From the vault: are you holding yourself to an impossible standard with your clothes?

(originally published in March 2022)

A few weeks ago, I asked in my Instagram stories: As you develop your personal style, are you holding yourself to an impossible standard of perfection? I knew some people would identify with this, but to my surprise, 76% of the respondents replied “yes”.

Some of the ways people said they held themselves to a standard of perfection were:

• Feeling like I need an outfit for every mood or occasion

• Not knowing if my minimalist wardrobe is my choice or horrible decision paralysis

• Feeling pulled between wanting to be cute and feeling like what’s the point?

• Need to look perfect, like the lookbook images

• I feel like I only have two choices: to shrink my body to fit back into my old ethically made clothes or to be a bad environmentalist by buying new clothes

• I often feel too guilty to make new purchases because I worry I’m not buying ethically enough (these last two relating to ethical fashion are such a large issue on their own, I’m saving them for their own dedicated newsletter).

I see this with my one-on-one clients too. They’re frozen in indecision because of the fear of making a mistake with something they add to their wardrobe. Some of this is healthy. If we’ve bought many items in the past that we don’t wear, we don’t want to continue the same pattern. That’s a good thing. But sometimes you can’t know what TO buy if you don’t make mistakes in the process of learning what NOT TO buy.

As I tell my 3 and 7-year olds, we all make mistakes. You will make mistakes in building your wardrobe. If you make a mistake, the best thing to do is learn from it. Why didn’t the item work? Was it something in the process of buying it? Was it too impulsive? Or was it something about the item specifically: the fabric, the cut, that it didn’t have pockets, whatever? If you learn from it and are able to avoid making the same mistake in the future, that was not a wasted purchase and there’s no need to punish yourself.

What about wanting to get dressed in the perfect outfit every day? Some days you feel like you’re killing it and some days you’re just not. Does every day and every article of clothing need to be perfect? No, of course not, because that’s an impossible thing to hold ourselves to.

I had a therapist once who told me that for any human, it wasn’t realistic to expect that we have only good days. She said that we should aim for a goal of 80% good days to 20% rough days. She broke it down even further and got really realistic with it. That meant that in a month, we were pretty much guaranteed to have around 6 bad days. Like not wanting to get out of bed or do anything kind of bad days. How much more gentle would we be with ourselves if we knew those days were coming?

What if we could hope that 80% of our clothing items are really great and 20% are not exactly what we want, but they work for now? Or what if 80% are super versatile and practical and 20% we just have to have for certain occasions even if they work for nothing else? What if we could allow ourselves 20% of the days we get dressed are outfits we just really don’t love? What if that was all ok and we didn’t have to feel like we were failing at something?

The last thing I’ll say is that for some reason, women have been expected to know how to do all this clothing stuff well, but it’s a skill that is learned like anything else. If you wouldn’t hold yourself to an expectation of perfection in drawing animals or building bridges or performing brain surgery if you hadn't been trained in any of those things, why would you hold yourself to perfection in your wardrobe?

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Does this give you any permission to let things be a little less perfect?