Getting my girl on used to be so easy. Underwear, dress, shoes, wig and off to the mirror for a bit of self-adoration. Actually ‘girl’ is probably stretching things a bit too far; if ever there was a physical manifestation of ‘bloke in a dress’ it was me (and perhaps it still is me but I’ll leave that to others to judge). Keeping things under control was also straightforward, with only one of each of the things I listed to worry about, everything could fit into a plastic rubble sack with room to spare and getting it in and out of its hiding place was a piece of cake. Even when I added a few more items to the mix, things remained pretty well under control.
Needless to say, it was never going to last! Thanks to a combination of joining the Kandi’s Land cohort of contributors and Mrs A giving her blessing to DADT in early 2023, things started to mushroom. First, another rubble sack was added and then I found a huge holdall in one of the local shops which looked like it would hold everything. It did, at least for a while, but there was one rather large problem – the weight of it when fully loaded. Bear in mind that my ‘stash’ is stored in our roof space, accessible only via a portable ladder with the only access being a hole less than 2 feet square. Trying to (wo)manhandle it up and down that ladder quickly showed that it was only a matter of time before Mrs A would return home and find her husband unconscious (or worse) in a crumpled heap at the bottom of the ladder, pinned to the floor by a huge holdall full of ‘goodies’.
If only that had been the only challenge I faced. But another problem was also looming. My terror at the thought of stepping into the outside world had been replaced by overwhelming urges to be there. And that meant that my stash of typical CDer fodder – high heels & high hemlines, all purchased from the ‘mutton dressed as lamb’ section of the womenswear department – was no longer fit for purpose. Of course, I could (and did) concoct a story about being a smartly dressed businesswoman grabbing a few essentials from the local supermarket during a quick break or even a woman on her way to church when the outing was on a Sunday but I quickly realised that I stuck out like a sore thumb when all of the other people in the vicinity were dressed very casually. Added to which, shoes that look fab in the mirror are often only too happy to make their presence felt when worn for any length of time. So I needed a rethink.
Kandi’s post Building the Perfect Beast (My Wardrobe) was a masterclass in what commitment to the cause actually looks like:
‘Now regarding storage. I’ll do my best to describe things. In our bedroom, I probably have six drawers with my Kandi clothes and a few things hanging in our closet. In another bedroom, I have an entire closet and a complete dresser. In the basement, I have a storage area under the steps, with a few rods for hanging things. With the exception of dresses, everything is hung five to a hangar. I have those long skirt and pant hangars, full. Bins full of dresses and skirts. Another closet with a set of drawers where I store my sweaters, purses and swim wear. There is one of those temporary closets for all of my blazers (five to a hangar) and I use another bedroom closet for coats.’
Quite a contrast to a single holdall! Even if Mrs A was to give her blessing to the expansion of my stash along similar lines, I live in the UK where houses tend to be a lot smaller than in the US so space for storage is at a premium and we don’t tend to have basements so sadly I’m stuck with the holdall in the roof space. A different strategy was required.
From time to time, my YouTube feed has featured the concept of ‘capsule wardrobes’. If you’re not familiar with the term, it’s defined as follows:
A small collection of essential, interchangeable clothing pieces that can be mixed and matched to create a variety of outfits for different occasions. The goal is to have a limited number of high-quality, versatile items, often in a cohesive colour palette, to simplify getting dressed, reduce clutter, and promote sustainability.
I watched the videos with interest but it was only relatively recently that I realised that the concept could dig me out of the hole I’d found myself in. One of my big problems, I realised, was that I tended to think in terms of complete outfits. That dress must always be worn with those shoes. That jumper must never be worn with anything other than this skirt. And so on. I suspect a lot of CDers are the same; we’ve not evolved our style on a daily basis over many decades to understand what works and what doesn’t and tend to go for complete looks we’ve seen on women when out and about or on the pages of magazines or clothing catalogues (remember those?!).
But if we stop thinking in terms of complete outfits and, instead, develop a mix and match mentality, all of a sudden our options mushroom. For example imagine that we only have the following to work with:
– one skirt, one pair of trousers/pants
– one jumper, one blouse
– one dress
– one jacket, one coat
– one pair of heels, one pair of flats
That’s just 9 items and yet it gives (2 x 2 x 2 x 2) + (2 x 2) = 20 possible outfit combinations. Choose the individual items carefully and we have an outfit for almost any situation from very casual – trousers/ jumper/ flats/ jacket – to formal – dress/ heels/ coat.
There are a couple of caveats here. Not all of those outfit combinations will work well but the nature of women’s fashions is that nothing is really off limits. The second is that accessories are important too – particularly jewellery but also small items such as shawls, scarves and belts can help give an outfit a complete look.
To prove my point, here’s a simple example created by AI with just the items I listed above:
1. Casual and comfortable for a trip to the shops?
2. Something a little smarter, a pub lunch perhaps?
3. Smart yet casual for an evening at the wine bar?
4. A dinner date beckons?
Of course, the limited number of available garments means that the scope of what can be achieved is also limited but adding just a few more items – perhaps a midi skirt, jeans, another dress and a pair of boots increases the theoretical maximum to 60 different outfits and we’re still only looking at a total of 13 items.
Being able to think in this way has been transformative for me. As I’ve already intimated, my stash was becoming unmanageable due to its weight and with Mrs. A’s retirement now imminent, it was in desperate need of a cull. It was less than a year ago when I last did this (see my post Time For A Purge! for the full story) but looking back now, I didn’t really consider anything’s usefulness when deciding what to get rid of. That’s not to say that I regret parting with anything, in fact the exact opposite is true and I kept things that really should have gone. But now that I can look at things in a new light considering whether they would work with other items in my collection and whether I could ever see myself wearing them in the outside world, things that were there for no other reason than I liked them (but never actually wore them) could go without me feeling any sense of loss. And it was a good job that I still had a supply of rubble sacks because I quickly filled one with a couple of pairs of shoes, a couple of dresses, a pair of trousers, a jacket and a few other bits and pieces which were then taken down to the local Salvation Army donation point where, hopefully, someone down on their luck for one reason or another will get pleasure from them (although the size UK9 shoes may have a limited market!).
I have to confess that I love the idea of a capsule wardrobe. I’d be lying if I tried to claim that I’d slimmed it down to the aforementioned nine items – there are four dresses, five pairs of shoes/boots, three tops and two skirts alongside the denim jacket, black overcoat and pair of trousers – but it’s by no means excessive and every single item has been worn outside at one time or another, in some cases several times. And having that variety means that the satisfaction not only comes from going out but also from planning what to wear. Added to which, I’ve got sufficient variety within those 17 items to ensure that, as long as I plan properly, I need never look out of place.
Whether my collection of clothes & shoes can legitimately be referred to as a capsule given that its existence owes more to luck than any organised planning on my part is questionable. Perhaps it’s sometimes fun to delve into the depths of a wardobe/ closet or unpack the contents of a stash bag and find a long-forgotten item but it begs the question as to why it was forgotten in the first place. If I lived a greater part of my life in my feminine persona, perhaps I’d feel differently but I felt a sense of relief as those items submitted to the latest cull – relief that the stash was once again becoming manageable, relief that there were no distractions amongst what was left and relief that, perhaps, someone somewhere who receives the donated items will experience a sense of delight that, as far as those individual items were concerned, I never really did.
