Excess, uniformity, curation
Boxes and boxes and boxes
It’s a short one this week, I’d hoped to be back at full steam but a combination of still nursing burnout and having to move house directly after coming back from vacation mean that a full fat issue of THE RADAR so as to keep to schedule isn’t feasible this week, I hope you fine club members can appreciate that.
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Every time I have to put my whole life in boxes, which is pretty much once a year, I end up thinking about cutting down. I still find minimal and obsessively function-forward wardrobes very desirable, even as I’ve let certain minimalist sensibilities go and bought many pairs of shoes. It’s a push and pull right? Just as all things are. I think now I’m more interested in narrowing down and then acquiring excess in the pieces I truly obsess over, many pairs of khaki pants, washed out jeans, navy sweaters, and light blue shirts. I’m teetering on the edge of a uniform.
Really, it’s quite an unusual thing for someone not to have a uniform, fifty or a hundred or a thousand years ago any given person would likely wear slight variations on a given outfit format day to day, if not the same suit, work uniform, or whatever clothing they could afford, day in and day out. It’s only now, in our age of individualism that we’ve developed a distaste for dressing the same way every day. Part of that is the phone, the need to document and publish, to have photographs look different across a profile grid, sort of the opposite of Princess Diana wearing the same outfit every day to deter paparazzi. Summer will always have that effect somewhat too I think, when it gets too hot and there are better things to be doing than to think about fashion.
The same goes for owning less, I think it’s easier to think about that in the Summer, and the two go hand in hand anyway, settling into that decided focus and then cutting back. I packed up all my outerwear last night, bar a couple, I came to terms with the size of the box and then I looked back at the ones I decided to leave out, the ones that were, by process of elimination, my favourites, for this climate anyway: a navy coach jacket, a knockoff suede Valstarino, a denim trucker.
It’s only natural that I have a lot of clothes, I’ve talked before about the collector’s mindset, about that point at which the shopper and the wearer are severed and it becomes more about obtaining an artefact and less about one’s own outfit rotation. On the other side of that though is curation, any collection in a museum is brought together to tell a complete story, and so as much as I like to follow my nose, for “I like it” to be reason enough, I’m curious to focus back into some tight and ruthless curation.
