My concept of a curated wardrobe as both a new luxury and a new hallmark of the stylish has attracted a broad scope of attention. Part of the negative attention has come about because there’s a big and inaccurate blur between the words ‘style’, ‘fashion’ and ‘clothing’, and as a result fashion and the act of purchasing clothing are often mistaken as the same thing. The fashion industry is a business – it needs us to shop and it encourages us to do so. While there’s certainly nothing wrong with that, it has been one of the factors that has led to the need for wardrobe curation in the first place. Thus some have seen the curated wardrobe as anti the fashion industry. It’s not. I’m not suggesting we stop shopping or even spend less, but simply that we need to stop buying average pieces.
As I see it, for a fashioniser, clothes and accessories are an extension of their personality. We wear the pieces we believe represent not only who we are, but who we aspire to be. On one level at least, we use fashion to say where we’re going in life. In such a world view, average pieces have little place. That concept of self-projection, on wanting to be more than average, raises a question for the clothing in your wardrobe:
Does it represent you? Or is your wardrobe filled with too many average pieces?
After all, average clothing is usually identifiable. We’ve all encountered people in our day to day lives and noted that what they’re wearing looks cheap. Or perhaps it doesn’t look cheap in so much as it’s a recognisable knock off of a catwalk piece. We probably don’t treat these people any differently (we shouldn’t), but we certainly don’t want to be perceived in the same way ourselves.
I touch on this after reading Lara McPherson’s positive response to the curated wardrobe:
When I first started working in the fashion industry it was with several big, old Australian retailers and it didn’t take long for my illusion of quality, art, design and beauty in the industry to be shattered.
What Lara has related isn’t necessarily a universal list; while I’m certain we all want to only buy in to in quality fashion, we’re not all looking for art to be an attribute in our own wardrobe. Even quality itself is open to interpretation and diminution.
So the question is raised as to what attributes we want our clothes and accessories to have and what we want them to say about us. When you look over your wardrobe next, can you look at all the pieces and say that they represent who you are and who you want to be? If not, then this is another sign of the need for a curated wardrobe.
