7 ms·

Funny to see what a female thinks of as "wearing the same thing every day". For most dudes I know, That's a lot of clothes to own. I think I made it to age 30

Funny to see what a female thinks of as "wearing the same thing every day". For most dudes I know, That's a lot of clothes to own. I think I made it to age 30 without ever owning 3 pairs of pants at one time.

jskopek 14y ago
I recently helped a female friend move out of an old apartment, and I was absolutely astounded by how much clothing she had lying around. It surprised me because she came off as a stylish, but not terribly fashion-centered person. By my rough estimate, this list represented probably 1/5 of my friend's clothing. Granted, a sample size of 1 is not terribly informative; however, my gut feeling is that a women's wardrobe will generally be considerably larger than a man's wardrobe. On an unrelated note, I love hearing about life hacks like these. Reminds you of how much else there is left to optimize.
- smikhanov 14y ago
  ...she came off as a stylish The author is definitely NOT stylish by any reasonable definition of this word. Hence the difference in the wardrobe size. Things like "ethical" or "green" consumption only make situation worse.
  - jskopek 14y ago
    That's a little harsh of you, don't you think? Her wardrobe isn't varied, but as long as the default 'works' there's no reason she can't pull it off. Do you remember what your friends wore yesterday? From what I've experienced, clothing doesn't really matter once you get past first impressions.
    - njs12345 14y ago
      So much of fashion is fit anyway, you'll be more stylish with a small wardrobe of clothes that fit well than a wide variety of ill-fitted stuff.
    - mark_integerdsv 14y ago
      You misinterpret the word 'stylish'. Hoodies and band shirts are not stylish and never will be. ...unless you mean to say something like: in the style of a young urbanite. The word 'stylish' in terms of fashion refers to more than just clothing though, it's meaning is closer to 'swagger' and it has connotations to 'classical style' or 'classy', which is where band shirts and hoodies fall out.
  - alex-g 14y ago
    Maybe not 'stylish' in the sense of glamorous high fashion, but certainly 'stylish' in the sense of having put effort into ones own personal style, and consistently dressing that way. So 'stylish' as opposed to slobbish, slovenly, careless, not as opposed to simple, everyday, cheap, downmarket.
- vijayr 14y ago
  when my friend moved in with her bf, I took over her apt. First time when I went to see the apt, it seemed small. When I moved in though, it wasn't. I realized she had so much stuff, that it made the apt appear smaller when I saw the first time. Women have lots of stuff - not just clothes, but everything (before someone complains - this is not sexism etc. just simple observation)
  - keithpeter 14y ago
    Looking round my man cave, I'd say I have a lot of stuff as well; several tonnes of books for a starter. Time for a declutter I think... Clothes: I like the smell of heavy wool jumpers and (Donegal) tweed jackets.
    - vijayr 14y ago
      I have a few books too. I am not talking about books though - women seem to have many many things, and they also have many units of the same thing. For example, why does anyone need 10 or 20 pairs of shoes? A female friend of mine has 40 (yes, forty) different bags, and she still keeps buying bags. And no, she is not wealthy, and doesn't live in a mansion. Edit: not complaining or anything. Just genuinely curious :)
      - Mz 14y ago
        Honestly, as a reformed female clothing junkie, I think it grows in part out of being intelligent -- thus easily bored -- and visually inclined. Getting a certificate in GIS and running my own websites helped cure me of interest in both fashion and decor. I can search for new skins for my blogs or twiddle with the font size or whatever instead of rearranging furniture and trying on the same pants with 27 different tops. It is just as mentally satisfying to that part of my brain. But clothes and decor were the only "appropriate" outlets for it when I was a homemaker/living like I was "supposed to" as a woman.
- egypturnash 14y ago
  The plural of anecdote is not data but... I've changed my sex. I used to be male, now I'm female. My wardrobe used to be "a collection of t-shirts and 4-5 pairs of jeans". Now it's a whole closet full of blouses, dresses, and skirts, plus a dresser with a few more things. I recently did a purge and got the stuff down in my closet to 100 individual pieces.
  - NathanKP 14y ago
    Very interesting. Why do you think your wardrobe grew so much after you switched to female? Do you think that you grew your wardrobe to better fit the image of a female in the eyes of others, or was it a natural impulse that came from within? Edit: Probably the root of my question would be does a transexual person like yourself truly feel female? And if you do does the feeling of being female precede or follow the switch? As you said your wardrobe was smaller before you switched to female. It would be very interesting if it had grown before the switch and then you made the switch. Fundamentally I ask these questions because I want to understand at least a little about what transexual life must feel like because I can not imagine it personally.
    - egypturnash 14y ago
      Trans 101: Imagine one morning you wake up and you're a woman - but you're still thinking like a man. Everything about your body feels wrong, everything about how you're expected to behave feels wrong. That's it in a nutshell. Part of the reason my wardrobe grew is that I actually like my body now and want to show it off. Part of it's that women are expected to put more effort into how their clothes coordinate, and generally allowed to dress more flamboyantly. (There are also lots of nerdy transwomen out there who keep on dressing Geek Casual after the transition. I am not one of them.)
gamache 14y ago
It sure seems like she spent a long time thinking about how not to think about what to wear. My dressing habits can fit in a tweet.
- tonyarkles 14y ago
  shrug That's not too much different than "It sure seems like I spent a long time thinking about how to not think about how to build and deploy my app". Put think time in now, so that you don't have to spend it later (or every day)
  - personlurking 14y ago
    A good point and one that I've also made further down. Spend it initially so you don't have to spend it later. Can't explain how much time it's saved me over the years.
- MSM 14y ago
  I too couldn't help but notice that she spent an awful lot of timing thinking through her fashion to be "liberated" from "taking up too much time and energy" deciding what to wear.
  - postfuturist 14y ago
    It's an up-front investment in time that pays off over the long run. I do it all the time in programming, pick the right API's and abstractions ahead of time (spend a good amount of energy and time) so I don't have to spend as much time and energy later. Eventually it pays off--a lot. If you think how you dress doesn't affect how people treat you in the world, you're terribly mistaken. Even more if you are a woman. This is a nice hack.
  - adrianbravo 14y ago
    I couldn't help but notice that she does not write a full blog post every time she gets dressed.
frossie 14y ago
Yeah, I was hoping more for a "Steve Jobs" approach. [I am female] And frankly it is a bit confusing. Would you really wear a band t-shirt and a hoodie to a funeral? [edit following comment below: I see, so it's "I wear the same thing ever day" for different values of the word "same"? I am somehow underwhelmed. ]
- vacri 14y ago
  I thought the same, then saw each entry has 'fancy subs', so she would swap the hoodie for a cardigan and a classier t-shirt for the band one (unless, of course, it's one for The Departed) It seems like she still has quite a lot of clothes to own. A story from growing up: a friend and I were about to play strip poker with his second cousin. Not wanting to lose too bad, we both put on everything we possibly could, including gloves and even paper face masks (being nervous young teens, we kinda missed the point of strip poker was to lose). In total we were each able to bring our total number of losable items before nakedness to 18. Fronting up to the cousin, she laughed and counted out her clothes - her everyday clothing totalled 18 items... even now, I can't remember what they all were, but I remember being gobsmacked at the time. Parents came home before that story went any further, though.
  - timoni 14y ago
    FWIW, I don't actually have those subs. I just included them because I figured other people wouldn't wear a hoodie to a funeral (for example). I would.
bsphil 14y ago
I think I'm at 3 decent pairs of pants. Light, dark, black. Maybe 8-10 dress shirts/polos to go with them in total. Boatload of old tshirts though.
rodolphoarruda 14y ago
For the past 5 years I've been owning a single pair of shoes. In January of each year I give away the old pair and get a new one.
- ChrisLTD 14y ago
  If you had three pair of well-made leather shoes, you could potentially keep them for decades by not wearing the same shoes on consecutive days and treating the leather every few months.
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    I'm a fan of low leather boots. Good looking low leather boots can be worn in just about every situation except weddings, and last a hell of a long time. It's rather liberating not having to worry about your shoes before deciding to walk through a soggy looking field or climb up a hill.
    - dredmorbius 14y ago
      Move to South or SouthWest. You'll be golden.
      - jlgreco 14y ago
        I've given the south west some thought, though it seems the north west is in my immediate future. Should definitely be an improvement over the east coast at least.
- deleted 14y ago
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- deleted 14y ago
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simcop2387 14y ago
I'm currently at 5 because I had to get some after some of my older ones are starting to fall apart and get holes. Soon i'll probably be back down to 3...
jmsduran 14y ago
Nice, so far I've gone 2 years without shopping for clothes. My coworkers have my dress habits practically memorized, gray/blue T-shirts Monday thru Thursday, and a Maroon or white shirt on Friday.
- cpeterso 14y ago
  And Saturday and Sunday? No shirt? :) It just occurred to me that one could map days of the week to colors: SMTWTFS ROYGBIV
cgag 14y ago
Yeah, I wear jeans, sneakers, a tshirt, and an optional hoodie every day and hadn't considered that wearing the same thing every day. I expected this to be more like a uniform.
notatoad 14y ago
also, apparently the whole goal of this is so that you don't have to stress about clothing. I don't wear the same thing every day, and reading that blog post was the probably most i've ever thought about clothing in my life.
ajross 14y ago
Right. I hesitate to call it "sexism," as there's no adverse discrimination going on, but the double standard here is turned up to 11. What is described in this article is, basically, the way almost every western man in a casual profession dresses. I wake up in the morning and pull on jeans, a t-shirt, and top it with a long sleeve, sweater or nothing depending on the weather. Yet no one would have any interest in reading a blog post about it.
- danso 14y ago
  Are you sure about that? Because I think you can find similar such themed articles in any given mens magazine, and unless the economics of print have changed, such articles require significant amounts of ink and trees to produce, so someone in the audience is interested in it. Perhaps this article attracted attention because it was well-written and well-produced with a liberal use of attractive graphics...as opposed to the 100% width Times-New-Roman-400-word-paragraph format that many bloggers use. Why were you so quick to jump to sexism?
- TwiztidK 14y ago
  It may be the way "almost every western man in a casual profession dresses", but it is not how many western women in a casual profession dress.
- timoni 14y ago
  This is true; a lot of guys dress this way naturally. I'm hoping the difference is that I actually _thought_ about what I wanted to wear every day, rather than just wearing jeans every day. I only know one guy who's consciously done this, and he's a designer, too.
  - ajross 14y ago
    Right. What interested me was the double standard I mentioned (and I should be really clear: I'm not sitting here and being a men's rights whiner about reverse sexism or anything like that, I'm honestly interested). Clearly guys aren't doing this out of instinct, we were taught to do it too. But it happened at an age and in a context where there was no value placed on the decision. It's just "how it's done", like brushing one's teeth. For women, coming to the same kind of decision is a lifestyle hack. I don't know what to think about that.
calinet6 14y ago
My 2nd pair of jeans just got a hole in the knee. My wardrobe has become suboptimal because of it. 1 pair of jeans = too few, 2 pair = just right, 3 pair = maybe a good idea, but c'mon, 2 is enough.
- LaGrange 14y ago
  3 pairs is optimal, because in emergency you still stay with 2. It's a backup.

jskopek 14y ago

I recently helped a female friend move out of an old apartment, and I was absolutely astounded by how much clothing she had lying around. It surprised me because she came off as a stylish, but not terribly fashion-centered person. By my rough estimate, this list represented probably 1/5 of my friend's clothing. Granted, a sample size of 1 is not terribly informative; however, my gut feeling is that a women's wardrobe will generally be considerably larger than a man's wardrobe. On an unrelated note, I love hearing about life hacks like these. Reminds you of how much else there is left to optimize.

smikhanov 14y ago
...she came off as a stylish The author is definitely NOT stylish by any reasonable definition of this word. Hence the difference in the wardrobe size. Things like "ethical" or "green" consumption only make situation worse.
- jskopek 14y ago
  That's a little harsh of you, don't you think? Her wardrobe isn't varied, but as long as the default 'works' there's no reason she can't pull it off. Do you remember what your friends wore yesterday? From what I've experienced, clothing doesn't really matter once you get past first impressions.
  - njs12345 14y ago
    So much of fashion is fit anyway, you'll be more stylish with a small wardrobe of clothes that fit well than a wide variety of ill-fitted stuff.
  - mark_integerdsv 14y ago
    You misinterpret the word 'stylish'. Hoodies and band shirts are not stylish and never will be. ...unless you mean to say something like: in the style of a young urbanite. The word 'stylish' in terms of fashion refers to more than just clothing though, it's meaning is closer to 'swagger' and it has connotations to 'classical style' or 'classy', which is where band shirts and hoodies fall out.
- alex-g 14y ago
  Maybe not 'stylish' in the sense of glamorous high fashion, but certainly 'stylish' in the sense of having put effort into ones own personal style, and consistently dressing that way. So 'stylish' as opposed to slobbish, slovenly, careless, not as opposed to simple, everyday, cheap, downmarket.
vijayr 14y ago
when my friend moved in with her bf, I took over her apt. First time when I went to see the apt, it seemed small. When I moved in though, it wasn't. I realized she had so much stuff, that it made the apt appear smaller when I saw the first time. Women have lots of stuff - not just clothes, but everything (before someone complains - this is not sexism etc. just simple observation)
- keithpeter 14y ago
  Looking round my man cave, I'd say I have a lot of stuff as well; several tonnes of books for a starter. Time for a declutter I think... Clothes: I like the smell of heavy wool jumpers and (Donegal) tweed jackets.
  - vijayr 14y ago
    I have a few books too. I am not talking about books though - women seem to have many many things, and they also have many units of the same thing. For example, why does anyone need 10 or 20 pairs of shoes? A female friend of mine has 40 (yes, forty) different bags, and she still keeps buying bags. And no, she is not wealthy, and doesn't live in a mansion. Edit: not complaining or anything. Just genuinely curious :)
    - Mz 14y ago
      Honestly, as a reformed female clothing junkie, I think it grows in part out of being intelligent -- thus easily bored -- and visually inclined. Getting a certificate in GIS and running my own websites helped cure me of interest in both fashion and decor. I can search for new skins for my blogs or twiddle with the font size or whatever instead of rearranging furniture and trying on the same pants with 27 different tops. It is just as mentally satisfying to that part of my brain. But clothes and decor were the only "appropriate" outlets for it when I was a homemaker/living like I was "supposed to" as a woman.
egypturnash 14y ago
The plural of anecdote is not data but... I've changed my sex. I used to be male, now I'm female. My wardrobe used to be "a collection of t-shirts and 4-5 pairs of jeans". Now it's a whole closet full of blouses, dresses, and skirts, plus a dresser with a few more things. I recently did a purge and got the stuff down in my closet to 100 individual pieces.
- NathanKP 14y ago
  Very interesting. Why do you think your wardrobe grew so much after you switched to female? Do you think that you grew your wardrobe to better fit the image of a female in the eyes of others, or was it a natural impulse that came from within? Edit: Probably the root of my question would be does a transexual person like yourself truly feel female? And if you do does the feeling of being female precede or follow the switch? As you said your wardrobe was smaller before you switched to female. It would be very interesting if it had grown before the switch and then you made the switch. Fundamentally I ask these questions because I want to understand at least a little about what transexual life must feel like because I can not imagine it personally.
  - egypturnash 14y ago
    Trans 101: Imagine one morning you wake up and you're a woman - but you're still thinking like a man. Everything about your body feels wrong, everything about how you're expected to behave feels wrong. That's it in a nutshell. Part of the reason my wardrobe grew is that I actually like my body now and want to show it off. Part of it's that women are expected to put more effort into how their clothes coordinate, and generally allowed to dress more flamboyantly. (There are also lots of nerdy transwomen out there who keep on dressing Geek Casual after the transition. I am not one of them.)

gamache 14y ago

It sure seems like she spent a long time thinking about how not to think about what to wear. My dressing habits can fit in a tweet.

tonyarkles 14y ago
shrug That's not too much different than "It sure seems like I spent a long time thinking about how to not think about how to build and deploy my app". Put think time in now, so that you don't have to spend it later (or every day)
- personlurking 14y ago
  A good point and one that I've also made further down. Spend it initially so you don't have to spend it later. Can't explain how much time it's saved me over the years.
MSM 14y ago
I too couldn't help but notice that she spent an awful lot of timing thinking through her fashion to be "liberated" from "taking up too much time and energy" deciding what to wear.
- postfuturist 14y ago
  It's an up-front investment in time that pays off over the long run. I do it all the time in programming, pick the right API's and abstractions ahead of time (spend a good amount of energy and time) so I don't have to spend as much time and energy later. Eventually it pays off--a lot. If you think how you dress doesn't affect how people treat you in the world, you're terribly mistaken. Even more if you are a woman. This is a nice hack.
- adrianbravo 14y ago
  I couldn't help but notice that she does not write a full blog post every time she gets dressed.

frossie 14y ago

Yeah, I was hoping more for a "Steve Jobs" approach. [I am female] And frankly it is a bit confusing. Would you really wear a band t-shirt and a hoodie to a funeral? [edit following comment below: I see, so it's "I wear the same thing ever day" for different values of the word "same"? I am somehow underwhelmed. ]

vacri 14y ago
I thought the same, then saw each entry has 'fancy subs', so she would swap the hoodie for a cardigan and a classier t-shirt for the band one (unless, of course, it's one for The Departed) It seems like she still has quite a lot of clothes to own. A story from growing up: a friend and I were about to play strip poker with his second cousin. Not wanting to lose too bad, we both put on everything we possibly could, including gloves and even paper face masks (being nervous young teens, we kinda missed the point of strip poker was to lose). In total we were each able to bring our total number of losable items before nakedness to 18. Fronting up to the cousin, she laughed and counted out her clothes - her everyday clothing totalled 18 items... even now, I can't remember what they all were, but I remember being gobsmacked at the time. Parents came home before that story went any further, though.
- timoni 14y ago
  FWIW, I don't actually have those subs. I just included them because I figured other people wouldn't wear a hoodie to a funeral (for example). I would.

bsphil 14y ago

I think I'm at 3 decent pairs of pants. Light, dark, black. Maybe 8-10 dress shirts/polos to go with them in total. Boatload of old tshirts though.

rodolphoarruda 14y ago

For the past 5 years I've been owning a single pair of shoes. In January of each year I give away the old pair and get a new one.

ChrisLTD 14y ago
If you had three pair of well-made leather shoes, you could potentially keep them for decades by not wearing the same shoes on consecutive days and treating the leather every few months.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  I'm a fan of low leather boots. Good looking low leather boots can be worn in just about every situation except weddings, and last a hell of a long time. It's rather liberating not having to worry about your shoes before deciding to walk through a soggy looking field or climb up a hill.
  - dredmorbius 14y ago
    Move to South or SouthWest. You'll be golden.
    - jlgreco 14y ago
      I've given the south west some thought, though it seems the north west is in my immediate future. Should definitely be an improvement over the east coast at least.
deleted 14y ago
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deleted 14y ago
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simcop2387 14y ago

I'm currently at 5 because I had to get some after some of my older ones are starting to fall apart and get holes. Soon i'll probably be back down to 3...

jmsduran 14y ago

Nice, so far I've gone 2 years without shopping for clothes. My coworkers have my dress habits practically memorized, gray/blue T-shirts Monday thru Thursday, and a Maroon or white shirt on Friday.

cpeterso 14y ago
And Saturday and Sunday? No shirt? :) It just occurred to me that one could map days of the week to colors: SMTWTFS ROYGBIV

cgag 14y ago

Yeah, I wear jeans, sneakers, a tshirt, and an optional hoodie every day and hadn't considered that wearing the same thing every day. I expected this to be more like a uniform.

notatoad 14y ago

also, apparently the whole goal of this is so that you don't have to stress about clothing. I don't wear the same thing every day, and reading that blog post was the probably most i've ever thought about clothing in my life.

ajross 14y ago

Right. I hesitate to call it "sexism," as there's no adverse discrimination going on, but the double standard here is turned up to 11. What is described in this article is, basically, the way almost every western man in a casual profession dresses. I wake up in the morning and pull on jeans, a t-shirt, and top it with a long sleeve, sweater or nothing depending on the weather. Yet no one would have any interest in reading a blog post about it.

danso 14y ago
Are you sure about that? Because I think you can find similar such themed articles in any given mens magazine, and unless the economics of print have changed, such articles require significant amounts of ink and trees to produce, so someone in the audience is interested in it. Perhaps this article attracted attention because it was well-written and well-produced with a liberal use of attractive graphics...as opposed to the 100% width Times-New-Roman-400-word-paragraph format that many bloggers use. Why were you so quick to jump to sexism?
TwiztidK 14y ago
It may be the way "almost every western man in a casual profession dresses", but it is not how many western women in a casual profession dress.
timoni 14y ago
This is true; a lot of guys dress this way naturally. I'm hoping the difference is that I actually _thought_ about what I wanted to wear every day, rather than just wearing jeans every day. I only know one guy who's consciously done this, and he's a designer, too.
- ajross 14y ago
  Right. What interested me was the double standard I mentioned (and I should be really clear: I'm not sitting here and being a men's rights whiner about reverse sexism or anything like that, I'm honestly interested). Clearly guys aren't doing this out of instinct, we were taught to do it too. But it happened at an age and in a context where there was no value placed on the decision. It's just "how it's done", like brushing one's teeth. For women, coming to the same kind of decision is a lifestyle hack. I don't know what to think about that.

calinet6 14y ago

My 2nd pair of jeans just got a hole in the knee. My wardrobe has become suboptimal because of it. 1 pair of jeans = too few, 2 pair = just right, 3 pair = maybe a good idea, but c'mon, 2 is enough.

LaGrange 14y ago
3 pairs is optimal, because in emergency you still stay with 2. It's a backup.