My Life in Clothes

As some of you may have noticed by now – I don’t really have one cohesive goal for the year. My goals are a little broad, and I assume I’ll probably post about other little simple living aspects from time to time. That’s just my personality. I am one of those people who constantly has to have something going on. I always take on a million little projects, so I knew when I started The Simple Year project that this would be no different. I wouldn’t be true to myself if I didn’t have a million little things going on, so in the spirit of bouncing from topic to topic, this post will be focusing on buying less, and specifically buying less clothing.

I don’t actually consider myself someone who has lots of stuff. Cody and I had to ship all of our belongings to our little bush Alaskan home via the postal service, which meant everything had to fit in 18-gallon totes. We shipped eleven totes total (I think), and I would estimate that I had clothing in two of those totes. All of the clothing that I packed in those totes fits nicely in one-half of our dresser and the hangers pictured above, so it’s definitely not a ton of stuff.

However, half of the stuff in my closet I don’t wear and the other half is stuff that  I don’t particularly like. I have a habit of ordering clothing items off of the internet on a whim. It works out occasionally, but more often than not I end up hating whatever shows up in the mail. Either it doesn’t fit, or it doesn’t look good on me.

I have a tendency to order LuLaRoe clothing for work too. I’m wearing one of their dresses and sweaters in the picture above. While I love my LuLaRoe stuff, it tends to fall apart or get ruined in the crappy water that we constantly battle in our village. My outdoor clothing (brands like Columbia, Patagonia, North Face, etc) seems to hold up better, so I’d really like to start buying exclusively higher quality brands, however those brands tend to be quite a bit more pricey too. And even with buying better quality stuff, the quantity of clothing I buy still really needs to decrease.

I’d like to limit myself to a certain number of items that I can purchase to replace my old, crummy clothing. Project 333 is something I’ve played with in the past, but never committed too, so I’m interested in trying that out too, but I know that there are items I’ll need to swap out or get rid of before attempting it.

Then, to throw another unexpected twist in this personal goal, Cody and I spend about 10 weeks a year traveling. Our travel extravaganza began this Tuesday, and we will be living out of suitcases for the next few months. Project 333 is basically a forced thing at this point because all of our belongings have to fit in such compact spaces. I expect it will be more of a challenge once I am back at our home in Alaska for the start of the school year in August. Still, there are little things I hope to accomplish before then. So, while we travel this summer, I’m really hoping to learn how to live with less clothing. Once we are back home, I hope to then apply what I’ve learned to my every day life.


7 Responses to My Life in Clothes

  1. Do you know what you like? i.e. dresses rather than trousers, tunics more than tops for example? What do you need for your work life as opposed to your personal life? I imagine Alaska as being fairly “non-dressy” but I may be wrong! Do you have a dress code for work? What colours do you like, what colours look good on you? Maybe it would be a good idea just to jump right in and do Project 333 and tweak it as you go along – it is meant to work for you rather than just be a set of rules. Good luck!

  2. Pingback: Buying Clothes from ThredUP | The Simple Year

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