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Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

Funny to see what a female thinks of as "wearing the same thing every day". For most dudes I know, That's a lot of clothes to own.

I think I made it to age 30 without ever owning 3 pairs of pants at one time.

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It sure seems like she spent a long time thinking about how not to think about what to wear. My dressing habits can fit in a tweet.

shrug That's not too much different than "It sure seems like I spent a long time thinking about how to not think about how to build and deploy my app". Put think time in now, so that you don't have to spend it later (or every day)

A good point and one that I've also made further down. Spend it initially so you don't have to spend it later. Can't explain how much time it's saved me over the years.

I too couldn't help but notice that she spent an awful lot of timing thinking through her fashion to be "liberated" from "taking up too much time and energy" deciding what to wear.

It's an up-front investment in time that pays off over the long run. I do it all the time in programming, pick the right API's and abstractions ahead of time (spend a good amount of energy and time) so I don't have to spend as much time and energy later. Eventually it pays off--a lot. If you think how you dress doesn't affect how people treat you in the world, you're terribly mistaken. Even more if you are a woman.

This is a nice hack.

I couldn't help but notice that she does not write a full blog post every time she gets dressed.

That's certainly a step in the right direction.

Yeah, I was hoping more for a "Steve Jobs" approach. [I am female]

And frankly it is a bit confusing. Would you really wear a band t-shirt and a hoodie to a funeral?

[edit following comment below: I see, so it's "I wear the same thing ever day" for different values of the word "same"? I am somehow underwhelmed. ]

I thought the same, then saw each entry has 'fancy subs', so she would swap the hoodie for a cardigan and a classier t-shirt for the band one (unless, of course, it's one for The Departed)

It seems like she still has quite a lot of clothes to own.

A story from growing up: a friend and I were about to play strip poker with his second cousin. Not wanting to lose too bad, we both put on everything we possibly could, including gloves and even paper face masks (being nervous young teens, we kinda missed the point of strip poker was to lose). In total we were each able to bring our total number of losable items before nakedness to 18. Fronting up to the cousin, she laughed and counted out her clothes - her everyday clothing totalled 18 items... even now, I can't remember what they all were, but I remember being gobsmacked at the time. Parents came home before that story went any further, though.

FWIW, I don't actually have those subs. I just included them because I figured other people wouldn't wear a hoodie to a funeral (for example). I would.

I recently helped a female friend move out of an old apartment, and I was absolutely astounded by how much clothing she had lying around. It surprised me because she came off as a stylish, but not terribly fashion-centered person. By my rough estimate, this list represented probably 1/5 of my friend's clothing.

Granted, a sample size of 1 is not terribly informative; however, my gut feeling is that a women's wardrobe will generally be considerably larger than a man's wardrobe.

On an unrelated note, I love hearing about life hacks like these. Reminds you of how much else there is left to optimize.

...she came off as a stylish

The author is definitely NOT stylish by any reasonable definition of this word. Hence the difference in the wardrobe size. Things like "ethical" or "green" consumption only make situation worse.

That's a little harsh of you, don't you think? Her wardrobe isn't varied, but as long as the default 'works' there's no reason she can't pull it off.

Do you remember what your friends wore yesterday? From what I've experienced, clothing doesn't really matter once you get past first impressions.

So much of fashion is fit anyway, you'll be more stylish with a small wardrobe of clothes that fit well than a wide variety of ill-fitted stuff.

You misinterpret the word 'stylish'.

Hoodies and band shirts are not stylish and never will be.

...unless you mean to say something like: in the style of a young urbanite.

The word 'stylish' in terms of fashion refers to more than just clothing though, it's meaning is closer to 'swagger' and it has connotations to 'classical style' or 'classy', which is where band shirts and hoodies fall out.

Maybe not 'stylish' in the sense of glamorous high fashion, but certainly 'stylish' in the sense of having put effort into ones own personal style, and consistently dressing that way. So 'stylish' as opposed to slobbish, slovenly, careless, not as opposed to simple, everyday, cheap, downmarket.

when my friend moved in with her bf, I took over her apt. First time when I went to see the apt, it seemed small. When I moved in though, it wasn't. I realized she had so much stuff, that it made the apt appear smaller when I saw the first time.

Women have lots of stuff - not just clothes, but everything (before someone complains - this is not sexism etc. just simple observation)

Looking round my man cave, I'd say I have a lot of stuff as well; several tonnes of books for a starter.

Time for a declutter I think...

Clothes: I like the smell of heavy wool jumpers and (Donegal) tweed jackets.

I have a few books too. I am not talking about books though - women seem to have many many things, and they also have many units of the same thing. For example, why does anyone need 10 or 20 pairs of shoes? A female friend of mine has 40 (yes, forty) different bags, and she still keeps buying bags. And no, she is not wealthy, and doesn't live in a mansion.

Edit: not complaining or anything. Just genuinely curious :)

Honestly, as a reformed female clothing junkie, I think it grows in part out of being intelligent -- thus easily bored -- and visually inclined. Getting a certificate in GIS and running my own websites helped cure me of interest in both fashion and decor. I can search for new skins for my blogs or twiddle with the font size or whatever instead of rearranging furniture and trying on the same pants with 27 different tops. It is just as mentally satisfying to that part of my brain. But clothes and decor were the only "appropriate" outlets for it when I was a homemaker/living like I was "supposed to" as a woman.

The plural of anecdote is not data but...

I've changed my sex. I used to be male, now I'm female.

My wardrobe used to be "a collection of t-shirts and 4-5 pairs of jeans". Now it's a whole closet full of blouses, dresses, and skirts, plus a dresser with a few more things. I recently did a purge and got the stuff down in my closet to 100 individual pieces.

Very interesting. Why do you think your wardrobe grew so much after you switched to female? Do you think that you grew your wardrobe to better fit the image of a female in the eyes of others, or was it a natural impulse that came from within?

Edit: Probably the root of my question would be does a transexual person like yourself truly feel female? And if you do does the feeling of being female precede or follow the switch? As you said your wardrobe was smaller before you switched to female. It would be very interesting if it had grown before the switch and then you made the switch. Fundamentally I ask these questions because I want to understand at least a little about what transexual life must feel like because I can not imagine it personally.

Trans 101: Imagine one morning you wake up and you're a woman - but you're still thinking like a man. Everything about your body feels wrong, everything about how you're expected to behave feels wrong. That's it in a nutshell.

Part of the reason my wardrobe grew is that I actually like my body now and want to show it off. Part of it's that women are expected to put more effort into how their clothes coordinate, and generally allowed to dress more flamboyantly.

(There are also lots of nerdy transwomen out there who keep on dressing Geek Casual after the transition. I am not one of them.)

Right. I hesitate to call it "sexism," as there's no adverse discrimination going on, but the double standard here is turned up to 11.

What is described in this article is, basically, the way almost every western man in a casual profession dresses. I wake up in the morning and pull on jeans, a t-shirt, and top it with a long sleeve, sweater or nothing depending on the weather. Yet no one would have any interest in reading a blog post about it.

Are you sure about that? Because I think you can find similar such themed articles in any given mens magazine, and unless the economics of print have changed, such articles require significant amounts of ink and trees to produce, so someone in the audience is interested in it.

Perhaps this article attracted attention because it was well-written and well-produced with a liberal use of attractive graphics...as opposed to the 100% width Times-New-Roman-400-word-paragraph format that many bloggers use. Why were you so quick to jump to sexism?

It may be the way "almost every western man in a casual profession dresses", but it is not how many western women in a casual profession dress.

This is true; a lot of guys dress this way naturally. I'm hoping the difference is that I actually _thought_ about what I wanted to wear every day, rather than just wearing jeans every day. I only know one guy who's consciously done this, and he's a designer, too.

Right. What interested me was the double standard I mentioned (and I should be really clear: I'm not sitting here and being a men's rights whiner about reverse sexism or anything like that, I'm honestly interested). Clearly guys aren't doing this out of instinct, we were taught to do it too. But it happened at an age and in a context where there was no value placed on the decision. It's just "how it's done", like brushing one's teeth.

For women, coming to the same kind of decision is a lifestyle hack. I don't know what to think about that.

I have put a fair amount of thought into it, mostly because I dislike shopping and I ware basically the same clothing every day.

Black dress (shoes, pants, belt) white shirt (button down w/ tie for work, t-shirt everywhere else.) Black wool trench coat when it's cold.

My 2nd pair of jeans just got a hole in the knee.

My wardrobe has become suboptimal because of it. 1 pair of jeans = too few, 2 pair = just right, 3 pair = maybe a good idea, but c'mon, 2 is enough.

3 pairs is optimal, because in emergency you still stay with 2. It's a backup.

Yeah, I wear jeans, sneakers, a tshirt, and an optional hoodie every day and hadn't considered that wearing the same thing every day. I expected this to be more like a uniform.

also, apparently the whole goal of this is so that you don't have to stress about clothing. I don't wear the same thing every day, and reading that blog post was the probably most i've ever thought about clothing in my life.

I think I'm at 3 decent pairs of pants. Light, dark, black. Maybe 8-10 dress shirts/polos to go with them in total.

Boatload of old tshirts though.

For the past 5 years I've been owning a single pair of shoes. In January of each year I give away the old pair and get a new one.

If you had three pair of well-made leather shoes, you could potentially keep them for decades by not wearing the same shoes on consecutive days and treating the leather every few months.

I'm a fan of low leather boots. Good looking low leather boots can be worn in just about every situation except weddings, and last a hell of a long time. It's rather liberating not having to worry about your shoes before deciding to walk through a soggy looking field or climb up a hill.

Move to South or SouthWest.

You'll be golden.

I've given the south west some thought, though it seems the north west is in my immediate future. Should definitely be an improvement over the east coast at least.

Nice, so far I've gone 2 years without shopping for clothes. My coworkers have my dress habits practically memorized, gray/blue T-shirts Monday thru Thursday, and a Maroon or white shirt on Friday.

And Saturday and Sunday? No shirt? :)

It just occurred to me that one could map days of the week to colors:

SMTWTFS ROYGBIV

I'm currently at 5 because I had to get some after some of my older ones are starting to fall apart and get holes. Soon i'll probably be back down to 3...

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