Our Favourite Clothes

According to certain statistics, we wear approximately 20% of our wardrobe 80% of the time.

It’s true, we all have our favourite clothes that we are quite happy to wear into oblivion, but why do we ignore so many of the other garments in our wardrobe?

I have several current favourite items in my wardrobe: the snugly cardigan that I miss when it has to go in the wash; the beloved pair of jeans that get worn endlessly, despite having several other pairs; the dress that does wonders for my figure. Sometimes we don’t even know what makes a garment a favourite, we just find ourselves wearing it all the time, until it either falls apart or we eventually tire of it.

It’s always a sad time when a much loved garment reaches the unwearable stage. I still greatly miss another favourite pair of jeans that I had to bin a year ago, because parts of the denim were becoming so ridiculously thin that the jeans were bordering on indecent! And then there was the beautiful pair I owned many years ago, with the gorgeous embroidered butterflies, which I had to let go, as I could no longer get in to them (must have shrunk or something!).

And whilst we have our favourite items of clothing, then there’s even more of a case for having favourite footwear. Once a pair of shoes has been ‘worn-in’, sometimes after a period of initial agony, we don’t want to swap them for anything else. I once had a pair of ankle boots that I suffered wearing for a couple of weeks, and was on the verge of thinking I would have to abandon to the back of the wardrobe, when they suddenly transformed into the most comfy boots ever. Needless to say I went on to wear them constantly, until eventually they were beyond repair and I had to assign them to the rubbish. Oh how I mourned the loss of those boots!

Apart from the obvious favourite items in our wardrobe, there are also the slightly perverse ones. You know, the ones that sit untouched for months on end, then we suddenly discover them and think, “Why on earth didn’t I wear this before?” promptly promoting said garment into the realms of ‘hot favourite’. Then we have the reverse, the ones that we wear like mad for a couple of months before exclaiming, “What was I thinking?” and relegating them to the charity bag.

Many of our little worn items of clothing may be garments bought for a special occasion, that we rarely get the opportunity to wear again, but keep hold of ‘just in case’. Others sadly, we may never have worn, putting their purchase down to a ‘moment of madness’.

Fortunately I rarely make the mistake these days of buying something that I will never wear (she says smugly). When I go out shopping for clothes I always stop and try things on, which was something I rarely did when younger because a) as a teenager I was too impatient b) as a twenty something I had young children in tow and c) dreaded communal changing rooms – need I say more?

Whatever our shopping habits, however, we will always have our particular wardrobe favourites – what are yours?