Cherish Your Closet

I have been thinking a lot about my wardrobe lately.  I am a clearance junkie.  I scour racks for double-extra-redline markdowns in order to find a great steal.  I love the thrill of getting something I love for super cheap.  Last week, I got Emmalyn an adorable Christmas dress for $8 - marked down from $70.  I was thrilled.  But more often than not, I settle for a piece of clothing that I only like because it's marked down.  I would never buy it at full price.  This drives Eric crazy.  When I show him a great deal, he asks, "But do you like it?"  It used to really irritate me, but I'm starting to understand.  Would I rather have a bunch of cheap clothes that I like, or a select amount of clothing that I love.  This post from Young House Love offered a lot of great tips about affordable shopping, but more importantly, helped explain this method:

Say I have ten outfits I love love love in my closet. I’d call them all favorites and on a scale of 1-10 I’d score them all a ten. That makes my overall closet average a ten. Then say that I see a sweater I kind of like (let’s say I’d give it a seven). And it’s on sale, so it’s tempting. The way I completely resist grabbing that sweater – which I’m guaranteed to like less than everything else in my closet – is to think of my closet average. Right now my overall closet average is a ten. If I get that sweater and it’s a seven, it’ll bring my entire closet average down, and I can just picture myself choosing other things on my hanging bar over and over again since it wasn’t something that I love love loved from the start. That helps me hold out for things I really truly love and stops me from grabbing anything I probably won’t wear or appreciate as much. Everyone loves a good closet GPA, haha – and it keeps that dreaded closet-clutter at bay (you know, when you have a bunch of stuff, but feel like you have nothing to wear).

Right now, my closet it as a 2.5 GPA.  Maybe.  I have a lot of clothes that I love, but I also have a lot of markdowns that I bought for the sake of a good deal.  And I don't wear the clothes I love.  I save them for a moment that may never come (I do the same thing with Emmalyn's clothes).  This post on Babble reminded me  again about the importance of wearing what I love.  When I read the post, I thought, "Wait, other people do that too?", "I'm not the only person who tries to save outfits for an undefinable moment in the unforeseeable future?".  So tomorrow, I'm wearing something cute.  Something I love.  What about you?  How would you rate your closet?  Do you save your outfits rather than cherishing them and actually, you know wearing them?