I blame Martha Stewart. It’s all her fault that I started organizing my closet. At the very tail end of summer, I decided that this — regardless of the fact that I am organizationally-challenged — was a doable project. But, after watching Martha 10 to 11 a.m. every weekday during my summer vacation from teaching, I had been brainwashed into believing that I, too, could make Shaker lemon pies, lifelike roses out of coffee filters, and personalized piñatas. All the while, I was lounging in my pajamas and eating a breakfast of eggs cooked in the microwave. Martha would be so disappointed. If only I could do something to make it up to her.
My closet. Three years ago, when my landlord showed my husband and I the apartment, the “walk-in” closet was, of course, empty, and enormous, and made me think that walking-in when it was full of clothes was going to be as easy as Shaker lemon pie. But the truth of the matter is that, full of clothes, my closet is the size of an airplane lavatory.
I don’t need a bigger closet. What I need is organization.
The first step in closet pruning was to group my clothes into categories by season. I was born and raised in California; I’ve heard people talk about seasons. Martha Stewart talks about seasons. But here in Santa Monica, it makes more sense to categorize by time of day: “Midday” and “nippy morning/late evening.” There are the clothes that I wear when it’s warm, and the clothes that I layer over the clothes that I wear when it’s warm.
I skipped Step 1. Step 2 included subcategorizing by item so that the pants were with pants, shirts with shirts — this was dependent upon me having done Step 1. So you can see how the whole project was doomed from the start. It’s like building a piece of furniture from Ikea for the very first time, and thinking that, please, if a whole dining room table can be put together with nothing but an Allen wrench, there can’t possibly be any need to follow the single page of step-by-step pictographs.
So, because I skipped Step 2, I also had to skip Step 3 — sub-subcategorizing by color. My mother’s closet is sub-sub-categorized. It’s the Amazing Technicolor Dream Closet, a rainbow of textiles. (My mother lives in Central California and has a closet the size of my bedroom. No joke. I once spread my arms like Leonardo DaVinci’s Vitruvian Man, and used my arm span to measure the square footage.) I started on Step 4 — dividing the clothes that I don’t wear into four piles: 1) give away, 2) throw away, 3) dry clean, and 4) tailor.
But there are some clothes that don’t belong in any of those piles. The vintage Levi’s and yellow tee that I wore six years ago, when my husband and I eloped in Las Vegas. The circa 1920s silk dress that I wore in a play during my first semester of college; the costumer let me keep it because, during my six-weeks as a fun-loving flapper, the antique had ripped and been sewn back together a half dozen times. My overly-ambitious first sewing project: A Donna Karan two-way stretch jersey dress in beige, the “It” color 10 years ago. I never wore it (it was beige — who looks good in beige?), but that dress is a testament that I saw something through to completion. That dress negates every elementary school extracurricular activity that I signed up for and quit. That dress negates that it’s mid-September and I still have clothes piled on the end of the bed and heaped on the floordrobe.
Martha Stewart would never be distracted by nostalgia. No, she would create a clothing time capsule and tuck in a lavender sachet. Great. Just what I need. Another project.
MARIEL HOWSEPIAN digs black coffee, fairy tales and a man in coveralls. She lives in Santa Monica and
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on September 13, 2007. Read the original PDF.