I can’t locate the quote I came across recently that claimed that buying clothes was not like buying a sofa. The gist was that you want clothes to look fabulous once, and then discard them, whereas you want a sofa to last for years. The quote brought into focus something that I’ve thought for a long time and that I am obviously way out of sync with most women on. I want my clothes to be like a sofa! I have finally learnt to buy (or make) good quality ones but I still wear them out. I like clothes and shoes but don’t have any need for loads of them. Since then I keep coming across posts about wardrobes that make me giggle.

The latest was via web-goddess this morning. I’m not quite sure if the point is that seven pairs of shoes for a man is considered to be loads or hardly any. I have seven pairs of shoes, and I know that is more than I have ever owned in my life before. I spent years with only my everyday boots and possibly a pair of posh shoes so this collection feels pretty extravagant to me:

• Lightweight hiking boots. Wear everyday in winter with jeans and in bad weather in the summer.
• Canvas trainers. Converse All-Stars at the mo. Wear with jeans in good weather in the summer generally.
• Black boots. Wear with skirts & tights in the winter.
• Brown boots. Almost the same as the black ones but brown for clothes co-ordination reasons.
• Flip flops. Everyday summer wear with skirts. The last pair of good quality Reef ones lasted five years so I replaced them with the same brand again.
• Sandals. My posh summer skirt wearing shoes, actually also flip flops usually.
• I can only make the collection up to seven by including my heavy weight hiking boots as well.

They all fulfil different needs. I would buy more if I found I needed something for a different purpose.

In the same vein I came across Project 333 just before starting on a wardrobe clearout recently. The idea is to simplify your life by choosing only 33 items of clothing (not including underwear, pyjamas etc) to rotate for 3 months and put everything else away. On going through my wardrobe it became clear I wasn’t the audience for this one either. Though there are more than 33 items in my wardrobe I thought I could easily survive on less. All the project would do would be to force me to choose which of the ‘posh’ items to add to my everyday clothes.

Instead I decided to track what I actually wore. So far I am a month into this project and have actually worn 18 items of clothing in 38 outfits (that’s 2 outfits a day some days):

• six tops (mostly long sleeve t-shirts)
• one dress
• two pairs of jeans
• two denim skirts
• one other posh-ish skirt
• four items of footwear (converse, sandals, flip-flops and lightweight boots)
• one cardy
• one sweatshirt

There are a few more items I would like to add. It’s basically rained for the whole month, in the next two months (weather permitting) I expect to add more dresses and short sleeve tops.