Posts Tagged "wardrobe"

By Leslie Willmott on Jul 14, 2015

  How many items in your closet beg to be worn but you have no place to wear them? Are they part of your past? Or, did you buy them with hopes they would be part of your future? We’re all dreamers and it’s easy to buy clothes for the lifestyle they promise instead of letting our lifestyle determine the clothes we buy. Lifestyles change at different stages in our lives – student, professional, working or at-home mom, re-entering the job field, retiring – and lifestyle transition can create a big change in wardrobe needs. A woman with young children who also works or volunteers could need a more varied wardrobe to take her from morning to evening than a business woman who spends most of her waking hours in an office. And the woman who retires from a long corporate career to adopt a more casual lifestyle of travel, volunteering, and golf might need to shift her wardrobe dramatically.   Chart Your Lifestyle If you never again want to cry “I don’t have a thing to wear!”, before you go on your next shopping spree, analyze how you really spend your time … then commit to making purchases that work for the activities in your current life. Do this periodically and the result will be productive seasonal closet edits and cost effective shopping excursions. Here’s how to get a clear picture of your lifestyle and needs: Ask yourself: What are the activities I spend my time in, and what is suitable and acceptable dress for those activities in the area where I live? Make a list of all activities you engage in during a month (either keep a diary and record this in real time or reflect back) and how often you do them – not how many hours you spend in each but how many days in the month you do it.   Note: You might spend 8 hours in an office and only two hours dining out, but they could require two different types of clothing. Group the activities into categories that require a similar type of clothing. For example: — Professional time (full-time, part-time or volunteer work) — Casual daytime (shopping, lunch with friends, travel) — Social time (church, entertaining,...