Closet Keeping, Part One

     In the past few months, I’ve been parsing our house in preparation for our move next summer.  In my rich experience with moving, especially moving without knowing how much space you will have at your next destination, I’ve learned that sum of your possessions has a direct correlation with the quantity of stress you will experience in process.  I’ve also learned that the earlier you start preparations, the less hair pulling, stress eating and general unpleasantness you incur during the actual event. You also don’t have to worry about rewarding movers with a bottle of fine liquor for packing a storage unit beyond their capacity guidelines (that is a story for another day). 

     My first project has been clearing out our closets. I chose this task first because aside from books, it is the largest undertaking. Plus, a consignment shop recently opened in our neighborhood giving me timely motivation.  I figured that consigning clothes would give me the opportunity to generate money from spending money* and to narrow down our personal belongings at the same time. It’s win-win all around. I have a habit of seasonally weeding and donating clothes, but this is the first full-scale review I’ve done since we moved into our house.

     When I started to sort through my clothing, I decided that I had to be unemotional. If something didn’t fit, if I hadn’t worn in in at least a year, or if I had several things just like it, it had to go. I separated every piece of clothing I owned into piles: keep, consign, donate, and undecided. Some clothes went easily into the piles. Others foundered between keep, consign and undecided. 

     I was reluctant to get rid of some of the items in the undecided pile because even though I no longer wore them, they held a certain place in my heart. The red skirt I wore the day Matt proposed still fit, but I have only worn it a few times since. I reminded myself that there are several photographs of me in it, so I finally decided that someone else might love it like I did. Other pieces were not so easy. Just taking a picture would not do them justice in my memory. I noticed that the ones that were the hardest to make decisions about were decidedly tactile. Touching them instantly took me back in time and made my memories more vivid.

     As I mulled these items over, I remembered an article about five personal belongings you should preserve for memories. One of the contributors posited that it was just as important to save some everyday clothes as it was to keep special things like wedding dresses. This made me think about an exhibit I visited years ago at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. It was a chronology of British fashion, from work uniforms to coronation gowns that spanned several centuries. It was fascinating timeline that I later used as inspiration for decorating a 50^th anniversary charity ball by asking former patrons to borrow and exhibit their gowns representing different decades. 

     Why couldn’t I curate my own personal clothing timeline? It certainly wouldn’t be as voluminous as the V&A exhibit, but what was the harm in keeping a few carefully selected items to let me have the occasional trip down memory lane? I decided that I would keep up to five everyday items that I no longer wear and “induct” them into my permanent collection. Before they could be included on this list, and not just put in the undecided section in my closet, I would have to decide that they invoked special memories and represented my sartorial tastes at a particular time in my life. 

     Tomorrow, in Part Two (since this entry has turned into something much longer than I expected!), I’ll profile some of my choices. Who knows, maybe I will decide to lampoon the J. Peterman catalog (have you ever experienced it? I haven't had a hard copy one in years, but the site is just as delightful).

 *My husband and I have a long history of tongue-in-cheek justification of our expenses starting with his assertion that buying a PlayStation3 with BluRay was actually saving us money since we wouldn’t have to buy a BluRay separately. We are fully aware this financial reasoning doesn’t balance out.