Sorting through my ‘Eras’ wardrobe
It’s June, and though we haven’t officially entered summer yet, the temperatures are finally warming up enough to want to break out shorts, tank tops and flip flops.
I remember my mom doing the annual wardrobe switch-out when I was a kid by packing away our family’s winter clothes into trunks and the back of the closets and moving our summer lightweight clothes into the dresser drawers. I guess that’s what you do when you only have so much closet space for a family of four. We are blessed now to have way too many closets and way too many clothes for just my husband and me and we just leave them all hanging in the same place or in the same dresser drawers year-round.
Despite our ample closet space, I still can’t help but enjoy doing the occasional wardrobe purge. I try to follow the logic that every time you buy something new, you have to get rid of something old. I roughly follow the numbers on that, but it takes me some lag time to clean out the old stuff. Rather than a quid pro quo, it tends to happen in bunches.
While doing a recent pass through my closets to see what I can keep, donate or discard, I found some older dresses that I haven’t worn in a while. While trying them on, I started to chuckle as my mind ran through the questions: Does it still fit? When was the last time I wore it? Would I ever wear it again? Does it have a sentimental value? Then I burst out laughing as I realized that my closet is really an “Eras wardrobe,” much like the theme of Taylor Swift’s epic concerts during her 2-year-long world tour. I didn’t see the concert, but from what I read she had different outfits for each portion of the show which coincided with a different album.
While not adhering strictly to every era of my life, I do have eras in my wardrobe. The “professional” era is right now with a subset of new, fairly new and fairly old dresses and blazers for work. Then there’s the “casual” era with subsets of summer and winter attire. There’s the “skiing and après ski” era for my winter days on the ski slopes and the “golf” and “beach” eras for summer. If you want to divide it up another way, I could go into eras according to each place I’ve lived and worked for each decade (yes, I have some clothes that are at least a decade old – especially jeans, sweatshirts and favorite sweaters).
My final chuckle came when I found a few cute but definitely older tank tops and camisole tops that I wore in my “younger” era and begrudgingly decided to retire. So long, “hip, young lady” era and hello “cool middle age” era!
At least I hope I can pull off “cool middle age!”
Kristin Emery can be reached at kristinemery1@yahoo.com.