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Last week, in my ongoing quest to make sure that each and every one of you is wearing clothes that look fantastic, I waxed eloquent about making mid-season sales work for you. Friday Style reader Jan raised a really good point about the enterprise of shopping, particularly finding what fits:
I'm trying, I swear I am.
And I don't want to be argumentative, but I do wonder ...
Don't you ever get tired of the sheer effort of it all? I feel like it's not the 5 minutes it take to put on something a little dressier, it's the 2 hours it took me on Sunday to find a bra that fit and the billions and billions of clothes someone who isn't a size 2 with perfect proportions has to try on in order to find the elusive 'clothes that fit and flatter your figure'. (I mean, really, if they were easy to find, don't you think everyone would be wearing them?)
Throw trying to keep to a reasonable budget into the mix and it a damn hard proposition. Damn hard.
So maybe my enthusiasm for the whole thing isn't what it could be. :) But at least I'm trying (yesterday afternoon was my first kid-free one in a month of Sundays -- literally -- and I don't have to tell you how many other things would be more enjoyable than trying on bras, do I?) -- I get credit for that, right?
I spent a substantial portion of this past weekend shopping, which only sounds like fun if you weren't there with me (you can ask my friend Caroline, who WAS there with me for about two thirds of it; she will tell you what a joy it is to be in the dressing room with me as I go through a litany of Reasons I Hate This Top/Skirt/Dress). Jan's comment came at the perfect time: I had spent two days searching for some basics, pieces that fit and that looked great and that were perhaps a wee bit nicer than what I currently have hanging in my closet. In a 36 hour period, I tried on approximately four thousand items of clothing, in at least four different sizes (plus some petite variants on my usual size). I wound up buying two dresses, two skirts, three blouses and a fancy knit top.
I will be returning one dress, one blouse, one skirt (and maybe the other, I'm just too damn tired right now to actually decide). Half of what I'm keeping was on sale (including a beautiful silk blend wrap dress for HALF OFF the original price--score!), but the other half most decidedly was not (gulp). By Sunday night I was tired and cranky and fretful about how much I had spent.
But I've been listening to myself talk recently (oh, good! you say) and I've been thinking that it might be nice if I had something beyond polos and Bermuda shorts in my closet, you know, for all those days when I'm trying NOT to look like a mom who is just WAITING for a nap. So I shopped until I was ready to pass out, and then this morning I got up in the morning all ready to Look Good.
But of course it is unbearably hot and humid here, and I have to do fifteen loads of laundry and run the vacuum in every damn room in the house and clean the ONE bathroom I didn't get to over the weekend, and I am wearing my Bermuda shorts and a polo shirt.
Yes.
Jan's point about effort is dead on: it doesn't take much effort to get dressed in the morning, once you have that perfect closet, but it takes an almost superhuman effort to HAVE that closet full of fantastic clothes. In the end, there's no getting around that marathon day in the dressing room, although there are some strategies for making it less horrific.
Have a plan. If you're going out for a Day of Shopping, decide in advance what you need. Jan spent her day trying on bras, which is fantastic (okay, maybe not for her). Having the right bra will make the clothes she already has look even better. And yes, you SHOULD plan to try on four million things, even if you're only shopping for one particular item; you really want
