Clothing {Simple Living Challenge}

Welcome to the “clothing” edition of the Simple Living Challenge. This is an area that I really want to get under control!

The justice/environmental issues surrounding clothing are vexing to me. The best thing to do is to buy used clothing; however since I’m a plus size this is a challenge as many resale shops don’t carry plus sizes. Organic/fair trade? Plus size seems to be limited to organic cotton hoodies and tees. Not exactly work wear.

So my personal philosophy is to try to buy as little as possible for right now. When I get skinny I’ll try to find more sources for organic and fair trade clothing. At one point in my life I thought I would sew all my clothes, so I did quite a bit of research on wardrobe capsules. Jennifer Skinner used to have a website which appears to be down now (you can still check out her blog though) in which she suggests always having two tops for each bottom, and about a week’s worth of bottoms and two weeks of tops. I love her method because she doesn’t try to make EVERYTHING matchy-matchy, but it’s still fairly versatile.

I cleaned out my closet in January and it was so nice to have that template. I chose my top 5 best fitting/favorite dress pants and realized I needed another pair. So I put that on my list. I had 10 tops in rotation, but really wasn’t in love with many of them so I knew to keep my eye out for inexpensive work tops. Also a dress or two to throw in the rotation just to keep things fresh.

It was so freeing to be able to let go of ill-fitting clothes! And having the wardrobe always in mind as a whole makes me feel less guilty about giving away those that aren’t in my “top 10″ list.

What are your wardrobe planning tips?

Related posts:

1. Money and Stewardship {Simple Living Challenge}
2. Cooking and Eating {Simple Living Challenge}
3. Learn from the World Community {Simple Living Challenge}

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