Goodwill (Wardrobe) Hunting

Supply and demand - a quick refresher The economics of supply and demand are straightforward:  When demand for goods increases, prices go up. When the supply of goods increases, prices go down (where prices are not constrained by law or other factors). The implication, then, is that if we all turn to buying our clothing used, it will drive up the price of used clothes, potentially pricing economically disadvantaged people out of the market.  Meanwhile, there is no question that clothing now enjoys a second or even third act before being discarded. Witness the rise of Poshmark , an online retailer of clothing, both new and used. While it's touted as a way to shop other people's closets, it's also a way for sellers to perform a sort of "clothing arbitrage," purchasing quality or trendy clothing from Goodwill at rock-bottom prices, and then re-selling the clothing at a substantial markup via Poshmark. If we all bought most of our clothing used and stopped buying prim...

 I have a theory about how ugly Christmas sweaters came to be, rooted in a bygone day of American thriftiness: HOW UGLY CHRISTMAS SWEATERS CAME TO BE You buy a Christmas sweater that's stylish, colorful and fits well. You wear it with pride. Next year, your Christmas sweater is not quite as stylish, but it's still colorful and fits well. By the fifth year, your Christmas sweater is noticeably out of date, not quite as colorful, and - let's face it -  no longer fits quite as well. But hey, you only wear it once a year and you paid good money for it. By the seventh year, this sweater is ugly! Voila, the ugly Christmas sweater is born. Now you can buy your ugly Christmas sweater right off the racks, like a pair of pre-washed jeans. Why wait for your Christmas sweater to become ugly? AN ALTERNATIVE TO UGLY SWEATERS The obvious answer, and the one you would expect from me, is to purchase your ugly Christmas sweater used. This is certainly a viable answer. I'm wondering, tho...

 Most of us, let's be honest, are drowning in stuff. While minimalist Joshua Becker's post was written several years ago, I suspect that the statistics he cites, described below, have only gotten worse. TOO MUCH STUFF 1. The average household owns 300,000 items. Wow. 2. 32% of households only have room to park one car in a two-car garage (one in four can't park any car in their garage). 3. One out of ten of us rents offsite storage to deal with our excess stuff. As of March of 2020, there was 5.4 square feet of offsite storage space for every man, woman and child living in the U.S. 4. Even with all the stuff we have, we don't have enough money . I created this blog to encourage us all to be more conscious consumers of clothing - to consider buying quality clothing second-hand and to be more thoughtful about how much of it we really need. The goal is to keep our clothing from becoming just more stuff that's out of control. Naturally, these concepts go beyond cloth...

 I'm taking a break from talking about used clothing this week to focus a bit on history. I recently saw a photograph of women from the 1920s, and it occurred to me what an amazing transformation had happened for women's clothing in just 30 years. Here's an image of what women wore in the 1890s. Note the long sleeves, high necklines and rear bustles. These outfits would also have required a corset underneath and petticoats. I found this image at ThisVictorianLife.com .  The couple who runs the site wears Victorian-era clothing in their everyday lives. Here is an image of what women wore in the 1920s. Note the (relatively) high hemlines, short sleeves and more contemporary necklines. Also note the low heel on the shoes. I found this image on a Pinterest page. While I personally prefer clothing that's a bit more figure-flattering, imagine the freedom these women from the 20s experienced compared to their 1890's sisters! Have things changed as much 100 years later? Ma...

 I culled my closet a couple of weeks ago, inspired again by Courtney Carver's Project 333  to limit my clothes only to what I intend to wear over the next (in my case) four months. Everything else got put into drawers or taken to an unused closet upstairs. While I'm sure I've gotten some things wrong (I just haven't figured out what they are yet), it feels like a revelation to walk into my closet:  Not too much, and not too little, it's exactly enough. The "Fulfillment Curve" from Your Money or Your Life (Dominguez & Robin) What does having "enough" clothing look like? When I left my job as a financial advisor, I no longer had "enough" clothes. I had plenty of clothing for meeting with clients in person; I also had workout clothing and a couple of more formal dresses. But I didn't have anywhere near enough clothing to meet my new daily circumstances of hanging around the house, meeting with a friend or running errands. I'v...

Confession:  I have only rarely tried to purchase jeans used. My preferences are usually so specific that I despair of ever finding that needle in a haystack. But having recently done research on how devastating the manufacture of denim is to the environment, I thought I would rescue  a pair of jeans from my local landfill if I could. Here are some steps you can take to locate your own great pair of used jeans: Don't just shop I didn't properly prepare when I first went shopping. I naively assumed that if I just tried on a bunch of jeans I'd eventually find a pair I liked. That might work in a more traditional store that offers new clothes, but I didn't find this approach helpful (plus, as I write this, we're in the middle of a pandemic, and you may not wish to try clothing on at the store). After visiting my local consignment store first and trying on nine different pairs of jeans, only to strike out, I got more strategic. Review your criteria I reviewed the tags ...

When I was a senior in high school, rumor had it that the student who won the "Best Dressed" award wore a different outfit to school every day. As I've noted before , I went to high school in a very wealthy community  (the link takes you to images of some of the mansions there), so it's entirely possible that the rumor was true.  How often do we believe that the only way to really dress well and win compliments on our appearance is to have lots of nice outfits, with an emphasis on the "lots"? Less is more Courtney Carver, author of the blog, bemorewithless.com , created a minimalist fashion challenge called Project 333 . This challenge asks you to select 33 items to wear - including your shoes, jewelry and other accessories - for the next three months, and give away or box up everything else until the next three-month period. A self-confessed shop-a-holic who used retail therapy to de-stress, Courtney found that having lots of clothes created more stress, a...

If you've been following this blog, you know that I advocate shopping with intention. I want you to banish any lingering habit of shopping for your clothes recreationally, and encourage you to instead shop with a plan and a list.  I also want you to consider purchasing used clothing for maximum quality at the lowest possible cost. I understand that, for many of us, this could be a big shift in behavior! The best way I've found to shift habitual behavior is with small, tortoise-like steps that can disarm our resistance to change. Marrying a Tortoise When I was in high school, I was a terrible procrastinator. Worse, I was rewarded for procrastinating by getting good grades even when I studied for a test or wrote my essay the night before it was due. I would let assignments and commitments hang over me and then try to complete them in a flurry of activity at the last moment.  Fortunately, I married a man whose approach is the exact opposite - a tortoise to my hare. It took awhile...

I've been slowly revamping my wardrobe, moving from a professional one to a more casual wardrobe. I got through the hot summer months here in Phoenix, then it was time to plan ahead for cooler weather.  In a previous post, Curate Your Fall Wardrobe in Three Steps , I set up a shopping list of things I wanted to purchase for my fall wardrobe: A nice jean jacket - $15 - $20 Dark-wash (nice) skinny blue jeans - $10 - $15 (I might need to purchase new) Two to three heavier-weight long-sleeve tops - $5 to $8 each Mid-weight jacket, sweater or poncho for colder days - $15 - $20 Leggings to go under black t-shirt dress (I'll likely purchase these new): $15 I figured I would spend between $70 and $94 over the course of the two months. Reality diverged a bit from plan (as it always does), and I had a few fails, discussed below, but here's what I purchased and for how much: Midweight jacket purchased half price at Goodwill for $4.45 Two heavier-weight long-sleeved tops purchased at G...

One of my favorite bloggers is Paula Pant, who created the blog, Afford Anything . The link will take you to her "Start Here" page, which lays out her philosophy, but in a nutshell:  You can afford anything you want - but you can't afford everything . This means you need to pick and choose. What will you focus on? Paula chooses to spend as little as possible on things that aren't important to her (such as her car), and instead spends lavishly on travel - she had saved enough money in her twenties to take off for three years of international travel. We can apply this same mindset to our closet. I just read The Curated Closet: A Simple System for Discovering Your Personal Style and Building Your Dream Wardrobe  by Anuschka Rees (available at your local library). As the title implies, her prescriptions are very practical, and she includes lots of exercises to help you identify your personal style, choose from a limited set of colors and figure out what's missing fro...

Dana Thomas, author of the book, Fashionopolis , published in 2020, has a scary message:  Our addiction to cheap, trendy clothing is poisoning the planet and keeping millions in poverty . Fast fashion is bad for you. The fashion industry as a whole is responsible for ten percent of all carbon emissions worldwide, and a whopping twenty percent of all industrial water pollution, according to Thomas' research. Meanwhile, sweatshop operations (Thomas reports of young people working in 110-degree heat in some of the factories she visited) paying low wages to the people manufacturing our clothes continue in many countries, including our own. Her research shows that one in six people worldwide, nearly twenty percent, is employed in some manner by the fashion industry. Of those millions of people, only two percent of them are able to earn a living wage. There is a Sisyphean side to the fashion industry as well:  We will only wear the clothing these people worked so hard to manufacture...

I once worked on a small advisory team with a colleague who commuted approximately 20 miles to work in a Hummer. This was back in 2007 and 2008, when gas prices were creeping into the $4.00 per gallon range here in Phoenix. He and I were both working in a call center; we weren't meeting with our clients in person. However, I regularly overheard my colleague on his client calls discuss both his car and his large property, located in a beautiful rural area just outside of Phoenix. More details emerged later:  The Hummer was leased and the house outside of town was rented. I eventually heard my co-worker mention to another colleague that he'd given up the house with the large property in favor of accommodations closer in - likely to compensate for the high cost of gas for his Hummer. Why do we do this to ourselves? Why are we willing to spend so much money on looking good to others? I'm not immune - for years, my husband and I lived in a very modest house while I dreamed of ow...

I remember in my twenties being terribly influenced by a mailer I received from a chain boutique that was advertising a compact wardrobe with separates. It showed me how each of the pieces would mix and match, what jewelry I could purchase to properly accessorize the outfits, and when the store's next sale would be. How handy! I'm embarrassed to confess that I gave in to their siren call, purchasing several of the pieces advertised. And while I regret being so easily influenced by the mailer and spending so much money on the advertised clothing, it did end up being a positive lesson on the value of carefully curating a few quality separates that can mix and match well. Chances are you don't have to start from scratch. It's now fall; if you've been following this blog, we've already discussed starting with your own wardrobe to identify some of the foundational pieces you'll be wearing for the next couple of months. But let's assume that you want to take ...

I felt like I learned a lot of impractical things at school. Even though I had a career in finance, I never did need to understand quadratic equations. Meanwhile, the things that are so important to daily life, such as how to construct a good wardrobe, control expenses, invest in a retirement plan and adjust your behavior for greater success, are not typically taught at school. I wish I'd known these principles before I launched into living on my own; they would have saved me a lot of anxiety and money. 1. I wish I'd known how to build a quality core wardrobe with separates. All items except white jeans purchased used In my 20s, as in my teens, I focused on purchasing expensive one-of-a-kind outfits (usually dresses) rather than on learning how to identify and select quality separates to build what's now known as a "capsule wardrobe."  2. I wish I'd known about the 50-20-30 budget. It wasn't until I went through a financial crisis in my mid-thirties that I...

Here in my home state of Arizona, the temperatures have dropped (sometimes even below 100!), and giant pumpkins have started showing up at the grocery store, signs that fall is nearly upon us. Take some time this weekend to plan out your fall wardrobe in three steps: 1. Edit last season's clothing, including shoes, accessories and outerwear. If you don't know what you already have, you can't shop thoughtfully. Gather everything you might wear this fall in one spot and do a careful review. What do you have that never got worn? Is it time for it to find a new home? What doesn't fit right now? It's okay to set clothes aside for a time, but don't include them in your fall wardrobe if they don't fit today. Below are some of the work clothes I no longer need:   I've already given away the two dresses shown here, but I'll be setting aside my work trousers and blazers for now, in case I have occasion to wear them. 2. Create a compact, intentional wardrobe fr...

At the age of six my husband had saved enough money to purchase something he'd wanted for a long time - a kid's football helmet he'd seen at a local store. His mother drove him to the store, he triumphantly counted out his money to make the purchase, and then he carried his prize back to the car. Cost in today's dollars, according to US Bureau of Labor Statistics  inflation calculator, would be $140.00 As soon as he got into the car, he realized he'd made a huge mistake. He'd just spent a large chunk of his saved money on something that didn't make him happy after all. It didn't turn him magically into a football player - it just made him feel empty.  How often do we do the same thing when we shop for clothing? Ah, we say, I'm finally going to get the outfit that will prove to everyone that I've "made it", that I'm someone to be reckoned with, that I'm beautiful. This outfit will let me catch that cute guy's eye, it will let...

 Alison Freer's book, How To Get Dressed: A Costume Designer's Secrets for Making Your Clothes Look, Fit, and Feel Amazing , published in 2015, offers a treasure trove of money-saving tricks and DIY hacks for getting the best out of the clothing you own or purchase. Check it out of the library first; but you may find, as I did, that you want to own it as a reference, there are so many useful tips. Here is a list of the top five money-saving lessons I learned in this book: 1. Learn effective stain treatments you can make with household products I've found in my Goodwill shopping that there is generally a "reason" that a particular item of clothing was given away, and a common one is a minor stain. You can now be the beneficiary of someone else's lack of stain-treating skills! I recently purchased some white shorts (shown in  this post ) that were perfect in every way - except for a tiny stain on one side. With one of the stain treatment options I learned in Fre...