We Should Only Wear Nice Things
Musings on 'stuff', wardrobe fillers, and 'nice things'.
I’ve had some trouble getting my writing together lately. A week ago I was going to publish a personal style newsletter about The Mandalorian, but I chickened out at the last minute, thinking that my readers are probably not as into Star Wars as I am. I have been floating a longer piece about clothing quality for weeks, and every time I try to tackle the topic, I start another draft. (I currently have five drafts.) I’ve also worked on a newsletter about how and where to buy vintage, but I’ve been feeling that the topic is too close to home right now. Just like many other small brick-and-mortar businesses, my shop has been struggling this year, and all I want to say about the topic is “buy from small shops while they’re still around”. It’s not just my writing that’s all over the place. It feels like everything is, Star Wars included – there will be no newsletter about The Book of Boba Fett. (Andor might be another story.)
A few years ago my therapist told me that your forties are a weird time in life. Life is a sequence of events that takes you from thinking that you know everything or at least something to realizing that you know very little or actually nothing. Your 40s are more or less smack-nab in the middle of that process. Your parents are getting older. You begin to face your own aging and your own mortality – the moment your doctor tells you to watch your cholesterol is an eye-opener. You’re old enough to either feel nostalgic about your teens and your early 20s or to go digging for clues in your early life decisions to see how they molded you and how you’ve become who you are. A timeline of your life begins to emerge and you see both its beginning and its inevitable end in a way you haven’t before. As a result you’re simultaneously the most confident and the most insecure about yourself than you’ve ever been. For me, this has bled into the way I feel about my personal style. I know what I like and I feel comfortable in my body, but I can’t remember being quite this insecure about the way I dress since I was a teenager.
For some time I blamed Tibi Style Class for making me feel uneasy about my personal style. I was learning a lot from Style Class, but I was also starting to think that my clothes weren’t cool or chill enough. There was a part of me that felt that if I could afford these stylish clothes, I’d feel confident again. I now realize that there was a lot more going on. My discovery of the Style Class coincided with the time in my life when I was starting to think that maybe some fashions were beyond me and my age. I was beginning to worry that I might look ridiculous in clothes I had managed to pull off when I was younger. I had understood what it meant when grown women said that they had trouble relating to young models wearing the clothes on the runway or on the pages of magazines. I had gone up a dress size or two and I craved comfort in a way I hadn’t before. Add hormonal fluctuations that come with mood swings, irritability and insomnia, and that’s a lot to process.
I feel like I’ve been recalibrating my position in the world of style and fashion for the past few years: I’m not exactly young anymore, but I’m definitely not old either. Where does that leave me? I’m still trying to figure it out. Transitional times are always tumultuous and maybe they need to be, in order to jolt something back on track. In the meantime I try to keep an open mind and excavate nuggets of wisdom in a myriad of places, including The Mandalorian and the comment box of my newsletter.
Two weeks ago MidnightBlueBlack left a comment on my previous newsletter. The comment was in reference to Sophia Coppola and how she manages to look like herself while wearing seemingly ordinary clothes. MidnightBlueBlack traced Coppola’s style back to some stylish women in Rome and Paris, who “only own nice things that suit them”. This sparked something in my brain. I immediately realized that these days ‘nice things’ means something else to me than it did, say, five years ago. Back then, a ‘nice thing’ would have been something fancy and expensive at the back of my closet that I didn’t want to ruin by wearing it. Now, the ultimate ‘nice thing’ in my wardrobe is the thrifted, magical Yohji jacket I wear repeatedly and always talk about. A truly nice thing is special because of the way it makes you feel when you wear it.
While thinking about ‘nice things’, I backtracked the timeline of my personal style in my mind. I pored over some of my old outfit pictures and read through the lists of things I had bought ten or so years ago when I had first started writing down all the clothes I purchased. The absence of ‘nice things’ in my personal style was palpable. I had bought “stuff, not style” (the phrase is Amy Smilovic’s, and I am forever grateful for it), and the reason why I had bought ‘stuff’ was what Subrina Heyink calls “pulling a look” rather than expressing personal style. These are not new realizations for me – I’ve been sitting with these wisdoms for some time and they’re all I really ever write about – but the notion of ‘nice things’ hasn’t really entered this equation in my mind until now.
By definition, the concept of ‘stuff’ doesn’t really align with ‘nice things’ at all – ‘stuff’ is disposable and ‘nice things’ have staying power. ‘Stuff’ keeps you disconnected and ‘nice things’ make you access a highlighted version of yourself when you wear them. There’s something about the fabric and the cut of ‘nice things’ that makes you carry yourself differently. ‘Nice things’ are meaningful and valuable because you become committed to them. In times of insecurity and personal confusion ‘nice things’ offer comfort and shelter, like armor. They make you feel grounded and invincible, no matter how crappy your day might be. Doesn’t it make sense, then, that when midlife perplexity is kicking our ass, we should only be wearing ‘nice things’ that make us feel better about ourselves?
I’ve gotten rid of a lot of my ‘stuff’ in the last couple of years, but I keep holding onto a bunch of things that reside in the no-man’s-land between ‘stuff’ and ‘nice things’. They’re wardrobe fillers: I bought them because I was in a mood and didn’t think things through or listen to my instincts before pulling the shopping trigger. Some of these things I actually wear a lot because they’re practical, but they don’t exactly spark joy, confidence or any other emotion in me. Often they even camouflage as ‘nice things’ because of the brand they carry. Maybe the fabric is luxurious but the fit just isn’t quite there. Filler clothes are ‘nice but…’, and to be perfectly honest, I’m kind of tired of seeing these types of clothes creep in and clog up my wardrobe and my life time after time.
I have a pretty good selection of ‘nice things’ in my closet these days. Not all of them are in the transformative Yohji jacket territory, but they’re pretty close: my Dries Van Noten shirts and trousers, my warmest and most comfortable cashmere sweaters, and my Pleats Please skirts all fit the bill of making me feel exceptional when I wear them. I have a handful of very nice jackets, coats and shoes. I wear my nice things often, but I still allow an awful lot of fillers to live in my closet. I try to make a point of wearing my filler items, too, because I feel bad for them. I want to hold myself accountable for having bought them, so I keep them, thinking that maybe they will prove themselves over time. (They very rarely do.) The problem is that I just don’t feel great while wearing filler clothes, and my process of getting dressed often gets weighed down by their presence. It’s like I’m waiting for my bad shopping decisions to transform into ones I can maybe-sort-of-live-with, and I waste a lot of mental energy tending to clothes I don’t care about one way or another. I wonder how I’d feel about my personal style if I only saw ‘nice things’ in my closet while picking out what to wear in the mornings.
I’ve been playing with the idea of creating an experimental capsule wardrobe made up entirely of my ‘nice things’. I have no delusion of becoming Sophia Coppola or one of those women in Rome and Paris overnight, but I am curious about where seeing only ‘nice things’ in my wardrobe might take me. I get a fair amount of wear out of my ‘nice things’ as is, but I’m intrigued by taking it further and teaming my ‘nice things’ with more ‘nice things’, and not with filler like I quite often do.
I’ve been thinking for a while that I need to just pull everything out of my wardrobe and rearrange things, but now that the autumn season is here, I am motivated to finally go ahead with it. This time I’m doing it differently: I’m not just swapping places between my summer and winter clothes like I usually do. This is not really a culling or a closet purge either. I’m packing away most of the filler items in my wardrobe, although things like my sneakers and some other purely practical things get to stay. (I obviously still need to go on my stupid mental health walks and unfortunately my very, very nice woven Stephane Kélian shoes will not cut the mustard in that regard.) I’m clearing up some space, both in my wardrobe and in my convoluted 45-year-old mind. I’m giving ‘nice things’, and myself in the process, the respect and the love they deserve.
P.S. Here’s a photo dump of what I have worn recently:
Hi Tiia, thanks for thus very thoughtful news letter. I am older than most of your readers - in my sixties. I can honestly say, life just gets better. I am happier now than I have ever been. I love wearing my nice things but I also have some fun "stuff" in my closet that makes me happy too. I got hooked on the Tibi style class early on during the pandemic. I just loved the new to me perspective but don't find them as interesting as I did in the beginning. At the end of the day, Tibi is in business to sell us new stuff just like the entire fashion industry. We must all find that balance between enjoying what we already own and buying new. The health of our planet depends on a huge reduction of clothing production and only the consumers will make this happen. So, yes, buy nice things that will last that you love!! And buy less.
Such an interesting read. It's always mattered to me that I show a bit of myself through my clothes. If I'm honest it's about always wanting to feel a bit different from other people, generally through having a masculine style.
I got sidetracked by Tibi and spent a ridiculous amount of money (for me) that I really didn't have. I'm selling it all at the moment. I've realised that as other comments have said, she's helped shake up my style but I don't really think that Tibi look is entirely me. I'm ditching all my oversized blazers and slouchy trousers. I actually realised that it doesn't really suit my body type (yes I know Amy hates any notion of looking for things that flatter, but I'm realising I don't entirely agree with that - after all her designs suit her shape don't they?!).
I've also realised I don't like her obsession with avoiding looking 'basic' - sometimes that basic look is pretty close to Sofia Coppola! And I really agree with wanting 'nice things' - and actually sometimes they don't have 'ease' in them (another of Amy's obsessions).
I'm really more inspired by people like you and Rachel Tasjian -I've nought some amazing vintage via links on her newsletter (I just messaged her and asked to be on the list - I'm no one special). Having avoided vintage for a decade or so, worried that I'd too old for it, I'm now loving buying it again. I bought 2 vintage Yohji jackets and can't wait to wear them. Neither is big and baggy!