“Hey, Laura!” I hear you saying. “What’s this Match or Clash thing?”

Put simply, it’s my theory of style:  You can match or you can clash but whatever you do, make sure it looks deliberate.  Match your socks to your jewelry, your sweater to your shoes or put three clashing patterns of pillowcases and sheets on your bed. It doesn’t matter whether you follow the “rules” or break them as long as it’s clear that you did it on purpose.

I’ve always hated the way people use “matchy-matchy” as a negative.  Partly that’s because what they’re usually criticizing isn’t so much that things match, but that they do it in a completely unoriginal way.  The curtains and the upholstery are made from the same fabric and the paint and throw pillows use a single color from it. The result is a room that looks like it came from the textile company’s catalog instead of from someone’s imagination.

Here’s my idea of matching:

This is the black/grey/white striped dress and cobalt tights that I wore today along with three lapis and silver earrings and two rings with the same color blue in them.  (You can see one of the earrings hanging to the left of the tights.) When I looked for somewhere to set up this photo I recognized the perfect spot:  next to a black/white/blue oilcloth tote bag from the German department store KaDeWe.

When I wear a scarf that picks up a color in the pattern of my dress or a piece of jewelry that matches my tights people sometimes ask how I managed to find so many things that go together.  There are particular colors I love and buy a lot of (certain shades of green and yellow, for instance) so maybe it’s no big surprise.  But I don’t think it’s really the buying that matters, it’s seeing the match:  Oh, wait—I’ve got gloves that go with the wool scarf I’m wearing under my coat! Those tights are the exact same color as the stripes in this skirt!  Don’t I have a pin somewhere that’s the same shade as these shoes?

What’s funny about this is that I’m actually a little bit colorblind. My problem is only with the border between blue and green, where my vision tends to yellow-shift.  You think this paint chip or pair of socks is blue, but it sure looks green to me.

Colorblindness is a sex-linked trait that’s relatively unusual for women (8 to 10% of men have it, compared to something like 1/2% of women) and I seem to be the only one in the family to inherit it from my father, who had the more severe red-green kind. He was seriously matchy:  the shirt had to go with the jacket, the tie with the shirt, the shoes with the belt.  When he shopped for clothes, which was often, he’d ask the sales clerk to make sure things were the color he thought they were and he always had his clothes organized accordingly:  blue shirts in one drawer, ecru in another, grey somewhere else, socks and ties sorted so he could always find the right ones. He counted on brown belts having gold buckles and black belts having silver ones, since he could tell those apart, and if he discovered halfway through the day that he was wearing the wrong socks, he’d go upstairs and change them. Fortunately, his office was in our house.

I try to deal with my own color problems by carrying clothing and accessories around the house, holding them up to a window, scrutinizing them under the brightest bathroom light, trying to make sure that those are really the same shade of blue, or that they’re different enough so it doesn’t look as if I was trying to match them and failed.  If I’m not entirely sure, I’ll sometimes pick tights or a scarf that’s in between two colors I’m wearing.  Or I default to all black—which, oddly, no one ever seems to describe as too matchy-matchy.

Occasionally, though, I’m on the expressway driving to work and I realize that the tights I thought were mauve are actually greyish brown or the red in my dress is a lot more orange than I thought, and I’m tempted to follow my father’s example and turn right around, go back home, and find something that matches. Since that’s usually not practical, I just try to avoid looking at the offending item for the rest of the day.

Coning soon:  If you can’t match, clash.

Seriously–what’s up with all these motorcycle boots?

Or the ones that have the buckles and zippers but also open toes?Or these, which I bought in Paris 20 years ago and have zippers, a zillion clips, and no buckles at all?Of course I know exactly why I have five of these pairs–paradoxically, it’s because I already own the perfect pair, the ones up at the top, which I bought at Barneys during the winter of 1999-2000 for $250. They’re beautifully made and fit exactly right and strike the ideal balance between girly and punk.

Let me stop for a second to mention that I believe in impulse purchases. Over decades of shopping I’ve learned that when I try to be pragmatic–I should really own x kind of shirt and I’m going out to look for one–I usually end up with something that I never wear. But when I buy something that just jumps out at me I almost always end up with something I love. (This approach also works for houses and cars, but that’s another story.)

I fell for these boots the moment I tried them on and they have turned out to be the absolute best clothing purchase I have ever made in my life. Really. For the first eight or ten years I wore them nearly every day from October to April. I wore them in the rain and snow, walking around Paris and Prague, for dressy occasions and for messy ones, with pants and dresses, long skirts and short skirts, tights and socks, clothes I loved and stuff I wasn’t all that crazy about. And they were always perfect with everything.

Even with the minor repairs at 8 years and major ones at about 10, the $250 I originally paid for them probably turned out to be the least I’ve paid for any shoes ever. If I calculated the cost per wearing, it’d be like Barneys paid me to take them home.

Sadly, though, by year 12 the wear on the leather itself showed that I wasn’t going to be able to rejuvenate them again and I started wearing them less often in order to make them last. I bought other boots, partly to supplement them, but also in the hope of finding another perfect pair.

Obviously, I haven’t found them yet. Instead, I have three–or maybe it’s five–pairs that do the work of one and I’m still looking. Sometimes I think that instead of buying yet another pair that isn’t perfect I should take the original ones to someone who makes handmade shoes and just have them replicated.

I can’t even imagine what that would cost but I’m not going to do it. I feel like it would be cheating, so I’m just going to keep shopping.

Four years ago I did one of those 365-days-of-Facebook things, posting what I was wearing every day (only missed one!). It was a writing exercise so there were some rules.  The posts were just lists of items of clothing: the skirt in that material, the shirt with those sleeves, these tights with the pattern on them, the boots, a scarf. No explanations of why I was wearing something, how I felt about a particular item, what people usually said when I wore it, although I would sometimes name the designer or the brand, or say where I bought a piece of clothing if it was someplace interesting.

People commented on the posts and on what I was wearing:  “Great dress!” “What’s the purpose of open-toed boots?” Occasionally “I have no idea what any of those words mean.”  Some of them would request that I post photos.  And sometimes when I saw a friend who’d read that day’s post they’d say, “Oh, that’s what you were talking about!” or “If I didn’t already know you I could have looked for your outfit!”

I started the daily posts again on New Year’s Day of this year but this time I decided to do something more. I’ve always loved clothes and shoes and all the accoutrements and although I’ve never really been “fashionable,” I’ve always had a recognizable look.  Years ago, when I wrote for a weekly paper, I’d occasionally write about that kind of thing and in the late ’90s a friend and I even organized an academic conference on style.  I wrote a long essay about skirts and my understanding of femininity,  I gave a paper about getting my first tattoo, and I read a lot of books about clothes and fashion and shopping. But then shit happened and I got distracted and never got back to the subject.

Now I’m back. I expect to describe some of the things I wear in more detail and consider what particular items mean to me. I’ll also write about my tattoos and my hair and my increasingly large collection (well, two collections, really) of vintage purses. I will attempt to answer important questions like “Why do I own four pairs of black leather motorcycle boots?” and “Is it possible for someone in her 60s to wear Converse sneakers unironically?” along with some others that don’t involve footwear. I will probably say something about scarves and about wearing my mother’s jewelry and about the differences between fashion and style.  If my level of disgust continues at its present level I will speculate about why the language in fashion magazines is so repellant.

And yes, there will be pictures.