Product Description

It's 8:00 A.M., and you've got a big day ahead. Face to face with your closet, you pull out the suit that's needed altering for two years, the blouse that doesn't go with anything, and the shoes that...why did you buy them, anyway? With the reject pile rising as fast as your frustration, you shout the lament of women everywhere:

"I DON'T HAVE A THING TO WEAR!"

Stop the material madness! Let two top fashion experts show you what's really hiding in your closet: a true reflection of your inner self. Now you can

• understand your attitudes and beliefs about clothes and shopping
• dress for your real life -- not the past or the future
• identify your fashion persona (hint: it's not what you think!)
• avoid impulse buys and other shopping traps
• make every item in your closet work for you!

Practical and fun, with revealing quizzes and other great tools, I Don't Have A Thing To Wear sheds light on the darkest corners of the closet -- and lets you shine!

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #111789 in Books
• Published on: 2003-08-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

About the Author
Judie Taggart is a fashion professional who has written for Women's Wear Daily, W, Cosmopolitan, and other national publications.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One: The Circle of Your Life -- Family, Business, Fun, and Romance

Fantasy and romance play a huge role in fashion. I have seen women buy clothes and say, "This will be wonderful to wear to Ascot," even though the chances of their going to Ascot that season are very, very slim. It has to do with fantasy.

Bill Blass, designer

The scene is all too familiar. It's 8 A.M. and Kay is running late. She has an important meeting and luncheon today. She is in front of her mirror, pulling on one thing, trying another, rejecting as she goes, delving deeper and deeper into her closet as she searches for the elusive ideal ensemble. Now she is tugging a hopelessly snug olive green skirt over her hips. Forget it. Next comes the cranberry pantsuit -- too much, too loud. The green gabardine suit worked a long time ago, but where is the blouse that goes with it? The gray pants are too short. (She'd promised herself she would get them altered.) The new paisley blouse is gorgeous, but it doesn't work with either the gray or green pants. (Come to think of it, it never seems to work with anything.) Kay presses on.

Jumbled among these seemingly unworkable work clothes are several colorful ski sweaters. She passes the ski pants and several colors of lightweight fleece turtlenecks, remembering that she never went skiing once this season, and in fact has rarely gone since she decided to learn three years ago.

Kay impatiently pushes aside three beautiful cocktail gowns in her effort to find her trusty brown blazer. Where is that thing? Oh, no! It's at the cleaners. She avoided taking it there as long as she could, fearing a morning exactly like this one -- when nothing else would please her and she needed to turn to that staunch dependable. Now, at this critical moment, it is missing in action. Maybe the dotted skirt and black jacket will work with a white shell blouse? No, that's too summery. Okay, how about the brown pants and blouse with a muted plaid jacket? Yikes! She just wore that Monday.

Two more skirts are way too tight. In fact, they've been too tight for a couple of years now. Wasn't she going to buy another black skirt? Hmmm. That was the day she bought the beaded evening bag instead. Which, come to think of it, she's never had occasion to carry. It's stunning, though.

Well, what's it to be? Looks like the black wool crepe suit with a black turtleneck. Again. Kay has exhausted herself trying to put together an outfit that gives her the right click of confidence. Surrounded by heaps of discarded clothes on her chair, bed, and floor, the thought once again crosses Kay's mind: I don't have a thing to wear!

Does any of this sound familiar? Have you ever found yourself in a similar scenario? So have we, and so has every one of our clients. But guess what? There's a simple reason why. Get ready to discover the answer by playing the "Circle of Your Life" Game.

A simple circle is the key to solving the age-old mystery of why women have closets full of clothes but nothing to wear. The Circle of Your Life Game is the first step in getting your wardrobe in sync with your life, and ladies, it's no exaggeration when we say that this exercise is a life-altering experience. Time and again, when we go through this exercise with our clients, they are stunned. They come away enlightened and inspired, and they certainly never look at their wardrobes in the same way again. Here's how it works.

The Circle of Your Life Game

You are going to create the Circle of Your Life. This is the first step to finding the real you in your closet. The goal is for you to discover exactly what parts of your wardrobe are missing. Your Circle of Life also enables you to make a shopping list and helps you to understand why your closet needs to be in harmony with your life.

The game takes about one hour, so plan to concentrate, and get ready to find out more about yourself "sartorially speaking" than you ever dreamed. Okay? Here we go!

Step 1. On a blank piece of paper (we recommend 8½-by-11-inch), draw a circle. You are going to create a pie chart, a simple circle divided into slices of various sizes. The size of each portion is based on your life's activities.

Step 2. On a second sheet of paper, list every category of activity you perform (clothed!) in your waking moments. These activities should be comprehensive -- evening, weekend, seasonal, and even occasional activities go on this list, along with those you engage in every day.

Step 3. Estimate the percentage of time you spend on each activity. To get a true picture, base your circle on a four-week period, about one month. We find using a month as a guide gives people a broader sense of how they spend their time, as weekend diversions may vary.

For instance, suppose your average waking day runs from

7 A.M. to 11 p.m.

7 A.M. to 11 p.m. = 16 hours

16 hours x 7 days = 112 hours in a week

112 hours in a week x 4 weeks = 448 hours per month

Now, figure out the hours you spend on each activity in a four-week period. Then use this figure to calculate the percentage of time you spend on that activity. For instance, if you work forty hours a week, you work 160 hours in four weeks. Divide 160 hours by 448 monthly hours: you work 36 percent of your circle. Suppose your social life totals forty-six hours in a month. Divide forty-six hours by 448, and the percentage is 10 percent for social life. If you have children, your activities with them may take, say, forty-two hours a week, or 168 hours. Divide 168 hours by 448 hours, and your percentage is 38. Estimate your activities and percentages until your circle represents 100 percent of your life. Write these percentages next to the activities listed on your paper. You may need to further subdivide these percentages after you have completed your circle.

Step 4. Returning to your circle, divide it into slices according to the percentages you have just created.

Step 5. Within each slice of your pie, list a life activity. Next to the circle, list the types of clothing you wear to perform this life activity. For your work slice, write what you wear to work. For some women this means corporate suits, trousers, twin sweater sets, and knit layering pieces, while for others it may mean a more business casual mix, such as khakis and sweaters, with dresses, skirts, and suits only occasionally.

Note: If your work tends to neatly divide itself into casual and more formal corporate dressing (for instance, if you are a consultant who works at home in jeans 60 percent of the time and dons designer suits for meetings with clients the remaining 40 percent), you might want to subdivide your work pie slice accordingly. With the changing rules about workplace dressing and the millions of people now working out of their homes and in flexible work situations, the individual variations on work dressing requirements are endless. That's why we have devoted an entire chapter to the nuances of business casual dressing.

If you work at home and commute electronically, list that percentage and what you usually wear to work at home. If you dress in business clothes to work at home, put that down. Many people do so to mentally get in the groove of working. We know men and women who get up, get dressed in a suit, walk to their office at the other end of the house, and take their jacket off. On the other hand, many businesspeople working in their homes plop down in front of the computer in jeans, slouchy cotton knits, or pajamas. If that is you, put it down.

And speaking of pajamas, if you come home from work and immediately change into loungewear or jammies, we would categorize that as casual. Sleepwear to us is a different thing.

Next, list your clothing choices for your other waking activities in the appropriate pie slices. You might wear similar things while doing various family duties, such as grocery shopping, carpooling, and volunteering, so write those in one slice of your chart. You may need dressier things for club meetings and luncheons. Working out may mean leggings and a sports bra for aerobics classes, but khaki shorts and tees for your daily two-mile walks. Write those down in separate slices and assign percentages. Here is where you may need to divide your percentages further to reflect this breakdown.

On the other hand, feel free to cluster types of clothes. For example, if you wear similar things to go antiquing and attending club meetings, list them both in one pie slice and determine a percentage. Beach and boating clothes are often similar and could share a slice. If socializing means going with friends or colleagues straight from work and not changing your business clothes, you should note this under your business clothing pie slice. Clothing you wear when entertaining at home or going out with friends on weekends may be the same and can be combined in a slice.

Why You Have Nothing To Wear

Now for the moment of truth. Your circle chart should look something like this:

Work 38%

Suits, jackets, tops, pants, pantsuits

Exercise/sports 10%

Golf/tennis/aerobics/jogging

Evenings out 15%

Dresses, separates, long skirts

Social 2%

Evening gown, cocktail dresses, and dressy suits

At home casual 13%

Jeans, knit pants and big tops, shorts, shifts

Weekends 19%

Dressy casual tops, pants, skirts, tees

Now take the Circle of Your Life and go to the place where you start each day...the closet! Separate the clothing you actually wear into the categories that correspond to the pie slices on the Circle of Your Life. Create a separate category for those items that either don't fit into one of your categories, or are items you cannot or do not wear. Now compare the percentage of clothes in each category you have created with the percentages on your Circle of Your Life chart.

We guarantee the percentages will not match.

You may work full-time, but is 38 percent of your closet r...

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Customer Reviews

Disappointing
I was hoping for even just a little 'psychology' of my closet in this book and found nothing even remotely useful. This book is full of fluff, repeats itself incessantly (hope you like SUITS!) and is a really long read. Buy Bridgette Raes' 'Style Rx' (for really specific tips about how to dress your body type) and 'Simple Isn't Easy' by Olivia Goldsmith and Amy Fine Collins.

It's All in Your Head....
Yes, it is! I enjoyed the psychological approach in this book as to why we dress the way we do. I'd read other "how to" books like Trinny and Susannah's "What Not to Wear", etc., and wondered if this book could tell me anything new.

Up front confession--I love taking tests with a psychological bent, i.e., "what your rising sign says about you", so the quizzes in this book about fashion persona were right up my alley. Sounds silly, but I actually got some valuable insight into how I REALLY like to dress, as opposed to how I THINK I should be dressing.

Then, I purged my closet of all the stuff that's been hanging there GLARING at me for the past couple of years. (I don't have a huge wardrobe, but we all have stuff that we hang onto in the hopes that "someday" we'll wear it, don't we?) I've got some of it up for sale on eBay, and some I donated to our local thrift store.

I think just finding out who I am, deep down inside, and why I want to dress the way I do, was worth the price of the book. Now, when I walk into my closet, it feels more welcoming because I know that I actually wear everything that's in it. "Hello, girls...whom should I wear today?"

Boring and Unhelpful
I own just about every book out there about style and how to dress, and this is one of the worst and will be discarded. The thing that irritates me about this book is both the cover and the title imply that this book is fun and helpful. It is neither. I read it twice, by the way, to give it a chance. Don't waste your money.