Kelp, is this another anti-wardrobe post wardrobe post? No! It’s more of an…alternative wardrobe post.
Other people have suggested previously that if the thought of exhaustively photographing your entire lolita fashion wardrobe sounds, well, exhausting, why not instead photograph a select part of it?
Is This That?
ラルフェイ半袖ワンピース from Atelier Boz
Nope! Honestly, the photographing thing is a big hurdle for me. The way my current digs, as the kids say, are set up, I don’t have a well-lit spot to quickly and efficiently snap items. Instead, I have to set up a permanently tilted mannequin I got from Marshall’s fifteen years ago downstairs- no I’m sorry, first I have to clear out everything in front of The One Blank Wall- no no, actually, I have to grab my ring light from the garage, then. Well. You see.
But wait, it gets worse. While readers may see the lovely emptiness of builder-grade interior drywall, I know the truth: take a 180 and be close enough to a piano-practicing family member to tap him on the shoulder. And also, you know, the grand piano he’s practicing on. I also just straight up block that hallway.
So What Is This, Then?
I think part of why wardrobe posts are so overwhelming happens even before the photos part – you have to just list out Everything you need to photograph. For the spreadsheet lolitas, this isn’t so bad. For those of us on the opposite side of the spectrum, if you’ve been in the fashion for a bit, it can be absolutely daunting.
My current New Year’s Resolution of sorts is to clean out a storage unit I started renting out of necessity when I was suddenly no-fault evicted some years ago. (My third no-fault eviction. This time during the early part of the pandemic.) At the time, I still had…delusions? that this was a temporary situation, that I would need stuff like a futon and cooking equipment and a big area rug for whenever I found housing that wasn’t couch-surfing at my parents’ house. But it didn’t take long for reality to set in – it just didn’t make financial sense for me to move back out, so I began my best efforts to move back in.
This has been a glacially slow process. My old room, while by no means small, is substantially smaller than the one I was renting. And it was full of stuff already when I got here, as was the rest of the house. While part of me can look around and sigh at the sight of all the things that have been Put Somewhere Temporarily for years now, another part of me reminds myself just how much stuff has been Cleared Out.
At least my old cookbooks are more or less squared away
Anyways. Obviously some of the stuff in the storage unit has Got to Go, but there’s also plenty of things both me and my mom have dropped off to Make Room Over Here or Tidy Up Over There, that now have to be reabsorbed in the least disruptive way possible.
So You Had Clothes in the Storage Unit?
Hell no, all my clothes stay with me. To get on a grim topic, it’s the one large collection of things I will pack up when I need to evacuate from a fire. I easily have two entire closets and a large chest of drawers full of clothing, nearly all of which can be very quickly tossed in garbage bags and smushed into my subcompact with the rest of my must-take items.
However, currently there is a lot of ‘wasted space’ in one of the closets I took over, and taking stock of the clothing situation is the first step. I recently did a small run-through on my big chest of drawers, and was able to make enough space to relocate my spare bedding from an under-bed storage box to one of the large drawers.
Atop this is, of course, a massive glacier of Things
This meant that under-bed storage box can now be used for…you guessed it, storing something else! So while going through my wardrobe may not seem the most efficient way to increase my storage capacity, it’s not the least efficient thing either, due to the sheer size and scope of the whole deal.
Wait, What Are We Doing Again?
A list, I’m making a list of my wardrobe. CSV type. No photos. Yet. Step one of mimicking a spreadsheet lolita. Fake it until you make it, or something. And as I make the list, I’m also going to get rid of at least one thing from each category.
Just one?, you may be thinking, but the thing is, the categories are going to be fairly granular, and certain parts of my closet are more carefully curated than others, so I don’t want to set myself up to fail by picking an arbitrary purge number. Even then, I already have carved out exceptions for certain categories that either will likely have very few items (bustiers/waists, for example…I maybe have 4?) or get heavy use as-is (e.g., foundation garments).
I have a few tertiary goals, such as setting aside things that need light mending (and actually mending them…unfortunately hand sewing is my nemesis, so something as simple as re-attaching a button is actually a huge hurdle). I’ll have my steamer on hand too, to freshen up anything that needs freshening.
Why There’s No List in This Post
Well! I was going to aim for a category a week, and then depending on how busy I was, strategically pick larger or smaller categories to tackle. And then not more than 24 hours after I started preliminaries, I got notice that my sister and her small, chaos-prone children were coming for an unscheduled visit for an indefinite period of time due to local air quality woes. I will likely still be able to tackle something in the meantime, but just in case, I did want to at least get this initial planning post posted instead of letting it languish in my drafts.
I can at least give you a sneak peak of my WIP categories, though! You can look forward to learning entirely too much about my more mundane items, from my slightly ridiculous amount of knit cardigans referenced in a previous post, to my definitely ridiculous amount of Uniqlo Heattech tights (#notsponsored). I will also be curious to put a number on just how many blouses I have – currently they are spread across two closets, which tells you a lot as it is.
Anyways, best of luck to all my fellow lolitas who are somehow participating in The Wardrobe deal! I’ll see some of you at least when I compile the January Bibliotheca newsletter…
kelp 