Editor’s note: hi, it’s me, I’m the editor. The content of this series is adapted from the Memoir That Never Was, which I wrote last year. The themes centered on identity-making and my relationship with secondhand stuff), but in writing it, I ended up synthesizing ideas that have been pivotal to my growth as a person since turning 40. Although I decided to shelve my Memoir That Never Was indefinitely, I decided that there are parts of it I would like to share here on the blog. It will get pretty personal/vulnerable at times, but I think the community we’ve created here is a wonderful (and safe) space, and I hope that these posts will inspire reflection and conversation. Cheers!

Let’s jump back to the full-closet-nothing-to-wear dilemma and talk about how one might tackle it with the Functional Clothes Wearer vs Creative Clothes Wearer distinction in mind. The first question I would ask myself is simple, and applies no matter what kind of relationship someone has with their clothes: am I doing ok? Don’t skip it. If your wellbeing – physical, emotional or mental – is suffering, it’s very likely to have a negative impact on your satisfaction with whatever you’re wearing, whether you’re a Functional Clothes Wearer or a Creative Clothes Wearer. When we are not feeling well, it is much harder to feel positive about anything, whether it’s something we care about a little or a lot. For me, dissatisfaction with my outfits is one of the earliest signs that my mental wellbeing is deteriorating; my creative drive grinds to a halt long before other parts of my life start to come undone. On the flip side, practicing creativity – even in small ways – can boost my sense of wellbeing. When my mom was dying, I got dressed up every day to go visit her; I did that for no other reason than because it made me feel better, more like myself, through the worst time of my life. It didn’t make any part of that journey easier, but it helped me to not lose myself in the process. Creativity doesn’t have to look creative or produce tangible products to “count”. Anything can be a creative act if it combines intention and meaning. It can be as simple as arranging a single flower in a bud vase on our desk, or the ritual of a morning cup of tea using a favourite blend and a teacup that used to belong to our grandmother. There is poetry in the prosaic.[1]

But let’s assume that we are well. Then, the root cause of sartorial dissatisfaction can usually be found by examining our relationship with our clothes to see where it might be getting off-track. For Functional Clothes Wearers, I think there are two common causes of dissatisfaction, one functional and one philosophical. Functional dissatisfaction happens when closets aren’t serving the functions someone needs them to serve — or not serving them well. Changes in personal circumstances – starting a new job, moving to a different city, becoming a parent, physical changes – can throw even a high-performing closet into disarray. Have your functional needs changed recently? If so, it could explain why you’re suddenly at war with your closet. Philosophical dissatisfaction can happen when a closet reflects back the owner’s confusion about their relationship with clothes. A Functional Clothes Wearer who thinks she must stay on top of fashion trends or else risk getting called out on TikTok, may end up buying clothes she thinks she ought to buy, but which she neither likes nor finds useful. “Wear what you like” is a phrase that solicits too many eyerolls and not enough respect, in my opinion. Its ambiguity doesn’t render it meaningless; it makes room for a plurality of meaning. It’s literally the only piece of sartorial advice that applies to everyone. For Functional Clothes Wearers, it’s a reminder (and permission, if permission feels needed) that it’s ok not to engage with fashion as a hobby, creative or otherwise. Function and art may overlap, but that doesn’t mean they are inextricable. If one is simply trying to paint one’s house, one doesn’t need to be Picasso. Everyone needs to wear clothes, but that doesn’t mean everyone needs to find personal fulfillment in fashion. Wearing what you like, simply because you like it and it works for you, is totally valid.

The specter of looking “dated” is something that seems to haunt a lot of people – particularly, I think, Functional Clothes Wearers. W. David Marx argues that fashion cycles are driven by humanity’s constant striving for status, writing:

[f]ashion cycles … [move] the population from one arbitrary practice to another for no reason other than elitist distinction and social conformity. Emulation is a delusional lunge at status improvement that only bolsters the existing social hierarchy.[2]

Basically, fashion cycles are kicked off because the high-status elites need new ways by which to distinguish themselves from the masses, thereby reinforcing their high status; the trends that emerge are then emulated, in a kind of hierarchical cascade, by everyone else, from early adopters all the way to what Marx calls the “laggards” – “individuals [who] are always out of sync with culture, which suggests a lack of social capital, a meager media diet, and, in some cases, a disregard for basic social norms.”[3] Once a trend is adopted (passively) by laggards, it has irrevocably reached the end of its cycle. Nobody wants to be the laggard in this scenario, to be inadvertently late to a party everyone else has already left. When it comes to fashion, I think Functional Clothes Wearers can be especially susceptible to this fear, precisely because they engage with clothes as functional objects of consumption, not as vehicles of creative expression. But there are a few things worth considering here. One, fashion is notorious for churning out micro trends because its business model requires constant perceived newness to drive consumption; social media amplifies these micro trends because social media also requires constant perceived newness to drive engagement. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that all, of even most, micro trends are markers of status; in other words, unless you’re an influencer, you can probably sit out most micro trends without fear of being “laggardly”. Two, macro trends move relatively slowly. Skinny jeans, for example, fell “out of fashion” over a period of several years, for most of which time they continued to be worn by large segments of the general public, even as countless articles warned of their impending loss of coolness. Three, looking “dated” is rarely a function of a single item of clothing. Something is “dated” not simply by being out of sync with current trends, but by being instantly recognizable as belonging to a specific past time period. Skinny jeans, alone, might not make an outfit dated, especially when paired with current, in-trend pieces. Skinny jeans, peplum tops, and bubble necklaces? Perhaps a different story. Four, trends are cyclical – especially in fashion. Marx writes:

“[a]fter contaminated trends are fully abandoned, they may be forgotten. And as negative symbolic associations fade, the trends are primed for a comeback. Once a convention is removed from “circulation and consideration” – and no longer associated with present-day adopters – innovators can resurrect it as a new means of distinction. The Adidas Country sneaker debuted in 1971 as a suburban cross-country show popular with “corny preppy kids”. But by 1987 it had disappeared from suburban culture, allowing New York’s hip-hop elites to embrace it as their own.”[4]

Some trends may need decades to make their comeback; others barely leave before they’re back again. Just look at leopard print or, on the other end of the spectrum, preppy style. All of this to say, the fear of looking “dated” is overblown, in my opinion, relative to the average person’s risk of suffering sudden and catastrophic embarrassment as a result of their sartorial choices. Unless you haven’t been to the mall, watched any media, or left the house in years, the odds are that wearing whatever you like will not make you any kind of social pariah. There is one exception, and it’s not so much an exception as an asterisk to this conversation. If the primary function one wants their clothes to serve is status-signaling, then by necessity one must pay attention to trends – the right ones, anyway – to be able to use them to maximize social cachet.

For Creative Clothes Wearers, “wear what you like” is a reminder of a different kind: that fashion is a tool – a means to an end, not an end in itself. We should wear what we like because it is the embodiment of our creativity. Creative Clothes Wearers should also look at trends – not because they dictate what we must wear, but because artists must be familiar with and understand their tools. If fashion is a language, then trends form its vocabulary. Personal style is the act of writing. When it comes to closet dissatisfaction, Creative Clothes Wearers face two common issues as well. The functional issue is the same as everyone else’s: even if clothing is a form of self-expression, there are still functional needs that need to be met and sometimes our closets end up missing the mark. The philosophical issue ties back to the imperative of “wear what you like”. Do we know what we like? In other words, do we know what we want to communicate? If we are at the beginning of our personal style journey – or, as I was back in 2014, still grappling with the question of identity – we may not be sure. Other times, we may not immediately notice when what we want to communicate changes (because we have changed), and our closet needs to catch up. Which brings us to the second part of the issue: are our clothes allowing us to communicate what we want to say, in the way we want to say? It is a far more open-ended question than those which might confront a Functional Clothes Wearer dealing with a problematic closet, but that is the nature of expression itself. We find ourselves in the telling.

Sartorial happiness lies not only in understanding how we relate to clothes – what they mean to us and how we use them – but also being aware that not everyone around us feels the same. We should not look at the choices other people make with their clothing without taking into consideration that different perspectives or values may lie behind them. Functional Clothes Wearers and Creative Clothes Wearers can have interesting conversations about fashion and clothes, but they probably shouldn’t take advice from each other. Take, for example, the idea of paring down clothing choices to a personal uniform to reduce decision-making load; many tout it as a transformative lifehack, and I’m sure it works for plenty of people who aren’t Steve Jobs, but I’m also sure it will never work for me – ditto for the ever-popular capsule wardrobe idea, in its many iterations. Any proposition that seeks to automatize, simplify, and remove experimentation from the clothes experience will never make me a happier, more productive person; it will only suck joy out of my life. I only wish it hadn’t taken me years – and many failed attempts at capsule-ing my closet – to realize that, but better later than never. On the flip side, if you’re a Functional Clothes Wearer, or mostly leaning that way, you will probably not find much joy in turning your clothes into an art project, picking adjectives to describe your personal style, or curating the perfect Pinterest mood-board. When engaging with any kind of fashion discourse, I think it’s helpful to ask ourselves: what is being prioritized here, function or form, and how does that align with my priorities? Knowing that helps us not only make sense of the information or ideas being presented to us, but also our choices in what we may do with it. Our closet satisfaction depends on it.

[1] Philip Mann, The Dandy At Dusk: Taste and Melancholy in the Twentieth Century, 2017, p. 50

[2] W. David Marx, Status and Culture, p. 201

[3] Marx, p. 196

[4] Marx p. 215

Three days of rain made this week a bit of a washout, but we snuck in a little fun here and there. Mostly, I spent the week adjusting to “normal” life, aka life-when-I’m-not-writing-24/7. I felt unmoored, which of course is bound to happen when a deeply-set routine is upended. Also, I’d forgotten what the “non-productive” phase of the creative process felt like (and how much I always struggle with it).

I’m currently taking a break from my completed WIP before I dive into edits and also taking a break from querying A Party to Murder. Instead, I am incubating ideas for my next book and waiting to see what coalesces. And I am consuming as much diverse media as I can in the meantime because you never know what will spark a connection that brings together disparate ideas into a story.

This week, I read a couple of fantasy mysteries that were pretty fun: Voyage of the Damned by Frances White (think And Then There Were None set on a magical boat in fantasy world, with an LGBTQ romance subplot) and Murder at Spindle Manor by Morgan Stang (locked room-type murder mystery set in a magical inn with a monster-hunting protagonist). I’m still looking for comps for my WIP and neither of these quite fits the bill, but I had a great time reading them. I also read a biography of Casanova (yes, that Casanova) by Ian Kelly, which was excellent, and am currently making my way through a book on the cultural history of St. Petersburg. Variety is the spice of life … and of writers.

My birthday is coming up and I still haven’t decided what I want as my birthday treat(s). I did pre-order the new biography of Gwyneth by Amy Odell, which I’m hoping will be a delight for my inner gossip-obsessed 90s teenager, but that’s all for now. I had a bad experience with Poshmark recently, so I’m a little gun-shy about sourcing there at the moment. (And Poshmark is where I’ve gotten a lot of bday presents for myself in the past.) I do have some fun plans percolating, though, so I shan’t be short of treats, one way or another …

Have a great weekend!

Editor’s note: hi, it’s me, I’m the editor. I’m adding this as a kind of introduction slash context for this new series, Tales of Thrift. The content of this series is adapted from the Memoir That Never Was, which I wrote last year. Its themes centered on identity-making and my relationship with secondhand stuff, but in writing it, I ended up synthesizing ideas that have been pivotal to my growth as a person since turning 40. Although I ultimately shelved my Memoir That Never Was indefinitely, I’ve decided that there are parts I would like to share here on the blog. It will get pretty personal/vulnerable at times, but I think the community we’ve created here is a wonderful (and safe) space, and I hope that these posts will inspire reflection and conversation. Cheers!

Have you ever looked at your overflowing closet and thought, “God, I have nothing to wear!” as you scrambled to pick something to wear to the job, appointment, or party you’re already 10 minutes late for? Isn’t that the worst? Nothing is more guaranteed to kill a good mood faster, or make you want to crawl back into bed and tell the world, “sorry, better luck tomorrow.” Or is that just me? Because I’ve been there, and sometimes it wasn’t just an ‘off’ day. Sometimes it was, like, an entire month. When that happens, I know it’s time for a check-in: something is rotten in the state of Denmark Adina, and I must find out what it is. Clothes are just clothes, except sometimes they aren’t.

Wait. Let me rephrase that. For some people, clothes are just clothes. Period. End of chapter. Just kidding – let’s continue. Since the invention of the loincloth, clothes have provided functional utility and, since we moved out of caves, social utility too. We wear clothes because they protect our bodies from the environment and because they tell other people who we are and what we’re doing. An office worker and a farmer wear different things for both of those reasons. And those reasons represent the sum total of what clothes do and mean for some people. Let’s call those people Functional Clothes Wearers. Think of Steve Jobs, the man who single-handedly spawned the “successful people wear uniforms” think-piece cottage industry. He famously wore the same thing every day, a black turtleneck and jeans. Maybe he did it because, as some people suggested, he wanted to create a personal brand that set him apart from other CEOs. Maybe he did it for the same reason Barack Obama told people he only wore gray or blue suits – to pare down decisions, eliminating the trivial (what to eat, what to wear) in order to focus on the critical (running a global empire, presumably). Either way, for Functional Clothes Wearers, function trumps form; to them, the fashion industry occupies the same mental space as the car industry does for me – I know it’s there but I never think about it until it’s time to buy a new car, at which point I pick whatever car-shaped object fits my driving needs and budget. Steve Jobs wore turtlenecks made by Issey Miyake rather than Walmart – I would too, if I had the money – but I don’t think he was a front-row regular at any fashion shows.

There is a second group of people, whom I am going to call Creative Clothes Wearers. I am not using the term “creative” as a descriptor of their style, but rather as a way to describe the way in which they relate to clothes. For this group, wearing clothes is a creative act – a means of self-expression, like writing or painting. Function matters, of course, but function can be served in different ways, and it is the choice of form that is important to Creative Clothes Wearers. For these folks, picking a suit is not a trivial decision to be automated in service of greater efficiency. It is an opportunity to communicate – not as a matter of necessity or convenience, but as art. For Creative Clothes Wearers, an outfit isn’t the email you write to your boss about the quaterly sales report; it’s the novel you write so the world can understand your point of view.

Functional Clothes Wearers and Creative Clothes Wearers are fundamentally different. Not better or worse, just different. Everyone falls somewhere along the spectrum between Functional Clothes Wearers and Creative Clothes Wearers. It doesn’t matter where you fall, but I think it’s helpful to know where you fall, because that determines how you can best maximize your happiness when it comes to fashion and clothes. If you’re closer to the Functional Clothes Wearer end of the spectrum, having to constantly pay attention to fashion trends, updating your closet every season, or even just thinking about personal style can feel bewildering, overwhelming and, ultimately, frustrating. It’s like being asked to write an essay on philosophy, when all you want to do is send a quick text message to your husband about picking up some milk on the way home. Functional Clothes Wearers want to look nice and feel good in their clothes as much as everyone else, but there is no particular joy in thinking about clothing a second longer than necessary to decide if something looks cute, feels comfortable, suits the climate and their boss’ expectations. If that sounds like you, here’s my unsolicited advice. You don’t need to pick three words to describe your style, hell, you don’t need to have a personal style. You can just wear clothes. Any clothes that you like, find comfortable, and consider appropriate to your situation. That’s it. Nobody is going to think less of you if you’re wearing a pair of jeans from 3 trend cycles ago, because people in general don’t think that much about what other people are wearing and also because most of them have no idea what a trend cycle is. You wanna know what I say when I see someone who is wearing skinny jeans in the year of our Lord 2025? Nothing. What someone else is wearing is none of my goddamn business as it has absolutely zero impact on my life. You wanna know what I – a self-professed Creative Clothes Wearer who spends an inordinate amount of time pondering the meaning of clothes – think when I see someone wearing skinny jeans? Assuming I have even noticed it – because, like most people, I’m probably otherwise occupied ruminating about what I’m wearing or, better yet, about what I’m having for lunch – this is what I think: here is a person who either really loves skinny jeans or doesn’t think about jeans very much at all. As is their prerogative.

Did you hear that? That was the sound of a value-neutral statement. Do you know why I’m wasting time pointing out something obvious like that? It’s not that I don’t trust your reading comprehension; I just feel that this is a point worth belaboring. There are some absolutes in life, but mostly there are choices that exist outside of an objective binary – good and bad. What makes a choice good or bad is a subjective valuation each of us brings to the question and, short of a situation where that choice directly impacts another person, the answers can never be categorically wrong. I think avocadoes are gross, but I don’t think it’s gross that my husband loves them. His love of avocadoes does not threaten my personal worldview; I don’t need to convince him that I’m right, that avocadoes are gross and that he should buy muscat grapes instead. (Although he should, because I adore them, and he should also let me eat all of them.) I’m using a dumb example here, but go into any comment section on any social media platform, and you will see a million of them.

“Cute dress! I would never wear that though – it’s so short.”

 “That paint colour makes the room look really dark – it would look so much better beige.”

“You’re putting up your Christmas tree in October? Wow, that’s so early!”

“You’re putting up your Christmas tree in December? My kids would never let me do that …”

The only rational and relatively polite response in each and every one of those cases is “OK, and?” Most social media comment sections are a waste of time because they’re taken up by people dumping out their insecurities, stream-of-consciousness style, in the pursuit of validation they will never get because why would anyone stop what they’re doing and go “wow, Random Person I’ve Never Met, you are SO right: my house should have been beige all along, what was I even thinking – of course there is only one right way to decorate and you nailed it!” To avoid inadvertently becoming one of those people, I have a very simple rule I use in deciding whether or not to post a comment on someone else’s social media content. It goes like this: am I writing an unqualified compliment? Hit send. Am I writing anything else? No, I am not. That’s it. I told you it was simple. I know what you might be thinking: some people post stuff asking for opinions – surely, then, it’s acceptable to give one. And I am not going to disagree with you, but I will gently point out that unless it’s a question posed in a friends group chat, it’s probably just a ploy to hit engagement metrics. Personally, I ain’t got time for that, but you do you.

But let’s hop off this tangent and return to fashion. You might think that because I’m a person who views clothing as a form of self-expression, I am constantly trying to “read” what other people are saying with their outfits. I do … and I don’t. In depends on the person. It’s quite easy to spot someone who is trying to express something through their clothing versus someone who is simply wearing clothes. Even Functional Clothes Wearers can recognize it, though they may not always be able to put their finger on why. It’s what we are referring to when we say that a person has “style”. Personal style is like a signal that says “subtext here, read at your own leisure”. You may or may not have the time and inclination to do it. But the invitation is there. On the other hand, if there is no subtext – if someone is just wearing clothes and going about their day – there is nothing to ponder. Sometimes clothes are just clothes.

This is a good time to bring up an important distinction. Style isn’t the same thing as an iconic look. Marilyn Monroe and Steve Jobs both had iconic looks, a visual identity that was instantly recognizable and never changing. As Philip Mann writes of Hollywood stars, “the secret is to project an innate personality through an identifiable style and to stick to it for evermore.”[2] As with any archetypes, there is only so much you can parse in an iconic look. It is, inherently, a finite and supra-personal text. Iconic looks represent an act of invention, not an act of expression. Personal style is the opposite. It is rarely static, because people are not static; what they have to say, and how they want to say it, changes as they change. I am not necessarily talking about radical transformations, although they can happen– sometimes, punks do grow up to become middle-managers – but the small, sometimes infinitesimal shifts that shape the course of our lives.

To be continued … [next week]

[1] But since we’re on the topic, my opinion is that anyone who makes a snide comment about another person’s clothes is an asshole with an inferiority complex. I was that asshole once, and therapy-ing the shit out of my inferiority complex magically cured me of the inability to mind my own business.

[2] Philip Mann, The Dandy At Dusk: Taste and Melancholy in the Twentieth Century, 2017, p. 221