The Cheap Pants Saga

    After the big closet clean-out of two weeks ago one of my biggest wardrobe goals has been to find and wear patterned pants that don't make me look like a Florida grandma. The pants above were one of my first new additions. The J. Crew website will try to convince you that they are still $80, but this is a  lie! A had a conversation with my roommate, who has a J.Crew sixth-sense, a couple days ago that went something like this:
Me: I like your pants.
Her: They're from J. Crew and they're $35 AND all of the sale is another 30% off.
Me: I'm going to have the same pants as you.
    And now I do. These pants are terrific quality, and linen and leopard print- what more could you ask for? There is also a ton of other great stuff that is heavily on sale right now, so I suggest that you, my cheapie friends, get thyselves to the air-conditioned mall.
   Speaking of the mall and cheap patterned pants, I recently stumbled into a crazy vortex of actual nice clothes. I was poking around (God help me) JC Penney, hoping to find the I Heart Ronson line that was at one time pretty amazing, when I saw these.

    Of course (shocker!) they've styled them so they look hideous. But they're not! They're black and white, Greek key patterned with a slightly high waist and very wide legs. I wore them with a with tee and some big gold jewelry and they were very ladies-who-lunch-on-a-cruise. And they were $11! I'm thinking about going back to see what secretly fashion-forward things they have to offer. It's a lot like thrift shopping: the place smells weird and mostly everything is hideous, but every once in a while there is something great that you can torture your coworkers with when you talk incessantly about it the next day. 

Small Town Shoppin'

Beacon, NY. Photo by Lauren Nye.

      

    This is post only kind-of-a-little about fashion or style and definitely not much about being a cheap person. Last weekend I spent the day in the tiny town of Beacon, NY, about an hour and a half south of Albany. My roommate had arranged a meetup with a friend from college who lives in the Bronx and Beacon was almost exactly the midpoint between the two. I hadn't heard anything at all about Beacon except for its MetroNorth stop. You guys, this place is awesome. First, see above. It's beautiful. And there is some serious eating to be done. We had killer burgers and fries at Poppy's and crazily delicious raspberry-lemon zest-mint popsicles at Zora Dora. I'm getting hungry again just looking at the links.
    As we ate the aforementioned popsicles we walked around the small shops mostly situated on a couple-block stretch of Main Street. The diversity and quality of these shops were a surprise, since the city snob in me sometimes wants to dismiss anything so far off the beaten path as out of touch. That front was well represented in the form of a "vintage store" selling mostly year-old mall fashions (but even there one of my friends was able to rustle up a killer purse). Just about everything at Clay Wood and Cotton was drool-worthy, and it felt good to buy something and have the owner be able to say who made it and where it came from. Dream in Plastic is the kind of place I would like to envision myself glamorously buying Christmas presents while sipping a latte. Or something.
    As wonderful as it was to spend the day there, it made me wonder: living in a city several times its size, why can't we have the same kind of vibrant shop scene that is thriving there? The owner of Clay Wood and Cotton told us that a large part of their business happens on weekends and during the summer, but Albany has a large year-round population supplemented by thousands of college students. Why do the only shopping choices have to be the malls (there's nothing wrong with them, I work there, but they murder small business) or the handful of small boutiques far from downtown Albany? I'm sure someone with economic or business savvy could answer this, but I'm just here for the whine.
    This weekend I'm going to Hudson, another small town full of awesomeness. This time I won't forget my camera (but thank you again to Lauren Nye for that stunning image), and I'll have more to say on wonderful small, local businesses!

I Really Wanted to Make an R.Kelly Joke About Closets

(This isn't my closet. Not even close. But we all have to dream!)

     In the spirit of making fresh starts, and because this week looks like it's going to be HOT in a major way this week, I decided it was time for a very belated closet clean out. This time I tried to do double duty with it. I'm trying to get a system in order so I'm not just donating a bunch of stuff to Goodwill to replace it with a bunch more stuff from Goodwill. I was inspired by the wardrobe rehab at A Pair and A Spare and the waste-reducing strategies at GOOD but I can only aspire to be as chic/ environmentally-conscious as the bloggers at either of these sites. This is a method that works for me and is slllllllooooooowwwwwwlyy getting me to the point where I'm ditching less and less every time.
    First, prepare yourself! Get out some laundry baskets and slap some labels on them. These are mine:

     These categories should be pretty self-explanatory. Now you have to go through your closet piece by piece. This is the worst, suckiest part. Look at everything with an editor's eye. Even if you loved it in the past, if it's not in wearable condition you HAVE to chuck it. If you don't remember how it looks on you then try it on in good light and if there's anything less than perfect about it put it in the pile to be sold/ donated so someone with different tastes or another body shape can get some use out of it. The general wisdom is that if you haven't worn it in a year you should get rid of it, but I don't always agree.  Closet cleaning presents opportunities to rediscover awesome pieces that got hidden under clutter. The best rule of thumb is to think of how much every. single. piece. will help you be the effortlessly chic individual you want to be.

     Look at this giant pile of stuff that I pulled out of my closet! Most of it is being saved for a neighborhood sale next month, but there are a bunch of other ways to get rid of things in wearable condition. Garage (or stoop) sales are a great option, as are Ebay and Plato's Closet. Usually I prefer just to donate and skip the hassle. It's easy just to drop things off at the Salvation Army and Goodwill, but also try looking for a local charity that matches up with something you support or believe in (for me it's the Treasure Chest, an awesome thrift store run by the Albany Damien Center) 

    Now that things are organized it's time to get obsessively organized! I keep dresses, bottoms and blouses on one side of my closet and sweaters and outerwear on the other. Within these categories I organize by color and sleeve length. This sounds like some crazy-pants activity but it serves double duty: it will be easier to find what you're looking for at 7 a.m. before you've had your coffee and it also helps you look for gaps and redundancies in your wardrobe. I have WAY too many tops and WAY WAY too many short-sleeved blue-based blouses. I'm also pretty sadly lacking in non-jeans pants and white tops (the most frequent victims of clumsiness + coffee).

   As you're noticing what you don't have in your closet start making a list. This can also include things you've been thinking about but never seem to have enough money for at then end of the week. Cut a few pictures out of magazines to serve as inspiration. Mine looks a little something like this:

    This list is an ongoing project. Buy something? Cross it off. See something you feel like you neeeeeeeed? Add it to the list, let it sit for a bit and then get it if you still are thinking about it after, say, two weeks. By putting a little more thought into things before I buy them I'm hoping to avoid pulling out another freakishly large stack of ill-fitting clothes come November!

This is how it starts- doing more with less

     I'm kind of holding my breath here. This is at least my third attempt at blogging, not counting the Livejournal (and Deadjournal! Remember that?) I had in high school and a few ultra- serious Myspace posts. I'm hoping this one takes not only so I don't have to live with the sting of someone asking, "so how's your blog going?," but also because I'm trying to build it around an idea that has become more and more important to me over the last couple years.
      I've always been a clean person. Sometimes, like when I hoarded notebooks and bits of magazines in middle school, I was a closeted clean person, but the tendency towards wanting to lead a junk-free life has always been there. A couple years I almost chucked my W-2's during an intense bout of paper-purging and as a writer I've always been a fan of less-is-more prose. More recently I've become someone who is interested in and works with clothes. For a long time I fell into the trap of buying and buying and buying until my closet was stuffed and I still had nothing to wear. Twice a year I would purge my closet and shuffle off to Goodwill and then repeat the process, hoping for different results. However, the past couple of months have given me the opportunity to change things. Six year's worth of student loans have come due so my purse strings have tightened considerably.  I love a challenge, so I invented one for myself: define your style better with less money than you did before. It's a challenge that everyone might not need to take up, but in a culture where consumerism is biting us in the ass in a major way it couldn't hurt. So, by buying vintage and thrift more, finding new uses for pieces I never wear, DIYing my heart out and thinking more about why I'm buying what I'm buying when I do shop I'm embarking on a fashion-y spirit quest. There's much more closet-cleaning, tie-dying, vintage-shopping to follow in the near future. Until then enjoy this picture of a cute, and very stylish, kitten.