I love it, but Sex and the City lied to me. It lied to me about how frequently I’d go on dates. It led me to believe suitors actually approached people at bars. (Carrie and company existed in a world before internet dating and cell phone addictions.) It lied to me about the kind of lifestyle a columnist with no alternative income could afford. And it lied to me about how much clothing I could have without Carrie’s walk-through closet. I blame Sex and the City for my mounds of seldom-worn clothes.
I moved this week. I won’t miss my former downstairs neighbours (and their three perpetually barking dogs, and their drum set). But I didn’t look forward to moving. Some people have organizational minds and can pack up all their belongings methodologically–folding clothes, wrapping fragile items, and writing on boxes with colour-coded felt tip pens.
I do not have that kind of mind. Like my bedroom, my brain is cluttered with God knows what. (Probably episodes of Sex and the City.) At some point during the packing process I give up any pretense of organization and just start throwing things in bags. This is also when the screaming starts.
But moving is a fantastic opportunity to purge your wardrobe of clothes that you no longer wear. Unfortunately, this is yet another era Sex and the City lied to me. In the first film, when Carrie foolishly gives up her apartment with its walk-through closet to get married to Mr. Big, her three friends come over to help. They listen to Aerosmith. Samantha Jones brings champagne. They’re supposed to vote on which items to keep and which to get rid of, but the scene becomes one big boozy dress-up party. Who wouldn’t want to have a dress-up party in Carrie’s closet?
In real life, purging your wardrobe is somewhat less fun. I gave up separating unwanted clothes while packing in lieu of shoving everything in garbage packs to deal with it later. This was a mistake. But I discovered, through a completely unscientific survey of my friends, that a lot of people have similar struggles while moving.
“I already had a tradition of doing a major purge of clothes before moving,” says artist Jessica (Jess) Bartram, “but now that I’m living with my boyfriend, who does not understand why any one person needs multiple dresses with bird-based prints, the act has become more of a necessity. Though I often pretend to be irritated by his insistence that I cut down my clothing collection, in secret it’s actually a really useful catalyst for utter abandon in closet streamlining. The fact that I still have those five bird dresses in my collection, though indicates that the man doesn’t always get his way.”
Jess admits that some clothes don’t get eliminated because of that annoying, persistent thought, “I know I haven’t had the courage to wear this thing yet, but surely after I move and start a slightly different, obviously more fabulous life I’ll sport this with confidence and grace!”
“Spoiler alert,” she adds. “These thoughts are all lies, yet I manage to forget this every time.”
Going through your entire wardrobe with an eye to giving things away is difficult, because you’re forced to confront clothes you never wear, things that no longer fit, and the younger person you once were.
Writer Micharne Cloughley says she hates throwing out things just because she’s moving. “The exception is the ‘on sale’ purchases that are actually too small for you, but you bought them anyway with the statement ‘for this dress, I’ll loose that 10 pounds!’ It never happens, and moving is time to let go. It’s not healthy to have those pieces hanging around.”
“I almost missed an entire drawer of clothes once while moving out of residence,” says Meg Shannon. “I’m usually pretty good when it comes to packing and moving, but there have been times since settling somewhat that I wonder where X piece of clothing ever went to. Usually it’s random pieces of a Hallowe’en costume. Which reminds me, I wonder where my angel wings ended up?”
When it comes to a clothing purge that seems almost as fun as Carrie Bradshaw’s, Katie Thomas has it down.
“I like to call it a ‘Fashion Show,’” she says. “Usually the process goes a little something like this. Try something on to discover it doesn’t really fit. Pour a glass of wine, or three. Try on the rest of my old clothes in a drunken haze. Wake up the next morning surrounded by a pile of ill-fitting, horribly unflattering clothes. Shove them into a garbage bag and hit up McDonalds on my way to the Salvation Army.”
Instead of donating them, when Chelsea McBroom does a purge she likes to host a clothing swap; “You get to see people you like get really excited about the clothes you cared for. It feels good, sort of like good karma, to put clothes out into the world to be shared, especially if you know yourself well enough to predict more clothes being purchased in the near future.”
But what if, after all that, you still don’t have room for your clothes?
Space is tight in Toronto apartments and some converted rooms don’t even have closets. I allowed the location of my new place to distract me from the fact that it only had a small closet in the hall. That’s when clothing racks come in handy. Clothing racks are useful, but they come with a warning.
Jennifer Carroll told me that they worked great for storage, but she got sick of seeing her clothes all the time. “They would nag at me — you have too many of us!”
I didn’t care. I visualized myself like Parker Posey in Party Girl, living amongst my colourful couture. The option seemed even better when my Mom offered to pick up an old one that was sitting in her friend’s basement.
Even though it looked a bit ghetto, with plastic tubes connecting the different polls, I was excited when Mom dropped it off. I had been living for days with all of my stuff in garbage bags covering my floor. I could barely move around my room. The clothing rack meant I could unpack my clothes, organize my space, and start my life anew.
I spent all morning hanging up my shirts. As I went, I separated items that I knew I would probably never wear again. I still managed to keep quite a lot. Just how much? Well, after I came back to my room from eating lunch, I discovered that the plastic connecting tubes of the clothing rack had snapped. My beautiful shirts were once again on the floor, albeit now on hangers. The busted rack, looking like some ancient ruin, mocked me.
I guess the gods were telling me I still had too many clothes.
On the one hand, we’re aware that clothes are just sewn pieces of fabric with little to no inherent value. After their price tags come off, they’re worth only what the thrifty rapper Macklemore would pay for them. We throw them in garbage bags and give them away. On the other hand, our clothes have a ton of personal value. Each item we buy represents how we saw ourselves at a certain moment. No wonder it’s hard to give them up.
“Your wardrobe, barring wear and tear, is one of the few things in life you can go back to,” Jen says. “I can go back to that shirt I wore a lot when I was 22 years old, but I can’t go back to the place I lived then or how I felt when I was 22. I guess I am a wardrobe sentimentalist.”
As for me, faced with the option of either getting rid of a lot more clothes or investing in an industrial strength clothing rack, I chose the later. In the middle of the brief blizzard on Wednesday I walked from the Toronto Standard office to Wm. Prager Ltd., a store that sells racks, mannequins, and other display equipment, mostly to stores.
“Is this rack really sturdy?” I asked the no-nonsense woman. “Cause I broke my last one.”
“You didn’t break one from us,” she said.
I proudly rolled my new clothing rack through the snow back up to Queen Street.
____
Max Mosher writes about style for Toronto Standard. You can follow him on Twitter at @max_mosher_.
For more, follow us on Twitter @TorontoStandard or subscribe to our newsletter.
