On the Rationalization of Clothes

They say when the universe was born and started expanding, it created it's own space and time.

So when my wife says "I shouldn't be buying more clothes, there's no place to keep them. You need to help me rationalize them," she is calling me to work on the space-time continuum. Create more space so she can have more time to shop. I have no choice but to try.

There are three philosophies for rationalizing clothes prevalent in our home.

One is mine. There are two sorts of clothes - those that you wear to office and those that you do not. Everything else is bunk.

Then there is my son's: There are clothes depicting modes of transport and these are the ones you wear. Every other item of clothing is not for wearing, but just to ensure accessibility to the above; that parents, friends and relatives have, hoping against hope, spent money buying this latter category is neither here nor there.

Last, is the method my wife follows: " ", " , ? . !" " , ; , ."

We begin the rationalization.

To set the initial criteria for selection, I suggest she discard everything that has not been used in the past six months. She agrees in principle or says something to that effect. We start. The plan is that she'd pull out clothes and we'll make two piles, 'yes' (keep) and 'no' (discard). It should be simple. She starts. First up is a white shirt. I ask her when she last wore it.

"I wore it to the meeting when we met the client for the initial briefing at the client's office after we won the project. We went for drinks later, remember you picked me up after the meeting? I think it looks good, though since it is white, I can't wear it too often, since white shirts, after a period just die. I remember Q in my office has a similar shirt though the colour is different." A keen observer might notice, that there is no mention of any temporal data that might lead us to infer whether the said meeting was in the past six months or no.

"Let me see if it still fits as well." She tries said shirt on. "What do you think?" I said it looked fine.

"Fine, not good?"

"No, good."

"No-good?"

"No, it looks good."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, I am sure."

"Ok, so lets keep it."

I backpedaled a bit and reminded her that the criteria in question was whether she had worn it in the past six months. She said she just told me she wore it at the client meeting, plus the question is irrelevant considering we had just decided that it looked good.

I bring the fact up that I am not updated with her client meeting calendar. She tells me that given the time I spend on her laptop I should know her meeting calendar.

Finally, she does tell me the meeting happened three months ago.

"Ok," I said, "That's an automatic yes then."

Half an hour later we had gone through three more shirts. It was a Saturday afternoon. I had to get to office on Monday. We needed to speed things up. I asked her to change places with me. I would take clothes out of the cupboard and she would tell me which criterion they came under.

I held up a shirt.

"I bought it with you, remember, the evening before we were to leave for our vacation and we went out to dinner and there was this moving-out sale on?"

I was at my dogged best "Yes or no?"

"Yes," she said. We made great progress and had cleared two whole shelves when I realized that the pile of 'yes-es' seriously outweighed the pile of 'no-s'. To elaborate, there was nothing in the 'no' pile. I thought it warranted a quick check of our criteria.

"What are you saying 'Yes' for?"

"'Yes' means I want to keep it."

I patiently explained to her that the purpose of culling was to get rid of stuff. We had to harden our hearts and take tough decisions. It then transpired that she did not agree with the criteria of disposing of something with six months of disuse. Six months is apparently the fallow period for clothes. So we tried other time based criteria. There were drawbacks to them - six months was definitely too short. A year was not long enough either since seasons change. Three years wasn't enough since styles often came back. We settled on a decade.

She had a pair of jeans she last wore in college that was put in the discard pile. Actually it made up the discard pile. I told her she could buy an equivalent mass of clothing as that pair of jeans if she wanted to maintain the space she had.

A fresh start was needed. We decided to approach the problem from a new angle. I told her my philosophy on segmenting clothes: There were office clothes and non-office clothes and all other clothes one got rid of.

She warmed to this criteria - she called it the 'purpose-based' segmentation of attire. So she would make a few buckets based on when or how she used the clothes. If they did not fall into any of the pre-designated criteria, no matter how much we liked them, they would need to go.

We started again. I asked her what her criteria would be. She said she liked what I said - she would go with office clothes and other clothes.

I picked up a white shirt.

"Office" she said.

Another shirt.

"Client meetings."

"Is that office or no?"

"What do you think?"

I told her I was just making sure. "Why can't you just say office instead?"

"Because I won't wear it if I am only going to office." Well that was pretty clear now.

I picked up another piece of clothing.

"Going out shopping."

I reminded her that this last criterion was not on her original list of criteria.

"Yes," She said. "I can't have only two criteria. What do you do when you have to go out?"

I said I wore non-office clothes.

"What do you wear when you go out to meet friends?"

The same.

"What about when we go out shopping?"

Ditto.

"And when we go to a picnic?"

Yep. That too.

"And if it is a sit down dinner?"

"You mean a place with a tablecloth?"

"Yes"

"I might not wear keds."

She adopted the long-suffering martyred look common to women accustomed to dealing with imbecility on a regular basis.

"All these things are different." She managed to say. And that sounded the death knell of the 'rationalization process' we had adopted.

Apparently, "Office clothes" is a kingdom with myriad species inhabiting it. There are clothes to be worn to office on days with no meetings. Then there are clothes that are worn for meetings with colleagues and bosses, different ones for bosses' bosses and clients.

Same for going out. Taking our son to the playground downstairs involves apparel that is separate from the outfit worn while taking him for a picnic by the beach and still different if the playground happens to be in a mall. The garments for eating at a restaurant without a tablecloth are as different from the finery used for eating in a restaurant with a tablecloth as chalk and cheese.

Plus then there is portion of the wardrobe that one might never wear, but needs to have, primarily because.

The bed was now full of little piles, each with only a smattering of clothes. I had forgotten which pile was which. The only pile I was sure of was the one to discard. It still had the pair of her jeans from college.