Capsule Wardrobes

I tell you what, it is SO worth the $20 (often including shipping!) to get pants that look and feel good. The most important thing seems to have been asking for measurements! I was asking for so many every day that Poshmark started limiting the number of comments I could post per day in case I was some sort of spammer 😂 For shirts, pit to pit and collar to hem, and for pants, waist, rise, and inseam have been clutch.

Congratulations on your journey so far too, and here's hoping you can snag some clothes that make you feel fabulous! The way I see it, ALL my clothes are "used" all but the first time I wear them anyway, so what difference does it make if someone else got the first wear?

Yes! I did a fair bit of this too, but after trying on dozens of items at a time and walking out empty-handed, I decided it would work better to measure a few of my favorite items that fit well and filter that way, since women's sizes in particular are basically completely arbitrary. On Poshmark, I asked for measurements so many times each day for several days that it would cap the number of comments/questions I was allowed to leave in case I was a spammer!

This is random, but I was going through the archives of an old blog I had had and came across a post where I noted the old website where I first learned about all of this! It's long since transformed into something else, but you can still find the systematic stuff through the Internet Archive! Check it out!

Fashion Tips | Basic Fashion Advice on How to Improve Your Style | Fashion Basics On How to Dress Your Body Shape and Finding Your Best Colors

Fashion Tips and Basics for Women: Step-by-step guidelines to improving your personal style and looking your best, tips on finding your body shape, face shape, build a solid closet

web.archive.org

Sure!

1. I did use Claude, but I also already had the other information from yeeeeaaaars ago. The "outdoorsy geek chic tomboy" thing I came up with on my own. Like being outside, but look like I belong in a university, and never did grow out of my "tomboy" phase. I had been stressing myself out thinking I wanted to explore "muted small-pattern florals" or whatever, and those were impossible to find with today's search functions (how I miss the days of boolean searches), so instead I decided not to worry about getting it exactly right, and just getting a better foundation to build from.
2. I wish I could remember where I found the color season thing because it was insanely helpful, but it's probably not even online anymore. It was at least 15 years ago. I'm sure there are new guides out there. I just remember that once I figured out I was an "autumn," it was super obvious. I think the first question was whether your skin has yellow undertones or pink undertones, and I'm so yellow my veins look green, but it may not be as obvious for everybody.
3. For some reason, I get better suggestions from Claude when I frame things like it's helping me design something for a client than for myself, like, "You and I are going to work together to design a capsule wardrobe for a woman who is __________. You act as my resident expert on current fashion trends, but also what's timeless! I'll handle interacting with the client and getting her answers to any questions you may have." That seems to make it not try to hard to be "friendly" with me as the client and say things people want to hear. It will say things like, "I hear you, but from what you've said, I don't think that combination will work very well for this client. Here's why:" in a way that it won't dare correct me when it thinks I'm emotionally invested in how my own appearance ends up based on the conversation.

I don't know how helpful that is, but I'm out of steam (unfortunately been sick the whole year so far). I'd say just crack open a chat and see where it goes! You can always start a new one if it starts going off the rails.

I'm going to end up trying to sell most of my existing "perfectly good" clothes on Poshmark and eBay. My mom is a reseller as a hobby, so she's promised to help me get the hang of it.

I actually lost the weight a year ago, which feels recent, but I wanted to be sure it was going to stick before changing up the clothes. I actually felt physically awful after losing it. My doc said it was probably just taking my body some time to process all the gunk that had been stored in the excess fat cells. (Annoying, though, since she and all my other doctors had attributed every problem I've ever had to being overweight...IFYKYK.) I'm feeling better a year later and haven't regained the weight, and while I think I'm probably going to start moving it down some more again this year, when I realized I could do the whole wardrobe for so little, I decided I might as well just go ahead and size down now and size down again if it comes to it.

(For anyone wondering, there wasn't any big secret. A dietitian just helped me figure out that what finally kills my "hungry between meals" switch is 40g protein, 40g fat, and 10g fiber in each meal, 3 meals a day. Ends up around 1800 kcal/day. As long as I stay around those macros, I'm not hungry between meals and the weight slowly goes away!)

Knowing my "color season" helped a lot. It also helped when I found an explanation somewhere that if your natural coloring doesn't have a lot of contrast, high contrast in your clothes will wash you out, and vice versa. I end up in the "low-contrast autumn" colorway, which makes it easy to look up color palettes people have made, and apparently even olive and navy count as "neutrals" for my people, along with the obvious brown/tan/cream/charcoal, and "rust" is probably the world's most obvious accent color for an autumn 😂 But then, I wasn't going for "creative" so much as "cohesive!"

Most of the items haven't arrived yet, and I need to go through the process of getting rid of the stuff I expect won't ever fit again, but I think it's going to be a fun year.

I found out knowing two main things made all the difference: What's my "color season," and is my natural coloring high-contrast or low-contrast?

After that I could basically just ask my dear friend Claude to give me a template for a "low-contrast autumn color season outdoorsy geek chic tomboy capsule wardrobe" and we were off to the races! 😂