A few days ago I was sitting in Soho having a wonderful conversation with a woman called Amy, whom I’d only recently met through LinkedIn.
You know those conversations where you arrange to meet someone for coffee, thinking you’ll talk a little about work, perhaps exchange a few ideas, and then somehow end up discussing life, identity, the decisions you’ve made and whether you’re actually enjoying any of it?
That kind of conversation.
And somewhere along the way, I shared a question I often ask myself to help me stay present and really enjoy whatever I’m experiencing.
What if today was your last day?
Quite a dramatic question for a casual evening in Soho, I know.
But I love questions like that because they have a rather inconvenient way of cutting through all the nonsense.
What would you do differently? Who would you want to see? What would suddenly become completely irrelevant?
And perhaps more interestingly, what are you currently postponing that you might regret never having experienced?
I use this question to bring myself back to the moment I’m actually living, instead of spending it worrying about tomorrow or thinking about everything I still need to do.
I was thinking about this afterwards, and because apparently I am physically incapable of having a philosophical thought without eventually dragging somebody’s wardrobe into it, I started thinking about clothes.
Specifically, all the beautiful things women buy and then refuse to wear.
And believe me, I have seen enough wardrobes to know this is practically an international sport.
There’s the beautiful silk dress that has been waiting for a wedding invitation since approximately 2022. The expensive shoes that are apparently too beautiful to be exposed to the pavement. The jacket that would look absolutely fantastic with jeans, except its owner has decided it’s evening wear, and therefore it must remain untouched until someone invites her to an appropriately fabulous event.
Who is organising these events, by the way?
And why are they taking so bloody long?
One of the things I find fascinating about working inside women’s wardrobes is how often we create these little rules for ourselves without even realising it.
We decide certain clothes are for weddings, others for important meetings, and some are apparently reserved for the woman we’re going to be when life becomes a little more exciting.
The woman who goes out more.
Who has somewhere fabulous to be on a Friday night.
Who is finally going to have the confidence to wear that enormous pair of earrings she absolutely loved when she bought them.
Except Friday comes, and she’s exhausted, and the earrings remain in their little box.
Fair enough. Sometimes a woman just wants to order food and sit on the sofa. I happen to think that’s a perfectly respectable Friday night.
But the strange thing is that some of these clothes could very easily be part of our everyday lives if we stopped insisting they belonged to an imaginary occasion.
I remember thinking about a beautiful silk dress that had been bought for a wedding and then barely worn because it felt too dressy for anything else.
And I thought, why?
Why couldn’t you put a lovely jumper over it, add some flat shoes and wear it for lunch?
The dress hasn’t signed a contract promising to attend formal events exclusively.
It doesn’t know it’s a wedding dress. YOU told it that.
And suddenly, instead of having one outfit for an occasion that might happen once every few years, you have a beautiful piece that can participate in your life.
This is something I feel quite strongly about as a stylist.
I don’t particularly like separating clothes into those rigid categories of workwear, weekend wear and occasion wear, because I think we end up limiting how much enjoyment we get from what we already own.
Of course, some things have practical limitations. I’m not suggesting you do the school run in a floor-length sequinned gown, although if you do, please send me a picture because I’d quite like to see it.
But there are so many pieces sitting in wardrobes that could have completely different lives with a little imagination.
And this is where I find styling much more interesting than shopping.
Because the question isn’t always, What do I need to buy?
Sometimes it’s, What haven’t I discovered about the clothes I already have?
I think we often underestimate how much our wardrobes are influenced by the stories we’ve attached to individual pieces.
That jacket belongs to a version of me who used to work in an office. That colour attracts too much attention. I’ll wear that dress when I’ve lost a little weight.
And sometimes those stories are years old.
We’ve changed jobs, moved cities, become mothers, started businesses, fallen in love, fallen out of love, changed our routines and completely rearranged our lives.
But the clothes are still sitting there waiting for permission from a woman who no longer lives the same life.
It’s rather absurd when you think about it.
And I wonder whether the same thing happens beyond our wardrobes.
How much of our lives are we keeping on hold because we’ve decided there’s a better moment coming?
We’ll enjoy ourselves when the business is making more money. We’ll take the trip when things calm down. We’ll finally do the things we’ve been talking about for years.
I’m particularly guilty of thinking that surely, at some point, life is going to become a little less busy.
HAHAHAHA.
As a single mother running two projects, I’m starting to suspect that particular day isn’t on the calendar.
And yet, when I look back at some of the loveliest things I’ve experienced lately, they weren’t the result of everything finally being perfectly organised.
They happened because I went.
Because I accepted an invitation, had a conversation with somebody interesting, turned up at an event, met someone new or made room for something I wanted to experience.
Sometimes I came home exhausted. Sometimes I had about a million other things I should probably have been doing.
But I’m glad I went.
That evening with Amy was one of those moments.
We didn’t need a special occasion to have a meaningful conversation. We just made time for one.
And perhaps that’s why I keep coming back to that question I shared with her.
Because I don’t want to keep postponing the enjoyable parts of life until I’ve reached some imaginary point where everything is sorted.
I’m almost 40, for God’s sake. How long exactly am I planning to wait?
And this brings me back to the wardrobe, because I genuinely believe getting dressed can be one of the simplest ways we practise that idea.
You have a beautiful piece of clothing that you love. You paid for it. You chose it because something about it made you feel excited.
And now it’s sitting in your wardrobe waiting for the world to provide an occasion worthy of its existence.
Meanwhile, you’re wearing the same four outfits because they’re easy, familiar and you know they work.
I talked about this in last week’s newsletter, Your Most-Worn Outfit Might Not Be Your Favourite, actually, about how the outfits we wear most frequently aren’t necessarily our favourites. Sometimes they’re just the combinations our brains have learnt to reach for without too much effort.
And I think these two things are connected.
We have the clothes that make our lives easy, and then we have the clothes that make us feel something. But why have we decided those need to be two separate categories?
Why can’t we have both?
This is a big part of what I do through my Wardrobe Architect Method.
When I work with a woman, I’m not interested in creating a beautiful wardrobe that looks fantastic when all the doors are open but becomes completely useless at 7:30 in the morning.
I want to understand how she actually spends her time, what she loves wearing, what makes her feel wonderful and which pieces she’s forgotten she owns.
We look at her lifestyle, her proportions, the cuts and combinations that work for her, and then we begin creating outfit formulas using the clothes she already has.
And this is the bit I love.
Because sometimes all it takes is introducing one of those forgotten pieces into a combination she already feels comfortable wearing.
And instead of giving her another thirty things to think about every morning, we photograph the combinations and create her Ready-to-Wear LookBook, so she can actually see how everything works together.
She’s no longer relying on inspiration magically appearing when she’s already late.
The work has been done.
She can open her wardrobe, choose an outfit and get on with enjoying her day.
And for me, that’s what makes the system valuable.
Not the number of clothes, how expensive they are, or whether somebody looking at her wardrobe would be impressed.
It’s how much of that wardrobe she can actually enjoy.
Because I think there’s something quite sad about owning beautiful things that never get to be part of our memories.
A dress that never goes anywhere. Shoes that never dance. A jacket you loved enough to buy but apparently not enough to wear to the supermarket.
And yes, I know, it’s only clothes.
But clothes are also part of how we experience our lives.
Think about an outfit you remember wearing during a wonderful day. Perhaps it was a date, a holiday, a dinner with friends, a celebration or simply an afternoon when you felt particularly good about yourself.
You might remember the people you were with, the conversations you had, the way you felt and what you were wearing.
The clothes become part of the memory.
And the more we actually wear them, the more opportunities they have to collect those little stories.
They stop being objects we’re preserving for a future occasion and start becoming part of the life we’re already living.
I suppose that’s what I’ve been thinking about since that conversation with Amy.
Not that we should spend every day behaving as though it’s our last, because quite frankly I have children to feed, bills to pay and a business to run.
I can’t be off living my final twenty-four hours every Monday.
But perhaps we could stop waiting for everything to feel special before allowing ourselves to enjoy what we already have.
I don’t think we need to turn ordinary life into one continuous celebration. There will always be laundry, emails, school paperwork and mornings when wearing the same comfortable trousers is exactly what we want.
But I would quite like us to stop treating the beautiful parts of our wardrobes as though they belong to a more deserving version of ourselves.
The woman you are today is allowed to wear the good dress.
Even if she’s just going for lunch.
Even if she’s going alone.
Even if nobody particularly important is going to see her.
Actually, especially then.
Because what makes an occasion special anyway?
Who gets to decide?
And if you’re waiting for someone else to invite you into a life where you finally feel entitled to wear the things you love, perhaps you could start by giving yourself permission.
So here’s what I’d love you to try this week.
Go into your wardrobe and find one piece you’ve been saving.
Something you genuinely love but rarely wear because you’ve convinced yourself it requires a particular occasion.
Now, instead of asking where you could possibly wear it, ask yourself how you could wear it differently.
Could you make it more casual? Could it work with something you wear regularly? Could you change the shoes, add a jumper, swap the jacket or use accessories to give it a completely different personality?
You might discover that the occasion you’ve been waiting for isn’t necessary after all.
Perhaps Thursday will do.
And if you’d like a little help recognising the patterns behind what you wear, I’ve created a free Wardrobe Pattern Assessment that you’ll receive when you subscribe to this newsletter.
It’s a starting point for understanding your wardrobe habits, the combinations you naturally gravitate towards and what might be preventing you from making better use of everything you already own.
Because sometimes the answer isn’t another shopping trip.
It’s a different way of seeing what’s already hanging in front of you.
Anyway, I’m off to look at my own wardrobe because I’m quite certain there’s something in there that’s been waiting for an invitation.
And given the state of my diary, it may have to settle for a trip to Waitrose.
Love,
Carolina x
P.S. I really want to know what’s been sitting in your wardrobe waiting for its grand debut. Tell me, because I’m genuinely curious what we’ve all been saving these things for :)