Making more of a transeasonal wardrobe
Just this year, I have started to change the way I approach building my wardrobe for a season. The main objective of this change is to make as much of my clothing work across all the seasons if I can. I’m getting more creative about how things can be used to achieve this, and essentially ignoring all the typical fashion advice about what-to-wear-when, especially when it comes to colour.
For at least 15 years, I very much used to be the kind of person who stored away all my winter things at the start of April and brought out all my summer things, then swapped them all around again come about September. There are definitely benefits to this approach, probably the main one being that each time I did this, it felt like I had ‘gone shopping’, rediscovering clothing I loved and it felt new again. It also seemed to temporarily free up space in my wardrobe so that I was only looking at a subset of my belongings, so I felt, aided my being able to focus when deciding what to wear.
Despite this, the prompt to switch about this tried-and-tested method came about for 6 reasons:
This cycle kept me feeling like I needed to overhaul my style every 6 months and that there was something new I needed for the ‘new’ season. This kept me feeling flighty about my personal style, not intimately acquainted with it.
I had started to refine my personal colour palette and realised that the colours I loved and I knew looked lovely on me didn’t actually change to match the traditional colours of the fashion seasons
I realised that where I live, in the UK, it’s pretty temperate without so much extreme distinction between the seasons and several of the pieces I wear during our mild winters work perfectly well for a cool summer’s day also, and vice-versa
I actively wanted to make my clothing purchases work harder and to be able to keep wearing something as long as possible, for as long as I think it’s beautiful and complimentary to my style, and not hide it away unused for 6 months for some daft arbitrary rule I have imposed on myself
I had started to resent the additional storage space needed to keep my off-season wardrobe and instead, valued having that space free in my home
I noticed that not being able to truly see all of my wardrobe in one place also prompted unnecessary purchases as I forgot that I had x, y or z. I started to acquire more than I needed. For me personally, this is made worse by the fact that I buy a lot of secondhand and vintage clothing and since there is only one, the availability of secondhand means you grab it when you see it
Essentially there were many more reasons to change tack than there were benefits to keep doing the same as I had always done.
Interestingly, it seems that I’m not alone in this idea, and that there are seemingly many more of us who are moving more towards this model and the fashion industry is apparently following suit, as testified by this Harper’s Bazaar article I happened upon from March 2020.
So, for Autumn Winter 2020/21, I am planning to keep using as many pieces from my Spring Summer 2020 wardrobe as I can and the list is as follows:
1980’s cinnamon-coloured silk Betty Barclay trousers
1990’s black, bronze and brown silk halterneck dress
Markus Lupfer floral wool-blend mini dress
1990’s long silk Gottex blouse
Temperley white cotton blouse
Ganni floral mesh top
1970’s Beged Or forest green suede skirt
French Connection asymmetric silk skirt
1970’s ivory lace short-sleeved blouse
1970’s pastel dagger-collar blouse with little 'ducks’ print
Every piece on this list was purchased second hand with the exception of the Ganni top.
In the past, I would have seen these pieces as either too lightweight or the wrong colour to work in Autumn Winter but I love all of these pieces and they feel so current to me, they are absolutely representative of my personal style right now in 2020 so I have plans to get more creative to see if I can make them work. Some more thoughts on how I’ll try and make these work for a different season, later.
Being absolutely frank here, there are still pieces that are going to go into storage as ‘summer only’ but this is about half the number as I would have usually stored, so I’ll chalk that up as progress.