Our house is over-stuffed with stuff. We haven’t moved in years and things have accumulated largely unmolested in corners and crannies. I sometimes think they’ve been breeding at the back of closets, even though I’ve done several purges over the past few years. But I’ve only ever got as far as the easy stuff: duplicates, broken bits, books I won’t read again, things that no one will miss. Tossing a cracked plastic bucket into the recycling bin is a good thing, but not exactly life-changing. More like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. 

But over the past few months, I’ve got more serious about purging. I’ve had to. Life has changed and we need to move forward more fluidly and efficiently. There is no shortage of guides on how to do this, so you can Marie Kondo a space—holding things in your hand to decide whether they spark joy—or do a Swedish death purge. The Ten Step Guide, the Room by Room Method, 75 Things to Purge, How to Declutter Your Home. 

Yet here’s the part I’ve found hardest: identifying precisely how I’ve changed and what I want to do going forward. The guides don’t talk about that, as if purging is an end in itself. It’s not. It’s a means to an end. You’re not just getting rid of stuff, you’re making space for something else. 

What?

Clothing seemed like an easy place to start. You can do a What Was I Thinking? purge. A This Has Got Shabby discard. The I’ve Stopped Teaching winnow. I did all of that, and was helped by the fact there are a growing number of non-profits that direct gently-used clothing to people who need it, or send shabbies into fabric recycling programs. (I’ll list some below.) Recycling things responsibly takes a ridiculous amount of time, but it’s far from the hardest part, and I’ve been stuck at a couple of other roadblocks, not quite finishing the job.

For one thing, I haven’t been able to shed a few pieces of old but expensive clothing at the back of my closet, things I wore in earlier incarnations. I’ve always been a writer, but I’ve supported myself by working as a journalist, a screenwriter and a writing teacher at the post-secondary level. And jobs = the need to look not just respectable, but occasionally formidable. 

I’m tall. That helps. But a friend and I recently spoke about old clothes and the formidability factor, and she told me a story about both. My friend works in film. She’s petite, and one time she had to face down an assholian director who was particularly tall. As they stood on set, he loomed over her and barked and failed to respect what she was saying despite her expertise. 

Finally my friend grew so exasperated she decided to answer each of the director’s barks in a slightly quieter voice, forcing him to bend over a bit more each time to pick up what she was saying—a bit more, a bit more—until finally they were at eye level and he was actually listening to her, and she got what she wanted. 

You don’t have to be tall to be formidable, she said. 

Her other point? My friend remembers exactly what she was wearing when she forced the director to make a better movie, and she’s hung onto the outfit. The clothes at the back of my closet have similar happy memories attached. They’re not just skirts and jackets, they’re souvenirs, emotionally resonant. 

I’m very unlikely to wear them again, but there they are—especially since my mother brought me up on her childhood memories of the Depression, and of course you have to stockpile, buffering yourself against disaster, and in fact there’s going to be another Depression any minute, and it’s both smart and environmentally sensitive to hold on to good quality clothes and find a seamstress who can modernize them (despite the article I recently read saying that shoulders on jackets are the hardest thing in the world to fix.)

In any case, when negotiating with myself over the remaining old clothes, I made a very good point. I’ll get some new ones, better quality that I’ve bothered buying lately, and be fully covered in every sense. Then I’ll be able to get rid of all the vintage pieces that a seamstress can’t update. 

But that circles back to my main question. What do I want to wear? Who have I become? What do I need? What’s my style now? What do I want to project?

I work full-time as a writer these days. I’m around the house much of the time and do most of my meetings online. In other words, I’m in the same position as a lot of people after the COVID lockdowns who no longer go into the office for a five-day week, although for different reasons. This societal cocooning has changed fashion, and people don’t dress formally much anymore, or at least they don’t at the moment. Like many women, I stopped wearing much make-up during the lockdown, and stopped colouring my hair. And as for fashion…

Who hasn’t seen the Gen Zs on the subway these days wearing pyjama bottoms and slippers? I started noticing this a couple of years ago and it hasn’t stopped. There was a kid in fuzzy slippers on the subway yesterday. A young guy. But that’s a fashion statement not open to me even if I wanted to try it, since some nice police officer would come up and ask how I was doing, dear, and where did I live, and would I like them to take me home. 

Instead, I’ve been thinking the uniform you tend to wear in film: jeans, casual shirt or T-shirt, designer jacket, all of them expensive. I’ll do somewhat expensive, but don’t like spending obscene amounts of money on clothes, so I used to buy my designer jackets at the late, lamented Last Call outlet formerly operated by Holt Renfrew in suburban Toronto.

My big score was an Armani jacket originally priced around two grand that I got for $60. I assumed it was a couple of years old, and discovered when an actress touched the sleeve and marvelled, “You’re still wearing this,” that we were probably talking more than a couple of years. But I came up with a wry answer, “I can’t seem to let it go,” and we exchanged an eyeroll, even though I’d only had the jacket for a few weeks. 

In any case, what was important was to toss it over a chair when meeting with producers, and hope they clocked either the label or the quality, and that my agent could leverage my apparent prosperity/desirability into a higher fee. Don’t snort. Presentation is important. And someone successful had given me the tip.

I digress. Except that I don’t. When trying to think this through—a struggle, since I don’t really care about fashion—I realized that I’m perfectly comfortable wearing the film uniform out of the house, and sweaters and jeans when I go online. 

Maybe all us non-fashionistas need to embrace a uniform—at least one we choose ourselves. For me? Dresses, not so much. Skirts, not anymore. I read once that Yoko Ono has a closet full of coordinated black outfits and wears nothing else. Like everything you read about celebrities, this may or may not be true, although the photographic evidence tends to suggest that it is.

In any case, I think I’ll do a hypothetical Yoko, pare down my choices, coordinate a few decent-quality outfits, recycle the old ones, then forget about fashion. 

Especially since I still have the rest of the house to do. 

There’s an international program giving clothes in good condition to women who are retraining to re-enter the workforce. As well as running the retraining programs, Dress for Success accepts clothing donations at local affiliates. Here’s where in Canada. 

In Toronto, the not-for-profit Double Take store at Parliament and Gerrard downtown accepts donations of gently-used items that they sell to support the Yonge Street Mission. Maybe you know of other places in your own city and can post them in the comments.  

As well, two not-for-profits do pick-ups at your door. Both Diabetes Canada and Kidney Clothes will take donations of gently-used clothing and small household items. Both operate in several cities across the country.

And for fabric recycling? I belong to a Facebook group called Zero Waste Toronto that maintains lists of places that accept less gently-used clothes for recycling. Check Facebook (I know, I know) for Zero Waste groups in your city.