When we wrote about repeating outfits last week, quite a few of you commented about issues of wearing the same thing for two days in a row, or how outfit choices can sometimes be restricted by what happens to be clean at the time, and this got us thinking about how often people wash their clothes.
We, for instance, know some people who wash ALL their clothes, EVERY time they wear them. Every single thing. Skirts, tops, even sweaters which are worn on top of other sweaters: they all go straight into the laundry basket as soon as they’re taken off.
Now, this strikes us as crazy. For one, who has the time for THAT amount of laundry? And for two, well, as far as we’re concerned, most clothes don’t actually NEED to be washed every single time they’re worn. Constant washing is bad for clothes, and it’s bad for the environment, and while we’re not advocating for a second that people walk around unwashed (personal hygiene: it’s a good thing!), we tend to split clothes into two distinct groups when it comes to laundry, and we don’t mean “whites” and “colours”. (Although that too, obviously. Or you’ll end up with a machine full of baby pink clothing, like the Chief of Police did on that day last month when a bright red gardening glove found itself going through a spin cycle with a load of whites.)
1. Clothes that have direct contact with skin – i.e.underwear, hosiery, tops with arms which come into close contact with the underarm area, etc. These get washed after every wear, no exceptions. Also, workout clothes: there’s no way they’re being worn again once they’ve been sweated on.
2. Clothes that don’t. Things like skirts, jeans, jackets, and anything else that’s usually worn over another item of clothing, and which therefore doesn’t come into contact with the skin. For example, a skirt worn in winter, over tights and with a shirt tucked into it will only really need to be washed after one wear if you’ve dropped something on it, or been sitting in a smoke-filled room for hours. Items in this category get washed on an “as needed” basis.
Obviously, the second category is a lot harder to define than the first, and really depends on what you’re doing in the clothes in question. If something gets stained, or dirty, then obviously it’s getting washed, regardless of how long its been worn for. If you live in, or are visiting, a hot climate, you’ll probably need to wash things more often. And if you spend a lot of time outdoors, or work with animals or on the land, or something, then your clothes will get a lot dirtier a lot faster than someone who drives to work in a climate-controlled office every day and doesn’t get any closer to dirt than looking at it through the window will.
As for ironing: well, that’s a whole other discussion, which we had back in this post, if you want to take a look!)
So, those are our rough guildelines for clothes washing (and we must stress, they are very rough!), but we want to know about yours. Tell us: how often do you wash your clothes?
We can probably all agree that the gentlemen pictured above are committing a crime of fashion, no?
Are they committing an actual crime, though? Well, police in Newquay, Cornwall, would presumably think so: they’ve already confiscated one such mankini, after a ban was introduced on offensive clothing and possessions, as part of a bit to cut down on “lewd and loutish behaviour” in the seaside town. So, no more Borat lookalikes in Newquay then. They can put up a sign saying “Welcome to Newquay: no eyeball bleach required!”
Were the police right to take someone’s Mankini away from them, though? We’d say that yes, they probably were. Although our fashion policing on this site is strictly for entertainment purposes, and we don’t actually believe in banning items that are only subjectively ugly (i.e. As nice as it would be to see a complete ban on Crocs, that wouldn’t really be fair, would it?), we do think there are some things that just don’t need to be seen in a public street, and one of those things is a naked behind. If you’re on a nudist beach, fine, get your butt out with pride. In the street, though? Well, it IS pretty funny (the guys pictured above, for instance, were happily posing for photographs, and were obviously wearing the manikinis as a joke or a bet.) but it’s also one of those things that, once seen, can’t be un-seen.
And now YOU can’t un-see it either, can you? Sorry about that.
What do you think about confiscating clothes? Should Borat-style mankinis be banned in public places?
Before we start this post, let’s just make one thing crystal clear: we don’t really believe in fashion “rules”. We don’t believe that you should never mix navy and black, for instance, or that red and green should never be seen. (If we believed in that last one, our red-haired, green-dress-wearing Chief of Police would be permanently incarcerated in the Fashion Police jail. Which would be pretty ironic, no?)
For the most part, we believe that people should wear whatever they want to, as long as it’s within the bounds of common decency. But at the same time, we all have our personal taste, don’t we? We all have those little things that we just can’t imagine ever wearing even although we wouldn’t necessarily bat an eyelid if we saw someone else doing it.
This list, then, contains five things that fall into that category FOR US. We’re not for a second suggesting that these things are crimes of fashion, or that no one else should ever do them: they’re just the silly, pointless “rules” that we impose upon ourselves for no particular reason. They’re our own little fashion foibles, in other words, and we bet you have one or two of your own, although probably not the same ones as us, which include…
1. Thick tights or knee high boots in the height of summer
This is particularly stupid of us, because the Fashion Police HQ is in the frozen North. It’s cold 99.8% of the time. But no matter how unseasonably cold it is in August, we just can’t bring ourselves to break out the opaques and boots. Don’t get us wrong: it’s not that we’re walking around in shorts when it’s pouring with rain and freezing cold. We’ll happily wear leggings, or trousers, and we have no issue with breaking out the knitwear and other so-called” wintery” clothes, but we reserve the woolly tights and the knee high boots for the actual winter, not the pretend one we sometimes get in summer.
Along the same lines as the above. Fashion magazines seem to constantly be telling is how to make sundresses winter-appropriate, usually by layering them over something else, or layering them under piles of knitwear. But we don’t want to. We prefer to keep the lightweight fabrics for summer and the heavier ones for winter. Don’t ask us why, we just do.
Vero Moda sundress. No, we don’t want to wear a long-sleeved t-shirt under it.
3. High heels with frilly ankle socks. Or any ankle socks.
Some people can pull this off and look just great. Not us. We’d look – and feel – like little kids playing dress-up with mummy’s shoes. A look best left to the young ‘uns, we suspect…
4. Anything with a drop crotch
You knew we were going to say this, of course. But we will never, ever wear anything that looks even vaugely like this:
Your butt just doesn’t ever need to have a face, does it?
5. Pyjamas in public
You know, if we were really ill, and we absolutely HAD to leave the house for something, them OK, we guess we can imagine throwing a coat over the PJs and hurrying back before too many people were exposed to our dishevelled night attire. But we honestly can’t imagine wearing nightwear in public deliberately, or habitually. If that makes up uptight then fair enough, we will wear that badge with pride, but we will never wear our PJs in public.
Loving yourself might very well be the key of living a happy life. Love your strengths, your weaknesses, everything! Everyone who made a submission to Links à la mode should be very proud and content with themselves. You are all fashion bloggers with a voice and have something to share with others. Did you know that your post could make someone’s day? Your DIY shorts might have been the highlight of a young girls day. Your inspirational post might have motivated someone who had the blues. These are all reasons to keep writing great content and when in doubt remember… YOU INFLUENCE PEOPLE.
If you would like to submit your link for next week’s Links à la Mode, please register first, then post your links HERE. The HTML code for this week will be found in the Links a la Mode group will be published later today. ~Jennine
If you read fashion blogs at all, you’ll know that “remixing” is a thing now: “remixing” being the practice of taking a particular item of clothing and, you know, wearing it in more than one particular way. So, say you have a pair of jeans. One day you’ll wear them with a blue top, for instance, then another time you might wear them with a green top, or a yellow top. And you might also wear a different pair of shoes with them sometimes, too, if you want to get really wild. Voila! You are a “remixer”, you crazy fashion person, you!
Now, the idea of remixing has been around for a long time now, but not so long that we don’t remember when it used to go by a different name. Yes, way back in the day, when The Fashion Police were young whipper-snappers and this Internet thing was all just fields, “remixing” used to simply be known as “getting dressed”. It wasn’t a FASHUN thing, either: it was just what normal people did, every day. Because, let’s face it, not many people would buy that pair of jeans and think to themselves, “Now that I have this pair of jeans, I’m going to always wear them with this one blue top, and NOTHING ELSE, EVER.” Do they? Do people do that? We suppose some people do, but then again, some people wear pyjamas to collect their kids from school. Moving on…
What we’re trying to say here, is that we sometimes think “remixing” gets made out to be a little more complex than it actually is. But then again, the opposite of remixing – outfit repeating – is also sometimes made out to be much more of an issue than it really is. You’ve probably all seen those news articles in which such-and-such a celebrity is seen wearing the thing more than once, and the word is deemed to have ended. Or read a fashion blog in which the blogger feels they have to apologise for commiting the huge sartorial “crime” of repeating an outfit. We know we have, and we normally think, “What’s the big deal? Isn’t this what everyone does?”
Actually, we think it’s quite refreshing to see someone in the public eye wear something more than once. As with the remixing, that’s what real people do. We buy things and we wear them… and then we wear them again. And again. And, if you’re The Fashion Police, probably againandagainandagain. The alternative, you see, would be buying a completely new outfit every single day in life, and who can afford to do that? (And who has the closet space, come to think of it?)
So repeating items of clothing is just fine by us. And remixing is just what normal people do when they’re getting dressed in the morning. What about repeating the exact same outfit, though? As in, same skirt with the same top and the same shoes, say. Do you think that’s a crime of fashion, readers? Because we’ll be honest: we’ve done it. And we’ll probably do it again. Well, if you’ve happened to put together an outfit you absolutely love, it would be a shame to have to say to yourself, “You know, I really love this outfit of mine, so it’s a shame I’ll never be able to wear it again, because I wouldn’t want people to think I was repeating an outfit!” Wouldn’t it?
Here’s our guilty fashion confession, then: we don’t just repeat individual items of clothing, we sometimes repeat entire outfits. Not constantly, of course. We wouldn’t turn up to work in the same outfit day after day, for instance. And if we’re going out with friends, we’ll probably make a mental note of what we wore so we don’t wear the exact same thing the next time we go out to the same place, with the same friends. But we won’t obsess over it, or feel the need to never be seen in the same thing twice.
What about you? Do you repeat outfits? And if so, how often do you feel it’s appropriate to repeat them? Do you have rough guidelines (No more than once per week, or three times per month, or whatever?) or do you just wear whatever you feel like wearing when you wake up in the morning, regardless of whether or not you’ve worn it before?
