To shoe or not to shoe while on the diet?

I have had mixed responses on my attempt to enroll friends and family into The Great American Apparel Diet.   I think I have signed up at least ten women so far, (no men yet, perhaps their egos aren’t tied to the clothes they buy?). 

Anyway, some participants think the shoe and accessories exception is a loophole,  “the accessories thing?” they ask, “ that’s like saying I’m going on the wagon but I can still drink champagne.”

Here’s my thinking around shoes and accessory exception.  Many people buy for many different reasons.  I want to see if the shoe and or accessory angle becomes a new focus for some people (think Amelda Marcos or Isadora Duncan).  Others may find that when they say “no buying for a year,” it means simply no buying. 

Those of you who have scoffed at the “shoe and accesory loophole,” will thank me when you need a fix. 

You officially have 14 days to stock up on anything you might need for the winter.   By the way, the over the knee boot is in…if you really need a pant fix you can always go with that.

Is The Great American Diet Part of the Slow Clothing Movement?

Last night as I was rummaging around in my closet looking for something to wear it occurred to me that I have given, thrown or recycled a lot of clothes over the past ten years. Darn, I’d love to have some of those items back, and if not the items themselves the time it took for me to shop, clean, futz and manage them into my wardrobe. Especially now since I am no longer able to purchase any new apparel. I remember vividly, an amazing and probably overpriced DKNY sweater coat. A sort of retro 20s style with velvet accents. I wonder who’s wearing that gorgeous garment now. I wish I were.

This morning, right on the heels of my closet rummaging, I read an article in the NYTimes magazine about storage and consumerism.  By 2005, according to the Boston College sociologist Juliet B. Schol, the average consumer purchased one new piece of clothing every five and a half days.  

This eye-opening statistic got me thinking about a “slow clothing” movement. There are official slow food, slow money, slow travel and slow sex movements these days. Why not a slow clothing movement? I wondered.  And is The Great Amearican Apparel Diet the beginning of it? 

 I googled “slow clothing” and “slow fashion,” and guess what…we’re slow to the movement. People have been blogging about this for a long time. “Wear local,” they say—is that like a sweater made with Fido the family dog’s hair? Or does it mean belting your neighbor’s old drapes and wearing them as a topper, a la Maria Van Trapp? Maybe we could learn from the Hispanics who wear huarache sandals made from repurposed flat tires? Buy from a thrift store and then remake your own, the experts suggest. Sew the arms of one sweater to the bodice of another, cut off pants and make them into a patchwork skirt, turn a tube top into a Rasta hair band. I am envisioning a renaissance fair.

In one article I read in the Christian Science Monitor, the author challenged US households “to create a single outfit for every man, woman, and child that is homemade.” Going back to a bygone era, she also suggested that people mend and darn their clothes.

Good idea for those people who:

a.) Know the meaning of darn in this context.

b). Know how to darn or sew http://www.ehow.com/how_648_darn-sock.html

c). Have a sewing machine. ( Investment Tip: Buy Singer, Ticker Symbol: SEW, you heard it here).

Darn (as in Darn-it), I wish I had that DKNY sweater coat  and that brown Liz Claiborne maxi, corduroy coat from 1987, and let’s not forget the blinding Neon Obermeyer ski jacket I bought in 1992 to match the bottom of my K2s. Looking back, I admit, it was a wasteful, hedonistic and consumer-centric few decades—but we looked good.

Now, with my apparel budget cut to the quick and my participation in The Great American Apparel Diet, I am left fantasizing about my old wardrobe. I imagine a lovely waif of a “slow clothing movement” girl prancing down the runway of life in my old clothes and my Guess booties. I trust that she appreciates where her wardrobe began. I really hope, upon further reflection, that the “slow girl” hasn’t sewn the arms of my Obermeyer ski jacket onto the bodice of my brown Liz Claiborne Courdory Maxi coat. But if she has, all I can say is “you go–slow girl!”