Clothes Coffin?

The one thing every woman longs for is the perfect wardrobe. You know, that one from the depths of urban legend where you open the door and can quickly select one or two key items that will easily mix to form the perfect outfit each and every time with a minimum of fuss?

I don’t know about you, but my wardrobe isn’t so much a carefully edited selection as it is a coffin for my clothes. A wildly and carelessly accumulated stash of all of the crap I though I might have needed at some point in my life and just never got around to wearing or throwing out.

The strange thing is I have never been one to follow trends religiously - I cannot artfully drape or layer an outfit to save my life and I certainly don’t do whatever fashion magazines tell me to - but the more I aimed for a great wardrobe the more I missed. Nothing matched. Nothing really suited me. And certainly nothing was of a good quality. It actually scares me when I think about how much money I have wasted in chain stores on clothes that I love but that fall apart after an unacceptably small number of wears.

One thing I always noticed about my clothing habits was an obsession with t-shirts – which I’m convinced is genetic, one look at my brother’s wardrobe can only confirm this. In my youth it was brightly coloured ones with strange images, but for the last few years it has been white ones. With everything. It has been my stop gap for a long time now and has always been paired with either pants and a bright scarf or a statement-y type skirt (I would just like to say that I have photographic evidence of myself doing this long before that Jil Sander runway ;) ). I have now also segued into the Parisienne staple of Breton striped tees and own far more than most people consider healthy. But, they’re the perfect style statement and they, along with my hefty collection of white tees, are going to be the starting point of my plan to build the ultimate capsule wardrobe of timeless classics.

It's going to be a bumpy ride.

image: inclinedtocreate.com