Here's a bet: a fifth of your closet does ninety percent of the work. The same jeans, the same jacket, the same two or three things you reach for without thinking. Everything else is sort of decoration.
And if you trace back why the decoration is decoration, it usually comes down to one thing: it was trendy when you bought it, and trendy things go with exactly one outfit.
The catch is you can't see that in the store.
Standing there, the trend and the staple feel identical. Both seem like you'll wear them forever.
You only find out which was which months later, when one's in the laundry every week and the other still has the tag on. So you have to check before you buy. Three ways to do it:
The shoe test
Start with shoes. Look at what you actually own, the pairs by your door, not the aspirational ones in a box somewhere, and count how many would genuinely work with the thing you're holding.
One pair, and only one? That's a trend. It's got a single look in mind. Three or four pairs, across different kinds of days? Now you've got something.
The three-outfit test
Next, build outfits in your head before you pay. Three full ones, head to toe, using only clothes you already have. No cheating: "I'd just grab a white tee" doesn't count, and neither do the trousers you're planning to buy next month.
If three come together fast, good sign. If you keep landing on the same single outfit, the one from the mannequin that sold you on it, that's probably all the piece has in it.
Plenty of trendy things come with one outfit and nothing else.
The honest one: would you still want it if nobody else had it?
This is the one everyone skips, because it's about you, not the clothes. Strip away that it's everywhere right now. Forget that the people whose style you trust are all wearing it, that it's obviously the thing this season. Picture it with none of that attached.
If you still want it, great. You actually like it, and you'll keep liking it after the hype moves on.
If the wanting just evaporates, then you didn't want the piece. You wanted in on the moment.
Which is a fine thing to want. It just expires, and it's a pricey way to buy a few weeks of feeling current.
Trends aren't the enemy
None of this means don't buy trends. Trends are half the fun of getting dressed, and if you wear something to death for one summer, it paid for itself.
Buy the trend knowing it's a trend. Wear it now, hard, while you want to. Just don't expect it to still be in rotation three years from now on a random Tuesday. That was never its job.
None of these questions are hard. The hard part is remembering to ask them when you're excited about something. Which is, of course, exactly when they matter most.
- Oro