Style refinement is…

• Recognising my unique set of needs and priorities, and developing a similarly unique style that matches

• Building on what exists, focusing on small changes and adjustments; not starting from scratch, not always thinking that a grand overhaul is necessary

• Being precise, not ball-park

• Looking at the details. Understanding the little details that I really like; understanding the little details that I really dislike

• Being in-tune with my intuition

• Protecting myself from too much external influence

• Developing knowledge of different fabric types - knowing the ones I like to wear and the ones I don’t

• Knowing precisely which colours both flatter me and totally float my boat; not wasting time or money on colours I neither like nor can wear easily nor really fit in with other items in my wardrobe

• Learning the right way to make up my face to the most pleasing and flattering effect; not just blindly following the basic advice that gets thrown at me that doesn’t account for the uniqueness of my face

• Understanding, appreciating and working with my body shape when dressing; not ignoring it, not pretending it is something different, not despising it

• Knowing which accessory types I like to use; not bothering to buy the ones I don’t

• Only having makeup in precisely the right shades and right finishes

• Having a wardrobe made up only of clothes that fit; not keeping clothes that fit poorly, no matter how cheap or expensive or cool they may be

• Having enough footwear, clothes and outfits that are suitable for the climate where I live (not necessarily adhering to what the fashion industry proposes is ‘for x season’)

• Assessing whether a potential purchase meets my unique set of criteria and not keeping anything that doesn’t

• Spotting the little changes I need to make to an item to perfectly suit my figure, tastes and uses

• Putting in the effort ahead of time to make day-to-day styling more effortless

• Continually evolving my style to meet my needs, and recognising that my evolution happens on an entirely different timescale from the fashion industry’s idea of ‘seasons’

• Happily decluttering anything that is no longer useful or attractive to me

• Being able to shop easily with a laser-focus for the pieces that match my priorities; not getting distracted by the new, the trendy or the things that look good on someone else

• Having some sense of cohesion in my wardrobe; not having ‘lone wolf’ items that don’t go with anything else I own

• Being able to assess a piece’s value to me, not just its cost (cost is what you pay; value is what you get)

• Owning a collection that works for me, and only me

• Finding daily joy in getting dressed and using what I have chosen to keep

Can I call myself a minimalist?

What is a minimalist anyway?

I feel like the minimalism movement is closely linked, visually at least, with a single recognisable aesthetic of neutral tones, clean lines, limited print and colour, devoid of non-functional decoration. The aesthetic is quite spare and white seems very important. The modern 2020 minimalist seems to take pride in living with bare essentials and owning quite a small quantity of any one item with little to no excess contingency.

I reckon anyone would look at my wardrobe or my home, and while I don’t think it is cluttered, it’s certainly not quiet. I love colour, print, and I do own more than one of some things, a few knick-knacks, and several things I only use infrequently, which, to the ‘minimalist’, might be construed as missing the point? I can’t imagine myself in a white-walled home with very little art on the walls, wearing crisp white cotton or a basic tee and impeccably tailored jeans with no makeup. I can’t imagine myself not wanting to buy and own jewellery. I can’t imagine giving up my full-suspension mountain bike because I only use it about 5 times a year.

Despite this disconnect, I still want to call myself a minimalist, purely on the basis that I feel like I’m minimising my ownership of physical objects, and I’m changing my decision-making process when I do buy physical objects. I’m striving not to own for the sake of owning, striving to re-engineer my thinking and to ignore the cultural practices of consumerism that have taught me to love the buzz of buying new and to use the ownership of things as an indication of my success. I am genuinely enjoying the process of minimising and of refining my choices to match closely with my personal values, tastes and objectives.

So, can I call myself a minimalist?

Just through writing this post, I’m realising that I am making the same judgments about my own journey as I fear others might make about it too. Like I’m not worthy of the title minimalist until I’ve reached the goals of white walls, clean wooden floors, a wardrobe that could fit into a carry-on case and one bar of soap that cleans my kitchen, laundry and hair.

I am reminded that this has to be a personal journey that shouldn’t be judged, neither by yourself nor anyone else. Your goals or ideals do not need to match the visual chatter and distraction of aspirational and inspirational imagery.

The trick is to hear and identify ourselves amidst all that noise and so we can define goals and follow paths we see for ourselves. Forget the tribe and the formula. There is no objective, and even if there was, your personal circumstances and objectives might change a year from now - that’s OK too. This is what refinement is to me - paying attention to myself, honouring my unique set of needs, circumstances, tastes and desires and stripping away or ignoring anything that doesn’t speak to that. This process seems, quite naturally, to result in minimising what I do do and do own, to be able to focus on just a few really important things but I’m reminding myself that that doesn’t have to lead to owning a set quantity of anything and minimalism can be a fluid definition that can just mean what it means to me. Like love.

Maybe I am a minimalist or maybe I shouldn’t bother with the epithet. Maybe the naming of this thing is just the easy way out to try and define myself, to try and see where this is going when instead, I should just enjoy the ride.

Making more of a transeasonal wardrobe

Just this year, I have started to change the way I approach building my wardrobe for a season. The main objective of this change is to make as much of my clothing work across all the seasons if I can. I’m getting more creative about how things can be used to achieve this, and essentially ignoring all the typical fashion advice about what-to-wear-when, especially when it comes to colour.

For at least 15 years, I very much used to be the kind of person who stored away all my winter things at the start of April and brought out all my summer things, then swapped them all around again come about September. There are definitely benefits to this approach, probably the main one being that each time I did this, it felt like I had ‘gone shopping’, rediscovering clothing I loved and it felt new again. It also seemed to temporarily free up space in my wardrobe so that I was only looking at a subset of my belongings, so I felt, aided my being able to focus when deciding what to wear.

Despite this, the prompt to switch about this tried-and-tested method came about for 6 reasons:

1. This cycle kept me feeling like I needed to overhaul my style every 6 months and that there was something new I needed for the ‘new’ season. This kept me feeling flighty about my personal style, not intimately acquainted with it.

2. I had started to refine my personal colour palette and realised that the colours I loved and I knew looked lovely on me didn’t actually change to match the traditional colours of the fashion seasons

3. I realised that where I live, in the UK, it’s pretty temperate without so much extreme distinction between the seasons and several of the pieces I wear during our mild winters work perfectly well for a cool summer’s day also, and vice-versa

4. I actively wanted to make my clothing purchases work harder and to be able to keep wearing something as long as possible, for as long as I think it’s beautiful and complimentary to my style, and not hide it away unused for 6 months for some daft arbitrary rule I have imposed on myself

5. I had started to resent the additional storage space needed to keep my off-season wardrobe and instead, valued having that space free in my home

6. I noticed that not being able to truly see all of my wardrobe in one place also prompted unnecessary purchases as I forgot that I had x, y or z. I started to acquire more than I needed. For me personally, this is made worse by the fact that I buy a lot of secondhand and vintage clothing and since there is only one, the availability of secondhand means you grab it when you see it

Essentially there were many more reasons to change tack than there were benefits to keep doing the same as I had always done.

Interestingly, it seems that I’m not alone in this idea, and that there are seemingly many more of us who are moving more towards this model and the fashion industry is apparently following suit, as testified by this Harper’s Bazaar article I happened upon from March 2020.

So, for Autumn Winter 2020/21, I am planning to keep using as many pieces from my Spring Summer 2020 wardrobe as I can and the list is as follows:

• 1980’s cinnamon-coloured silk Betty Barclay trousers

• 1990’s black, bronze and brown silk halterneck dress

• Markus Lupfer floral wool-blend mini dress

• 1990’s long silk Gottex blouse

• Temperley white cotton blouse

• Ganni floral mesh top

• 1970’s Beged Or forest green suede skirt

• French Connection asymmetric silk skirt

• 1970’s ivory lace short-sleeved blouse

• 1970’s pastel dagger-collar blouse with little 'ducks’ print

Every piece on this list was purchased second hand with the exception of the Ganni top.

In the past, I would have seen these pieces as either too lightweight or the wrong colour to work in Autumn Winter but I love all of these pieces and they feel so current to me, they are absolutely representative of my personal style right now in 2020 so I have plans to get more creative to see if I can make them work. Some more thoughts on how I’ll try and make these work for a different season, later.

Being absolutely frank here, there are still pieces that are going to go into storage as ‘summer only’ but this is about half the number as I would have usually stored, so I’ll chalk that up as progress.