What do we wear [in 2025]?
Circling HomeWork #25
I’ve just come off a giant closet purge in which I didn’t buy any clothes for roughly two months (brave), threshed the wheat from the chaff all over my bedroom floor, and filled up trash bags galore.
With this overhaul fresh in my mind, I wanted to look back at what I wrote a year ago about my buying habits and staple garments, when I was feeling bewildered by the unspoken class and taste dynamics at play on the style internet. (How much money do these people have? What are the normal people buying? And where are we buying it?)
Catch up on that post here for context:
A year later, what has changed in my clothing habits? What has stayed the same?
Same:
I still identify as a person who owns a lot of clothes and buys a lot of clothes, mostly cheaply and secondhand, and who considers this a core part of my creative life. I make clothes, I notice clothes, I think about clothes. I volunteer in the costume department at my community theater for the love of the game. I have meandering conversations with my friends about the signifying power of certain fashion objects in culture, about why I love masc-ing up a girly outfit using Dr Martens or a dramatic shoulder, about letting the cycle of jean-shape trends collapse into itself like a black hole while we just wear whichever ones feel best on our bodies. I still hold there is no greater joy than to lock in with an audiobook in your ears and get lost in a thrift store for hours. I am not a fashionable woman, nor am I a fancy one, but my clothes are important to me and I give myself permission to acquire them freely and wear them with pleasure.
Changed:
I can feel a little tilt in my buying habits in the past year. I have spent slightly more on individual pieces, accrued maybe slightly less quantity from the racks of Goodwill. I have more frequently set my sights on a specific item and looked for it until I found it. I rejoice in this shift — it reassures me that I am a human woman participating in the circle of life and aging right one time. Each year, I know a little better what I like and why.1
The Inventory:
Below are the items I identified in February 2024 as staples in my wardrobe.