Chicago is famous for its temperamental weather, especially the wild swings with which winter ends and spring, at least theoretically, begins. When it’s 70 degrees in early April we all say, “Oh, just wait—it’ll be 30 again in a few days.” What with the polar vortex and all, this year has been worse than usual. I usually turn my heat off on April 15th but it’s May 6, for crying out loud, and it was in the 40′s when I got up this morning!
On top of making it nearly impossible to figure out when to plant tomatoes, all of this tumult is adding way too much drama to my daily decisions about what to wear. I keep putting on things that are bright and colorful in the hope that sympathetic magic will bring on spring, but that hasn’t really worked. So now I’m going to take the ultimate step: switching my cold- and warm-weather clothes.
Last summer, after years of cramming things into spaces that were much too small, I bought a house that has, if you can imagine it, even more storage than I need, including multiple closets in which one can actually hang clothes. In the room where I store the extras (along with a large part of my purse collection, knitting and sewing supplies, linens, and old cat toys) there are two dressers and a closet available for off-season stuff and whatever else doesn’t quite fit in the bedroom so I’ve been thinking about what moves and what stays put.
I always face two challenges during seasonal clothing changeouts. The first is the fact that my winter and summer wardrobes don’t really differ as much as many people’s do. I wear heavy linen, cotton, and sleeveless/cardigan layers all year so it’s mainly a matter of switching wool skirts and pants for really lightweight cotton or linen ones, putting away all the long-sleeved dresses, trading boots for sandals, and trying to remember where I put the shorts. Each year I have to decide exactly where to draw the line. What about the sleeveless dress that’s really more fall-winter because the fabric is so heavy, or the flowered capris that are heavy cotton but totally summer?
In the last place I lived, access to the off-season clothes required moving a full clothing rack, toolboxes, and miscellaneous baskets out of the way so I could get to the back of a long closet, which was such a pain in the ass that once I changed seasons, that stuff essentially disappeared until it was time to switch again. Now I only have to open a different closet, so the decisions about what counts as winter and what counts as summer don’t feel like such major commitments.
That leaves the even bigger challenge: what to do with things I haven’t worn recently. For lots of people—and according to every magazine and TV show that has ever given advice about clothes, shopping, storage, or hoarding—this semi-annual ritual is an opportunity to “prune” or “declutter” or “curate.” The standard rule is to toss everything you haven’t worn in a year. (Some people even say six months, but they obviously don’t live in an area that has four seasons.) The idea is that if you haven’t worn something, either you really don’t like it anymore or it’s outlived its usefulness and you’re too stubborn, nostalgic, tied to the past, or on-the-road-to-hoarder-hell to admit it.
But I can go two or three or even four years without wearing something that I totally love just because I haven’t had a reason to, or I forgot I owned it, or I got rid of the thing that went perfectly with it (which just demonstrates the danger of tossing out clothes without careful thought). One day I see a skirt or sweater or a fantastic pair of shoes that’s somehow fallen to the bottom of the pile and I think, “I can’t believe I haven’t worn that in so long! I’m putting it on tomorrow!”
Every time I have to make this choice, I ask myself whether, if I lost that weight or found the right shoes, I’d want to wear a particular piece again. That’s not as simple a question as it seems because it’s also about losing weight or buying shoes and then discovering that something I’d stopped being interested in wearing suddenly looks good again.
A couple of years ago I decided to use the fabric from a skirt I really never wore to make a new skirt from a pair of pants I liked but that didn’t fit anymore. I put on the pants so I could figure out how to do it and to my surprise, they fit again!
So yay, pants! And also boo, no new skirt! But maybe I just haven’t seen that old one with the right pair of shoes yet.