Ten Item Wardrobe

Not my closet(s). Mine are way more jam-packed than that.

I know.  I disappear for the better part of a week, completely shirking my brand new and pretty awesome blogging schedule, and this is what you find when I inexplicably return.  Stuff about clothes.  Oh well.  Clothes are important to me.  I love clothes.  I feel like they say a lot about a person and about their self-perception.  I have liked clothes as far as I remember.  Shopping for clothes was (and still is) always something that Grandma and I would do.

But this summer, buying clothes to fit after I gained weight kind of became a bit of an obsession.  You know, nothing fit, and I couldn't just walk around naked.  At least for the month of June I went to Old Navy way too often and spent way more money than I should have.  It slowed down though.  And reared its head in a controlled way during the tax-free weekend right before school started because I decided that I needed to have something of a professional wardrobe.  It's been in remission ever since (book buying, on the other hand...)

At any rate, I've been reading a lot of books on France lately.  Along with clothing, I've always felt an affinity for all things French.  *shrugs shoulders*  C'est la vie.

One of the books I'm reading talks about cultivating a ten-item wardrobe.  The first time I read that, I was pretty much incredulous.  Ten items?  Ten pieces of clothing?  No freaking way.  Granted, these ten items do not include accessories or shoes or special occasion outfits or layering pieces (tank tops, cardigans, leggings).  But still!  Only ten items?  

Then I started thinking about it.  I could do a lot with the right ten basics.  

Especially when you consider what all you can do with accessories, shoes, and layering pieces.  One of my over-indulgences from this summer was to develop a large collection of tank tops.  I have solids.  I have thin stripes. I have thick stripes.  I have patterns.  I have a million colors.  I also own several bright scarves.  I don't have an over-abundance of real shoes (I own lots of flip flops, but it's finally gotten to cold for that) because I've always worried about buying a bright shoe that only really works with one outfit.  But I still think that wearing boots with a skirt looks totally different than when you wear flats with that same skirt.  Or heels.

By the way, special occasion outfits are really party dresses--something that I would wear only to a party, but not for a regular day outfit.  If this were summer, I could, however, include sundresses in my ten-item wardrobe.

Anyway, I've decided to try having a ten item wardrobe.  For one month.  I'll be traveling for ten days, so having a ten item wardrobe will really help cut down on the packing, which is nice.  I've picked my five bottoms, but I have not picked all of the tops yet.  I know three for sure.  Once I do (in the next couple of days), I'll post pictures of all of the items.  Then I will post pictures of the daily outfits.

I attempted to do something like this, called 15:30, a couple of years ago.  It was a failed experiment.  I don't really remember why I failed.  I think it was because of yo-yoing weather.  And it was my first semester of grad school and stuff was going down.

A couple of caveats about the experiment.  

I am not doing laundry every day.  I do laundry once a week-ish.  So, even though I am going to put a pair of jeans as one of my ten items, if that pair of jeans gets dirty, I can wear a different pair.  Same thing with black t-shirts.  Basically, I can swap like for like if I need to, but I can't swap things just because I get bored.

If I wind up losing weight and things don't fit, I'll obviously have to adjust there too.  I'll try to keep it similar, but there are some things I have that just don't have a smaller version of them.

I'm going to really try to limit myself to the ten items.  But if I'm going absolutely crazy or if I get a lot of fabulous clothes for Christmas, I'll probably up it to fifteen.

Also, I want to start writing about clothes once a week.  Updating on how this experiment is going.  And on other changes I make to my wardrobe.  I can't do a massive purge right now.  But I can do some fine-tuning.  Hopefully I can do a massive purge by summer.