My outfit today includes a pair of Cynthia Ashby pants and a Boden cardigan. I got the pants at one of Cynthia’s studio sales, where you can pick up pieces that are one-of-a-kind, or imperfect, or from seasons past, and I often buy stuff on which the dye didn’t come out exactly right. In this case, the color was a tiny bit uneven and faded a little more than I’d expected but I love these pants and I wear them all the time in the summer.

I bought the cardigan because I had another one that I just adored, in a beautiful light greeny yellow that I wore so much I tore a hole in the elbow. The sweater’s cable pattern made it too much trouble to fix and the website didn’t have the color anymore so I couldn’t replace it. Instead, I ordered it in a color called something like “dusty rose”–not a shade I really wanted, but there you go. After wearing it only rarely for a few years, I decided to dye it some shade of green so it would actually replace my beloved one.

Of course, olive dye on a dusty rose fabric doesn’t produce anything that remotely resembles green, so back in the drawer it went, brought out once or twice when I really, really needed a lightweight cotton cardigan. Until one day I saw the light. Or I saw it in the right light. Or something.

Anyway, another Match or Clash lesson: Be prepared for serendipity.

About a year ago my friend Linda and I agreed to be at an event to promote a grantmaking group we’re in. In return for sitting behind a table right near the bar and smiling at people for a few hours, we’d get a donation from the organizer and maybe drum up some interest from a few attendees. We’d gone to a similar event in October and had a lot of fun despite sitting much farther from the bar, so this didn’t sound like a bad way to spend an evening.

As the day got closer, though, the prospect grew less and less appealing. First, I had to miss a performance by some friends that I’d really wanted to see; second, the event ran from 9 pm to 4:30 am, so there was the whole staying-awake thing. But the biggest problem was the fact that it was the annual White Party, which meant I had to wear, well, white. All white.

Now, white is a perfectly nice color on the right person, but that person is not me. I do have white linen pants but I almost never wear light colors next to my face, and on the rare occasions when I do, it’s usually something pink. White looked bad enough when my hair was dark but the grayer I get, the more washed out I look in it, and not even bright red lipstick and black-framed glasses really compensate. So it was no surprise that when I went through my closet and dresser I found nothing that would pass muster with the host.

I figured I’d just head over to Marshall’s and get a tank top that I could toss the next day, but first I sorted through a pile of old t-shirts, where I found a few that were primarily white: one from a conference, another from a cable TV show called “Three Guys Talk Hockey” (long story), and one that looked like it had come from an airline, maybe in a goodie bag or perhaps from that time my bags got lost coming back from somewhere. Unlike the other two, which seemed to be gigantic, the airline shirt fit like something a person might wear out in public and it looked as good with the linen pants as anything I was likely to buy, so I put it on, along with a printed shawl that I could drape over my shoulders or wind around my neck to break up the monotony.

As predicted, we had fun people watching, drinking, and admiring the truly amazing footwear. The shoes were so wonderful that after a couple of hours Linda started jumping up from behind our table and asking if she could take pictures:

The place we were sitting was relatively dark and with all of those fabulous shoes, no one was really paying attention to what I was wearing—which was a good thing, because at about midnight I brushed my hand across part of my shirt and suddenly realized from the odd texture that I’d worn it to paint my living room. And about an hour after that I remembered that I actually own a black and white sleeveless top that would have been perfect—and that I’d have been happy to wear—if I’d only thought of it at, say, 8 pm.

There’s a lesson of some kind here, although I’m not sure what it is. Keep better track of where I’ve put my clothes? Check everything for paint stains? Always sit in a dark corner so it doesn’t matter what I’m wearing?

Or maybe it’s as simple as this: keep a few pieces of clothing you hate, just in case, and never wear them unless you have to.

There are lots of ways to mark when you become a collector rather than someone who just has a big pile of stuff. I’ve got boxes and boxes of scarves and shawls, for instance: long and short ones, silk, cotton, linen, rayon, solid and patterned, artist made and mass produced, ones I bought online and on vacation, new and old and even really old (from my maternal grandfather, who died in 1929). But I don’t collect scarves or shawls. I just like them and can’t seem to stop buying more, no matter how often I tell myself I shouldn’t, and there’s no particular reason I buy one and not another beyond liking it better.

Collecting, though, is deliberate. You become a collector when you define the limits of what you’re accumulating and start looking for it on purpose: I’ll have this but not that and I won’t let chance determine whether I find it.

Lots of collectors are completists, trying to amass every single version of whatever it is they’re amassing, but I’m not. I have no idea how many styles of purses were produced by the companies I collect and I really don’t want to know. Or rather, I don’t need to know because I already know enough: There are lots of them out there, enough to keep me busy for a long time, and probably a lot more than I could ever use, display, or store.

I often say that one of the great things about collecting vintage purses is that it keeps me from buying new purses. The downside, of course, is that I can’t buy new purses. What I can do, though, is start new mini-collections, like the Delill fruit change purses. For a long time I limited myself to things like that—extensions of my existing collections. Then one day I ran across something that struck my fancy in a completely different way. Soon I started buying these:

These are all Margaret Smith bags—”Margaret Smith Gardiner Maine,” as the labels always say. Starting in the 1940s, Margaret Smith produced purses and beach bags, along with clothes we’d start calling preppy a few decades later. The bags are almost always fabric, usually cotton, and often lack the cardboard liners that make purses stiff, so they’re a lot floppier than leather bags. And because they’re fabric, the handles tend to get dirty, where leather ones tend to crack. But the fabrics are what attracted me in the first place and what makes me buy one rather than another:

Sometimes pretty is enough.