Spring Cleaning as a Ritual
For the past few years, I’ve started a tradition of Spring Cleaning. Not the kind that happens in an afternoon, but the kind that unfolds over weeks. Every inch of the house is dusted, swept, mopped, and reorganized. Every drawer, shelf, cupboard, desk surface, and closet is pulled apart and put back together with intention.
At one point this year, I even wrote the words “Spring Cleaning is no joke” on the dry-erase grocery list board hanging on our refrigerator, to formalize it, or at least to remind both myself and Charlie that we were committing to something real.
We started in February and just finished in mid-April. The very last thing I cleaned was my closet.
What We Keep, and Why
I looked at every piece of clothing I own and considered how long it had been since I wore it, how useful it is to me now, and what outfits I could realistically make with it.
There were two pieces that gave me pause, as they have for the past several years.
Because the truth is, I haven’t worn either of them in over a decade, and yet neither has felt easy to let go of.
The Life I Thought I Wanted
One of them is a jacket I bought at H&M in 2014, when I was working at a conservative insurance office in Minnesota. Monday through Thursday meant dress pants and a button-front top or a sweater. Fridays were essentially the same, just paired with a nicer pair of jeans.
The clothes I wore for work felt dull and not like me. The H&M jacket was the opposite. A windbreaker in a wild print, with vivid colors like hot pink. It wasn’t something I could wear to the office, but it felt like a version of myself I wanted to step into, a creative, expressive life that didn’t yet exist but that I wanted to manifest for myself.
I felt like, if I had that jacket, I could be that woman with the creative job and the exciting life, at least for the time I was wearing it.
I bought it because it made me feel closer to that version of myself, even though it got a hole in it almost immediately, and even though it didn’t have hand pockets, which always felt like a strange omission for a windbreaker.
I wore it a few times. I brought it with me on a trip to Rome, though I remember being slightly frustrated every time I had nowhere to put my hands.
And then, slowly, I stopped wearing it.
The Life I Lived
The other piece is a sheer black lace top with a line of fringe across the chest, something I bought in 2012 while working at Buckle.
I rarely wear black, and I never really have, but something about it spoke to me. The fringe had a kind of movement to it, something slightly Western, something just outside of what I normally chose. My coworkers even commented on it, surprised that I had bought it, and surprised again when I wore it.
But I did wear it, often.
One Saturday, I wore it to brunch with my mom and my sisters. It’s the only time the four of us have ever gone to brunch together, just us, and it hasn’t happened again since. I remember thinking, even at the time, that it felt rare and significant. It’s a special memory.
Over the years, I stopped wearing the top. Fringe has cycled in and out of fashion more than once since then, and still, I never reached for it again.
But every year, when I stand in front of my closet deciding what to keep and what to let go of, I think of that brunch.
And I keep it.
Returning to Clothing
For a long time, the value of clothing was tied to its newness. To wear something repeatedly, in the same way, risked feeling static, as if the outfit had already said what it needed to say, or as if we’d be stigmatized for wearing the same thing repeatedly like a personal uniform.
I remember in high school I had strict rules for myself on how often I would wear a piece of clothing. Not more than once a week for pants, not more than twice a month for tops or special pieces. And I would never wear the previous year’s clothing to school. On weekends or summers, sure, but never to school.
But something is shifting.
More and more, clothing is being approached not as something to cycle through, but as something to return to. Pieces are kept not only because they are functional, but because they begin to accumulate meaning. They become tied to specific moments, identities, or versions of the self.
And once a garment holds that kind of weight, the question changes. It is no longer what do I wear next, but how do I wear this again.
Styling as Translation
Part of this shift is practical. There is a growing awareness of overconsumption, and with it, a desire to make more use of what already exists.
But the deeper reason feels more personal.
To style a piece differently is to approach it from another version of the self. The same garment can move between identities. It can feel structured one day and relaxed the next, expressive in one iteration and restrained in another. It can be worn in one phase of life and then, maybe a decade or more later, worn again in a completely different context, because it may be the same piece it always was, but you’re not the same person anymore.
Styling is not just variation. It is translation. It allows something constant to shift meaning as the person wearing it changes.
I’ve seen this most clearly through the ways others have worn pieces from my own collection. The garments themselves do not change, but once they leave the studio, they begin to take on new lives. One person wears a piece with restraint. Another leans into contrast and accessories. Someone else approaches it with a sense of nostalgia, referencing something entirely different.
For example, I’ve worn the Carly Ensemble countless times, both pieces together and separately, across a variety of outfits. But not once did I think to tuck in the jacket. Since releasing the collection, I’ve seen multiple people style it that way, and it always looks unexpectedly right to me, like something the piece was waiting to become.
None of these interpretations feel like deviations from the design. They feel like continuations, taking the ensemble to places I never anticipated while creating it.
What becomes clear is that an outfit is never singular. It is not fixed to one intention, one identity, or one version of the self. It expands.
Longevity Beyond Wear
This is where longevity in clothing begins to take on a different meaning.
A garment lasts not only because it is well made, because most clothing can be repaired or upcycled in some way as damage inevitably occurs. A garment lasts because it continues to feel relevant. And relevance is not about trend. It is about adaptability, the ability of a piece to move with someone as they evolve, to be reinterpreted across different phases of life.
Styling is what makes that possible. As long as you can style a piece for the life you live now, even the smaller lives, the moods that shift from day to day, it can live again and again with you, accumulating new memories and stories about the person you’ve been.
Letting Go, and Wearing Again
Standing in my closet this week, holding those two pieces again, I realized they were asking two different things of me.
The windbreaker jacket represented a version of myself I once wanted to become. But I am no longer waiting to become her.
I’ve lived that life. I’ve built it. Through music and fashion, through Berried Alive and House of Caswell, I’ve had the chance to design the clothes I once imagined wearing. I’ve made windbreaker jackets more colorful than that one, with better construction, with hand pockets, with intention.
I became the person I thought that jacket might help me be.
And because of that, I was able to let it go. I’m going to donate it, and it can become part of somebody else’s story.
The fringed top is different.
It doesn’t represent a life I was reaching for. It holds a moment I lived.
A Second Life
Charlie and I are going to dinner tonight, and I think I might wear it.
Not as I did in 2012, with jeans and a hat, but as I am now. Styled for a life that looks entirely different from the one I had then.
Maybe that is what it means for a garment to last. Not that it remains unchanged, but that it remains open, able to take on new meaning, to move with you, to wait patiently in your closet, and return to you when you are ready to see it differently.
To be worn again, not as repetition, but as continuation.
An Invitation
If this way of thinking about clothing resonates with you, I invite you to join the Collector’s List.
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