If I Buy Just This One More Thing...

The story of a seemingly mindless purchase, and thoughts about control

After a particularly fretful, restless night in April, I decided to do what I like to call “the old switcheroo”. Twice a year I pull everything out of my closet and pack away seasonal clothes that I will not be needing in the coming six months. I opened the containers that have kept my spring and summer clothes in order, and it felt like reuniting with old friends. Oh, the adventures we’ll have once it gets warmer! (The spring has been quite cold here.) I placed lighter coats and jackets where I can see them, and put on hangers my linen clothes and trousers suitable for warmer weather. I then folded my heavier knitwear and winter trousers into sealed containers, I zipped warm overcoats into garment bags. I cleaned and polished my winter boots and put them away in boxes.

I used to dread the old switcheroo. Due to the sheer volume of things I previously owned, making the seasonal closet switch would take me a whole day, sometimes two. I’d spend an enormous amount of time trying to figure out what to keep and what to donate. These days the old switcheroo is a much easier process. This time I got my closet sorted in a couple of hours, and I culled just three things that no longer fit my body. I was very pleased with myself and the clothes I have. I felt content. Until I didn’t.

It started with an innocent thought that same afternoon. I’ve been wearing a lot of black in the last couple of years, especially in the summertime. “Raven summer”, I called it in 2024. Because I’m a woman of contradictions, out of nowhere “swan summer” popped into my head. All-white looks for the summer of 2025! I took a quick look around my closet. With the exception of my white shirts, I don’t really have white clothes. And that’s how it began: “if I just had a white skirt, I could come up with amazing outfits for swan summer…”, and “if I buy a white skirt, my wardrobe would feel complete”.

Fast forward an hour or two, and I was knee-deep browsing Etsy for white vintage and antique skirts. I shut down my laptop a couple of times, only to turn it back on minutes later to “take one more look”. I’m pretty good at asking myself the right questions before buying something, but the “if I just buy this one more thing…” momentum had a mind of its own. I didn’t stop to think about the practicality of a white skirt, or the life I have, or any other crucial factors I typically try to keep in mind when contemplating a purchase.

Instead I published a Note on Substack about how I knew I was delusional about buying “just this one more thing…” Many likes followed. Other people recognized the feeling I was experiencing. I wasn’t alone in this, and it made me feel better about myself. But it didn’t stop the ball from rolling.

At least I had enough sense to understand that no random white skirt would do. I wasn’t looking for lace, ruffles or tiers. That narrowed things down dramatically, and I was close to giving up once or twice. But then I found a long white skirt from the early 1900s that had no unnecessary frills. It was a bit shorter than my black antique skirt that I have loved and worn a lot, and it had a beautiful texture and a tie in the back. This was it. If I bought this one thing, I’d be good. I wouldn’t buy anything else for two months. No, three months. No, until the fall, or how about the rest of the year?

I double-checked how many pieces from my own wardrobe I had sold on Vestiaire Collective in the last couple of months, and the list of things I had already bought this year. I convinced myself that my wardrobe wouldn’t feel off balance after this purchase. My husband reminded me of some birthday money he had given me to spend in February. I figured I could spend that money now, and I wouldn’t be breaking my budget. Because I’d be good after this. I would be, really. My palms sweated. I pulled the trigger and bought the skirt.

Afterwards I wallowed in feelings of heavy guilt on the one hand and unencumbered joy on the other. I sent an excited message to my antique-clothes-loving friend Noora about the skirt. Noora asked me how I would style the skirt once it arrived. I hadn’t even stopped to think about styling. I didn’t have top options or shoe options. In all seriousness I had zero ideas as to how I was actually going to wear the skirt. I told Noora that I had thought about buying a white skirt for a while, but as I typed the words, I felt that they weren’t true at all. This was a pure impulse purchase, thoughtless and rash. As terror set in, I rambled on about an all white look and how I wasn’t going to allow myself to buy anything for a long while. Clown emojis would not have been out of place in that exchange.

The first couple of days waiting for the skirt to arrive felt almost painful. I was uncomfortable and wanted to make sense of my discomfort. How did I get here? After years of trying to learn to buy clothes smarter, had I learned nothing? I tried to remember the previous time I had bought “just this one more thing”.

“Just this one more thing” purchases seem to be of a very particular nature to me. They are:

• either not planned at all, or overplanned to a ridiculous extent,

• expensive or beyond my budget, and

• somehow out of the norm, or “forbidden”, like a designer piece that I shouldn't be able to afford, or a piece that has a very limited function.

The long white skirt fell under the last category. It felt what kids these days call “a vibe” rather than an actual physical garment. It occurred to me that I had bought it because of the thought of the skirt, not the skirt itself.

After consulting my shopping files, it turned out that it had been quite a long while since I had bought something in this frame of mind. I had to go back to my list of purchases from 2023 to find an inkling of this type of buying. The last time I was fully in this mode was in 2022. It hit me that I used to buy clothes in this manner all the time; frantically, full of empty promises to myself, with a fire under my behind and thoughts of an imaginary self and an imaginary life. It felt necessary to be reminded of that, because seeing how far I’ve come allowed me to breathe freely again. “I got this”, I told myself. “What’s done is done, and it will be okay.”

In order to minimize the potential damage, I figured that I should start planning how I might wear the skirt, so I logged onto my Pinterest and went through images I had been saving for the last year or so. “There must be something here that I can use”, I thought. And there they were: multiple all-white looks that I had already pinned during the winter months. The mood boards and the styling ideas were there. Swan summer had not been a new thought at all. As reckless as the purchase of the skirt had initially felt, it started to dawn on me that the plan of buying this skirt had been percolating for some time. I just hadn’t realized it.

Skirt details

Finally the skirt arrived in the mail. The weight and the complexity of the fabric astonished me. The marcella weave of the cotton was incredibly intricate but soft. As I slipped into the skirt that evening, and learned to tie the complicated ribbons in the back, with the gathered fabric forming what almost resembles a bustle, nothing felt out of place (except for some condition issues that the seller had failed to disclose in her listing, but I figured I could live with them). The skirt felt right. I was at ease.

I’ve thought a lot about control in the weeks that have followed the skirt’s arrival: how freaked out and embarrassed I felt after making (what seemed like) an impulse purchase, how out of control I felt I had been. Many style writers talk about guilt as one of the primary forces that moves us as we navigate the world of buying: that we try to limit our purchases because we have been led to believe that style is frivolous and silly. If we just let go of our useless feelings of guilt, we’d be happier and just enjoy our clothes.

I feel that it’s a bit more complicated than that. When we try to make sense of the world of style and clothes, at the bottom of it all is the need to be in control: to make the correct decisions and to avoid mistakes at all cost. We try to control the way we are seen by others, because we want to appear to be in the know. The way we fret about shopping is most definitely fueled by guilt, shame and the patriarchy aiming to keep women in order, but the underlying need we have is control.

Still too cold to go tightless, scarfless and coatless.

Many lovers of clothes and fashion are united in their goal to figure out how to buy better, how to stop buying things that we don’t wear, and how to navigate the endless stream of beautiful things that we might want but can’t or shouldn’t own. We tackle these challenges with no buys, tracking our purchases, exercising very strict control over the number of buys and budgeting on the one hand, and low buys, leaning more toward mindfulness, on the other. Many of us, even the most frantic shoppers among us, keep shopping lists, wish lists, and saved searches. We analyze and nitpick our style and the new offerings of our favorite brands, or we meditate and tell ourselves who we are so that we can buy accordingly. In a world where many of us can, at least in theory, wear whatever the heck we want in our everyday lives, we seem to long for a sense of discipline and control. Methods may vary, but we all want to have answers, and sometimes we’re willing to sacrifice our freedom and intuition in exchange.

In some ways it makes sense. Clothes themselves are about the complex juxtaposition between freedom and control. Clothes cover, embrace, or sometimes distort our bodies. They conceal and reveal. In doing so they signal our gender, our age, our class, our thoughts and ideals, and our standing in society. Clothes and the way we interact with them make society. It goes without saying that trying to find answers in this framework is not going to be simple. But to me it seems that the way we try to control our relationship with clothes and shopping has become a performance that lacks a deeper understanding of what makes us human.

Humans are tactile creatures with a profound intuition for beauty and an appreciation for skill. We have woven fabrics and clothed ourselves for millenia, in order to stand out or to blend in. We should know how to do this, instinctively. But of course the world is so much more complex now than it used to be. Our circumstances have changed dramatically in just a couple of decades. It’s not just our immediate physical world that we interact with, and we’re very rarely involved in the process of producing the garments we wear. We’re quite literally out of touch. No wonder we’re confused.

We are judged on the basis of our looks and clothing choices both in person and online, and with so much stuff (or images of stuff) and social connections at our fingertips, it gets more and more difficult to figure out what to choose and how to “get it right”. The bigger picture is simply too vast for us to control. I’d wager that the more we try to rationalize and control our eternal quest for personal style, the more we spend our hours looking at screens, trying desperately to find answers, and the further our instincts slip away from us. It resembles scrambling, and I wonder if it’s making anyone happier.

I wish I had a conclusion I was happy with, but as usual, I’m left with more questions than answers. I have my white skirt now. Do I feel that my wardrobe is finally complete? No, duh. Of course not. That’s not how it works. But I do love my skirt and I’m going to be wearing it a lot this summer. Am I somehow enlightened by this experience, ready to take on intuition as my primary shopping tool? Heck no. I’m not planning on abandoning my shopping list and budget, and I will still take the occasional break from shopping if it feels necessary. But I recognize that elusive, impossible need for control in myself, and I’m curious to investigate it further.

I guess the moral of the story is to trust that you might already know what you’ll want to wear. Stop freaking out and go with your gut sometimes. Buy that “just one more thing”, if it feels right. If it works out, great. If it doesn’t… well, to err is human.

---