The 30-Wears Collection // Exhibit 001 : The Airy White Shell

Meditations on "slow wardrobe cataloguing", the heat-beating prowess of a billowy white top, and the repercussions of lazy laundering.

A few years ago, I devised an ambitious project to slowly catalogue my closet by writing a piece dedicated to each item. Conceived as a “wardrobe meditation” of sorts, I sought to express gratitude for the clothes that I had, while examining my relationship to these material acquisitions and bringing the imbedded stories to surface.

While I began with much gusto, eventually my dedication to the project petered out — along with my resolve to not shop while undertaking this endeavour. The 56 items that I managed to document in this laborious fashion are available for perusing on my old blog, though many of them have since departed my wardrobe. 

Since my last entry in 2022, I’ve had time to reflect on why this project failed. Really, it boiled down to the cognitive dissonance I was experiencing as I waxed poetic about slow fashion and cherishing long-lived pieces, all the while new purchases continued flooding into my wardrobe. It became a detached chore writing about items I’d only possessed for a short time and hadn’t forged a real connection with yet. And it resulted in some unintentionally dishonest reviews, like the designer dress I raved about, but have barely worn since (this whole post is so cringey to read — so many shopping red flags!!!).

Even though the initial run of the project ended with a DNF, I always saw it as a worthwhile venture that I’d come back to. I still believe that wardrobe chronicling can be an antidote to conditioned hyper-consumerism. An act that directs our attention back to the content of our own wardrobes, away from the brand-affiliated kind that begs us to click and purchase. Now that I have other priorities and find myself shopping considerably less, I feel ready to revisit the exercise once again.

As with last time, I’ll be giving my wardrobe contents the museum catalogue treatment (everybody’s closet is an anthropological treasure, in my view), while going deep into my thoughts and feelings toward each individual piece. These entries are part show-and-tell, part quality assessment, part use analysis, part style notes, part storytelling, part love letter. For the readers who have been with me on this journey of style autobiography, you will see some familiar pieces re-profiled, along with snippets of my old words reworked and updated.

But this go-around, instead of attacking the catalogue randomly and haphazardly, I’ll be starting with the oldest, most worn items in my possession. Enter: The 30-Wears Collection. The concept is partly inspired by Jenny’s The 10 Year Closet series (both brilliant and admirable). 30 is the oft-cited benchmark for the minimum number of times a piece of clothing should be worn. Personally, I’d love to see my pieces rack up wears in the triple digits, but given the massive amount of turnover my wardrobe has seen in recent years, it’ll take some time to get there. There are no shortcuts to attaining a long-lived, long-loved wardrobe.

The other major difference is that I’ll be approaching this project as a more open-ended, pressure-free exercise — as opposed to a completion-driven challenge with rules and a timeline. By holding space for each item of clothing I’ve chosen to keep for myself, out of the myriad possibilities I have access to, I hope to 1) create a personal record of my closet and style as it evolves, and 2) cultivate a practice of looking inwards as much as I do outwards as an admirer of beautiful garments.

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Exhibit 001 : The Airy White Shell

• Purchased from: Swedish thrift shop (originally Lindex), 2017

• Cost: ~$8 CAD

• Material: 75% cotton, 25% silk

• Number of wears (from 2018-publishing): 33

Lately, there’s been a lot of discussion about how to dress when it’s roasting outside, a relevant question in the age of heatwaves. My usual answer is: something sleeveless, thin, loose, and light-coloured. This billowy, barely-there top is a textbook illustration of what I mean.

The airy white shell has been a longstanding fixture of my summer wardrobe. The second of its kind (RIP my silk Alice + Olivia top c. 2013), I purchased this piece from a secondhand shop in Malmö, Sweden, where I was studying abroad in 2017. On this study exchange, I brought a very limited wardrobe with me; the cheap Ikea cupboard in my student room looked very aesthetically minimal when all was unpacked. Initially satisfying to look at, I quickly became bored with the lack of options and started hitting up local secondhand stores and Euro fast fashion chains like Monki and Weekday.

My Swedish capsule was particularly lacking in warm-weather pieces. As the semester was wrapping up and I booked my Ryanair flights for some post-schooling travel, I was in desperate need of lighter attire. This top, originally from the brand Lindex, was perfect for a few weeks of backpacking around Southern Europe and Morocco. I can still conjure memories of wearing it while strolling through the old Medina in Fez, reading on a tourist-filled beach in Nice, and digging into a hefty jamón sandwich on some stone steps in Barcelona. Since returning home from that whirlwind European adventure, I’ve continued wearing in regular rotation nearly every summer — this year marks our eighth together.

It’s a whisper of a top: slightly sheer, and made from a tissue-thin silk-cotton blend that gives off a hint of sheen when it catches the light. The cut is boxy and oversized, barely making any contact with skin. In it, I often feel like I’m wearing an elegant pillowcase. I haven’t always loved the generous length and am periodically tempted to chop it into a crop top. But, at the same time, I do appreciate the unique silhouette this longer top adds to my arsenal of hot weather outfits.

This piece is lightweight, rolls up tiny, and doesn’t look too bad with wrinkles — all of which are great qualities when travelling. It’s no wonder that this top has accompanied me on so many trips, including our most recent trek to the Maritimes (where the ratio of things I brought for my baby vs. myself was like 5:1). I also deeply associate this top with summertime in the city: outdoor concerts, patio dates, park hangs, gelato runs. The feeling of a warm breeze down my back as I bike home from an overcrowded street festival, my belly full of greasy foods consumed in stick form.

I’ve probably worn this top around 40 times (33 is the official count since 2018, when I began diligently tracking my outfits worn, save for a few “lost months” after giving birth), which is fewer than I expected from a top that I mentally claim to “wear all the time”. Yet, according to my spreadsheet, it’s been one of my most consistently-worn tops over the span of those years, as (many) others in competition for airtime went in and out of circulation.

A gallery of past outfits, from 2017, 2019, 2021, 2022, and 2013.

And over those years, the way I style this piece has evolved. As seen in the figure above, an enduring signature outfit of mine was this white shell + a mid-length skirt — the failsafe combination that kept me cool and looking put-together. Last year, I experimented with layering the top over skimpy slip dresses, a look that made me feel sultry and attractive at eight months pregnant, while keeping my colostrum-leaking cleavage contained. These days, I’m most likely to pair it with the long-inseam shorts that have come to dominate my wardrobe for the season, or some sturdy canvas fatigues.

Another subtle difference is that, pre-COVID, I generally tucked all of my tops in. It was sometimes awkward to do with this piece thanks to the volume and length (see outfit #1 above), but done right (outfit #2), it looks like an artfully crumpled piece of abstract origami. In recent time though, I’ve taken to just letting the bottom hang loose in all its ethereal glory. No more fidgeting and collecting sweat droplets in the waistband.

As you can imagine, this well-loved garment has acquired its fair share of wear and tear after eight summers of service. There are spots of yellowing around the neckline and bottom hem, blemishes that are fortunately not too noticeable. The top was in good working condition — up until a few weeks ago, when it got chewed up in a laundry mishap, resulting in some pretty significant damage to the delicate fabric.

Prior to the incident, I had always washed this item by hand, wringing it out in the sink and hanging it up to dry. But in my bone-tired, sleep-deprived state, I made the lazy decision of tossing it in with the rest of the wash. Big mistake. Currently, it sits in the “to mend” pile atop my dresser. I’ve tried just stitching the rip along the neckline back together, but this attempt at a lazy fix was another fail. I’m not ready to say goodbye to this piece — not yet. I’m thinking that I’ll have to apply some sort of patch over the torn areas, but whether the thinning fabric at the edges will be able to support added material is a question mark.

For now, the future of this cherished top hangs in the balance. But in spite of the tragedy, this experience of (potentially) wrecking a quiet workhorse top that had long faded into the background of my closet has made me realize just how much I appreciate the beauty, versatility, and heat-beating prowess of this airy white shell top.