to wear?" -- Clothing buyers at everywhere I shopped in 2005, apparently. This actual tunic is from Evans' CURRENT range, alas.

 The defining moment for me when I decided that Clothes Really Are Difficult was back in the mid-2000s when I was in my late 20s. At that time I wore a UK size 24/26 (about a US 22/24) and had a corporate job. These were not particularly compatible facts. My experience was that were relatively few places to buy affordable, good quality, attractive clothes for an office based career that fit. Anything that was in my size and suitable for corporate wear cost the earth and was often more suited to women 20 years older than me. I think things have changed a bit in the last decade (and I'm a decade older than I was then, of course, so perhaps my perceptions of the clothes options would have changed). However, I wouldn't be at all surprised to discover that younger, professional plus size women still struggle to build a decent quality age-appropriate work wardrobe on a budget, and instead were still trawling through racks of tunics with butterfly prints looking for something more professional.

Even before I was a plus-sized grown-up with a clothes budget, though, I was a plus-sized (mostly UK 16-20) and taller-than-average teen and university student. Even when all I was buying was school uniform and then the de facto student uniform of jeans-and-a-sweater, my choices always seemed very limited. My fall back clothes-buying strategy was buy anything that fit and was at least in a colour I liked and a price point I could stand, bearing in mind that this often didn't leave many choices (not helped by the fact that I am a cheapskate thrifty and probably did budget less than I needed to for clothes at that time). The questions of whether I liked the thing I was buying, wanted to wear it, could imagine an outfit that included it, etc etc were pretty much pointless to contemplate, since the actual choice was: this top, or no top at all. These trousers, or no trousers at all. Not a great set of choices unless you enjoy public indecency charges.

For the most part, at that time, I decided that since clothes and fashion were not interested in ME, I would eschew all interest in clothes or fashion. I don't think this was necessarily a bad thing, I should add, and I am not breaking my heart over my fashion-less teens and twenties. It also wasn't self-consciously virtuous (in that "I am above these worldly concerns!" sort of way). I just... didn't really commit much mental energy to it, except at a few specific moments e.g. prior to a special event, which would cause frantic activity and, inevitably, despair.

However, ultimately, when I hit a certain level of seniority in my job, my clothing situation resulted in several encounters with a particularly appalling boss who lectured me, in these very words, for being "fat, ugly and badly dressed". (To give you an impression of how toxic this situation/workplace was: the boss' job title was VP of Human Resources. This was not a good period of my life. I wouldn't even swap it for my current PJs/sofa/chronic illness situation.)

The garibaldi biscuit, a.k.a. my comfort eating food of choice

 To be frank, I was fat, and I probably was badly dressed. (Ugly is too subjective to comment, though her actual problem was that I wouldn't (and still won't) wear make-up due to epic skin allergies, which was presumably supposed to hide the ugliness.) There is, if I'm honest, a part of me now that cringes horribly at how I presented myself, clothes-wise, at that time. However, I am never ever going to think that that boss' approach to talking to me about those issues was good or right, and it really didn't help me at all. (Nor was her constant fat-shaming in any way productive, since every time she told me I was disgusting and fat I would tend to go home and comfort eat an entire packet of Garibaldi biscuits.) With increasing levels of desperation and loathing of the shopping experience, I continued to acquire clothes I didn't really like in an attempt to improve my wardrobe (there was one olive green suit in particular that sticks in my mind horribly). Mostly, however, I defaulted more and more to the most basic, safe corporate uniform of black trousers and a white blouse.

Subsequently, once I had left the job with the terrible boss, I lost weight and dropped down to a much more well-served, mainstream size (about a UK 14/16 or US 10/12). Once I got over the shock of being able to walk into most high street shops and find something in my size, I was mainly sad to discover that being thinner did not have the magical fashion results so widely touted by the weight-loss industrial complex. I didn't enjoy clothes shopping any better, couldn't find well-fitting clothes on the rails (alas, no matter what my weight I will always ultimately be forced to consider my proportionally enormous bust first) and continued to experience the woe of standing in front of a stuffed wardrobe and wailing that I had nothing to wear. Overall, I bought a lot more clothes, and while I probably did achieve a marginally higher standard of presentation, it was all still very hit and miss. For all it was easier to find clothes in my size, it was somehow no easier to actually find clothes I wanted to wear. The only respite from this was when I started my PhD and my whole wardrobe devolved back to student standard jeans and t-shirts/sweaters on class days and yoga pants and t-shirts/sweaters on days when I was working at home.

My actual pre and post wardrobe purge photos from 2012

Enter the decision to start sewing garments a couple of years ago. At about this time, two other wardrobe related things happened: I knew I was going to be going out to work again and needed to upgrade from student wear; and I also started to get really itchy about how many clothes I owned and the associated facts that (a) I didn't like very many of the things I owned; (b) I didn't wear very many of them but just had the same few things I did like in near constant rotation. I did a HUGE wardrobe purge, and decided to start to rebuild with a plan, which has gone through multiple iterations ever since.

The question of what I want to own has turned out to be a much more complicated question than I anticipated, because the thing with sewing is that in theory at least, you can have anything, or nearly anything. Once I started to feel like I had free choice, rather than just being stymied by hating everything that is available to buy, I had to ask myself how I actually wanted to dress. No more "this top, or no top at all" but "any top at all that you can imagine". Somehow, this is far more work than I ever expected. It is liberating not to be limited to what is in the shops, but it is time-consuming to think about what you would like instead. "This top or no top at all" is a much faster, if less enjoyable, decision. It was evident to me from the start that sewing would be a much bigger time investment than any previous clothing acquisition strategy I have employed, not just because I have to MAKE something instead of clicking a "Buy It Now!" button. My conclusion was that having a concrete plan/set of plans would be the best way forward.

In the next post I will talk a bit more about the evolution of my wardrobe plan and how sewing fits in. (ETA: You can read Part II here.)