Creative ruts are fickle things. They can creep in just as you feel you've reached prolificacy and then disappear with just as little notice. Sometimes all it takes is a bit of mundanity: a conversation in the car, a jacket on a stranger, or a memory you thought you’d outgrown.
Lately, I’ve been wondering if my creative ruts and my wardrobe rotation are symptoms of the same impulse - that newness equals progress. When I can’t bring myself to write, I often scrap the whole thing and start again. When I’d run out of styling ideas for something, I would banish it to the back of my wardrobe and buy something fresh. Perhaps I’ve forgotten the value of what I already own. This train of thought snowballed from a conversation with my mum, as she pointed out a passerby’s khaki bomber jacket. “Do you remember the navy one I had?” She asked. “I wish I’d kept it instead of stealing your black one.”
The black bomber jacket in question was the classic Topshop one I asked for as a birthday present when I was about sixteen. The first recorded photographic evidence of it was during a week of work experience for Joseph in 2018! For a while, it was a constant in my rotation. Then all of a sudden it stopped being a go-to, eventually falling out of my rotation altogether. Yet, I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of it - the fact I had once revered the jacket was stopping me.
As it happens, my sentimental reluctance isn’t an original experience.
Psychologist Richard Thaler is calling this the endowment effect: where people place more value on an object that they own than on the same object if they didn’t own it (The Decision Lab). Adding sentiment to an otherwise ordinary item of clothing and it becomes less fabric, more archive. That ratty 1975 tour t-shirt that I’ve got at the back of my shelf isn’t a cheap cotton blend, it’s a reminder of my first gig. The bright yellow puffer jacket I wore all through school isn’t objectively ugly (it is), it’s a relic of my formative years.
The reminder of the forgotten bomber jacket had me thinking about the rest of my wardrobe. I can’t claim that everything in it is just as old (I grow, my style changes, I am not immune to the draw of a polkadot), but there are some real relics hanging in there. The oldest surviving piece (not including hand-me-downs from my mum)? A very small, very green, American Apparel jungle-print vest, purchased on a coveted teenage pilgrimage to Westfield White City.
It’s seen arguments, many a push-up bra, a first kiss, summers paired with the iconic Topshop button-up skirt. Like my bomber jacket, it lost its leafy shine after a while and got dropped from my collection of favoured clothes. Then it got put out of sight.
I found it again last year during a post-Masters wardrobe cull during a minor existential spiral. Buried deep in an unused pile of clothes was the top, still as aggressively green and seemingly even tinier than when I bought it (or perhaps my frontal lobe is almost developed). The rational part of my hyper-existentialist brain drew me to put it on Vinted, so I laid it on my bed, wrinkle free, thinking of all it had been through with me.
The average Brit buys approximately 61 pieces of clothing annually, according to Spring Fair (SPRINGFAIR). Yet, the V&A finds that we only wear our clothes for an average of just seven (7!) times before they’re tossed aside (V&A). At the same time, resale platforms like Vinted and Depop have seen a huge rise, driven largely by mid-twenty-somethings like myself both offloading and hunting. We’ve been trained to equate newness with relevance, even though our most meaningful pieces are often the ones we’ve already lived in.
In some fashion circles, there’s also been a shift away from relentless newness. The idea of “cost per wear” has become shorthand for responsible consumption, not least to also convince ourselves that that expensive handbag is worth it. Take Becca Bren for example, a creator who has made her content revolving around this. She posts ‘cost per wear checks’, in which she films a fit check and tells us how much each item of clothing is working out to cost - and it’s amassed her a cool 60k followers on TikTok (beccabren). Celebrity stylists have started championing rewearing - take a look at Cate Blanchett’s red carpet looks. Most of them were worn by her in awards seasons years ago!
Now, when I’m stuck on an idea, I leave it and come back to it with a fresh mind or inspiration. I have subconsciously been doing this with my clothes, too. After finding the miniscule AA top, I didn’t sell it, nor did I dump it right back in the unseen. I started wearing it again. Not with my ultra-high waisted Joni jeans (those I did, in fact, donate), but as I would wear anything else. I’ve experimented with styling it, perhaps with a bolero to show off the print, or simply as an extra layer for warmth.
I was curious to find out what those pieces are for other people, so I asked. The results are unsurprisingly varied: a four-year-old jumper made by a friend, a hand-me-down polo shirt from Dad, a knitted jumper bought with a very first pay check 30 years ago. Each of these has seen so much of life, and there’s a reason they’re still in your wardrobes. The endowment effect isn’t simply a psychological phenomenon, it’s a demonstration of the very human experience. One you wouldn’t get from constant newness.
These are an archive of their own. Maybe the trick, creatively and sartorially, isn’t to purge our wardrobes every time we’re bored or stuck. Inspiration could be buried right at the back of them.
Sometimes, the inspiration is still perfectly green.