I thought of doing the "writes" as per the use case as having to denormalize the "record" first which is extra work from insert point of view (but optimized for

I thought of doing the "writes" as per the use case as having to denormalize the "record" first which is extra work from insert point of view (but optimized for "fetch" - the entire dataset of shirt+pant is right there) - that is not how they come out of the washing machine. They come out normalized as "shirt" "pant" which is optimum for inserts. So if she doing the laundry, her method is the least effort for her.