Every minute of every day, inside and outside of every closet, there’s a women who thinks she’s got nothing to wear.
Can you relate?
Every day, closet doors open on rooms full of nostalgia and dream sizes, garments we convince ourselves we’ll one day wear again. These are the “skins” for who we are—at work, at home, when nobody’s around, on a first date, for our partners, while out shopping, in the park, when we want to be noticed, when we want to hide. These are our psyches, exposed!
What seems never to be discussed in the media is the relationship that we have with our closets: attachment or pride or joy, for example, or disconnection or betrayal or disappointment. What is happening here? We are identifying with our clothes. To say it another way, we want our clothes to identify with us.
In the last ten months, I’ve run two 12-session Stopping Overshopping groups, worked with a number of individual overshopping clients, and learned about two women who swore off any clothing purchases for an entire year, choosing instead to shop their own closets. (One has even developed a program to teach others to do the same. ) It seems as though everywhere I turn in my work life, people are coming out of their closets to talk about what’s in them. They’re doing this to feel balanced and reasonable, or to put the brakes on overshopping.
One useful strategy they use is to count the items of a particular class that they’ve overbought: shoes, perhaps, or maybe scarves or sweaters. For Lois, iterating a staggering 122 summer dresses certainly brought home the fact that she had far more than she needed or wore. Less dramatic counts had the same effect on others. Some clients have sold their overages on eBay; others gave things away by the dozen.
Clearly, I believe that closet reconnaissance is a mission worth completing. It’s something I’d been meaning to do for a number of years—yet never quite happened to get around to. Then I read an article in a local paper this April about a warm, creative, and competent woman named Eve Cantor, a former buyer at upscale Barneys and former women and children’s boutique owner who’d recently begun a business helping women explore their closets. I decided it was time for that long-postponed spring cleaning of mine.
I knew that part of what had kept me from overhauling my own closets was inertia, but a larger part was not wanting to go it alone. What Eve offers— impeccable taste and the capacity to size up (forgive the pun!) clients and help them put together versatile, reliable, and flattering wardrobes that express their personalities and lifestyles—exactly filled the bill. We decided that she’d come, we’d work together on my closet, and then we’d each write about the experience. Maybe the experience would be positive enough to motivate overshoppers, with or without a closet support buddy, to do the same.
As the day approached, I noticed a few anxious thoughts: “I don’t shop at Barney’s; I almost never spend that kind of money on my clothes. What’s she going to think of my wardrobe?” or “I haven’t tried on some of this stuff in years; what if it doesn’t even fit anymore?” or “There’s so much in these closets; where are we going to begin and how much can we get to? If we don’t finish, am I going to continue myself or just let the rest go?”
The actual day couldn’t have been more conducive to the task at hand. A gentle rain fell on New York, offering us a nurturing cocoon for the metamorphosis. Eve began by asking me to set aside the “no-brainers,” those items that I definitely wanted to keep; I’d say that constituted about half my wardrobe. As I tried on the rest of the garments, one by one, Eve showed me how some items could be altered to fit better. For example, the first picture is me trying on one of my favorite jackets; it’s gotten a little snug. Eve suggested this out-of-the box solution: have the zipper removed and replaced with a hook-and-eye closure, and maybe even wear the jacket with a skinny brown belt.
