“56% of U.S. survey respondents would prefer to receive tickets to a live experience rather than more stuff. Women in particular prefer experiences over physical gifts. So, wrap up those tickets, and give the gift of making memories.”

—according to Eventbrite (a ticketing venue)

I need working space, not clothing space. My stashes of collected fabrics and yarn date back from before I was born. My “old” materials are vintage and antique. I have two lengths of wool jersey that are likely a hundred years old and which I rescued from my grandmother’s passing. I began purchasing Liberty of London cotton lawn after I got my first teaching job in 1976. The yarn goes back as far with precious skeins of wool and cashmere hoarded over my adult life. I have been doing my best to weave and knit my way through my yarn stash. There is still too much stuff. Way too much!

Despite the obvious bias of the source of quote above, I agree. Please, no more stuff. Experience over things.

A Portland neighbor asked me where I would put all my clothing in the condo. She probably knows we have two tiny closets. (No exaggeration, they are less than 22″ deep and put together, amount to less than 5′ wide.) She asked me several times where I would store my clothing—she seemed quite distressed at our lack of closet space for clothing. The vacuum cleaner and other things need to go into those closets. The truth is, what I really need room for is my weaving, knitting, and sewing materials that I do not intend to part with. The truth is I have too many clothes. We pretty much all do.

In the 18th century Thomas Jefferson’s wife had “16 gowns (18 if you count the 2 ‘to be made up’), 9 petticoats, 18 aprons, and 20 shifts.” She would have been counted a wealthy woman, but most American women today purchase double that many items each year. Fashion Coached‘s survey found most “survey respondents seem to have between 77 to 155 pieces in their wardrobe with a few outliers in the 300+ range.” They aren’t counting underwear and socks. When Marie Kondo helped people sort their clothing on a Netflix series, a woman piled all her clothing on her bed until it toppled over on to the floor. Well.

On the western frontier in the 1800s, a woman might have three dresses or only one or two. If she had three, they would likely be her plain dress always worn with a long apron, an old and worn but serviceable dress worn for particularly hard tasks, and her wedding dress worn to church. Even a hundred years ago, in the 1920s, a woman possessed fewer garments than today.

Between in the 1900s and 1920s, women’s dress went from seventeen layers down to four, and nineteen yards of fabric down to seven.  You would think that the drastic reduction in material made clothing more affordable – and they did, except for one thing.

Instead of three or four complete outfits for the typical middle class 1900s woman, 1920s young ladies were expected to wear a new outfit every day with new clothes for new seasons, and only the best most current fashions could be seen.

—Vintage Dancer

The condo is from 1925, and the narrower women’s clothing styles of that period would have allowed a single working woman to store all her dresses, a businessman to find space for his suits. There was space.

Neither Gary nor I have any suits and we are not dressing for work anymore. Mostly we wear the same clothing day after day, varying the tops. Altogether, aside from socks and underwear, we could probably get by with a half dozen items each for daily wear. For special occasions, he has fine cotton and linen shirts, and he needs a nice pair of slacks (eventually I will have to order for him—assuming an event arrives); I still have way too many nice tops. Notable are Eileen Fisher velvets purchased on sale, including a smokey-violet velvet dress that I wore to Alan’s Baccalaureate and Ian’s wedding. More than twenty-five years of use so far. Recently I saw that same dress online at EF. I will likely wear the one I have now and again for the rest of my life.

We have too many clothes even though I try not to buy more. In the past five years, other than underwear and socks and running gear, I purchased cotton nightgowns, a robe, two pairs of pants (one used from EF Renew) to replace pairs that were too big (and took in the waists of three other pairs), and a new pair of handwoven pants at the Public Market in Seattle. (That last pair was because I failed to resist the brilliant colored fabric.) Last year, Gary bought me an embroidered black silk jacket at an antique mall, which I have worn twice. I resisted the stylish 1940s vintage fitted jacket that fit me. Even though I still think of it wistfully, I wouldn’t have had an opportunity to wear it.

What I might need is an event to wear that silk jacket Gary gave me or that velvet dress that has witnessed important life events…

And then where to put the books? Oh my, our books. Gary had a brainstorm and figured out where to put six bookcases in the entry, three on top of three. Storage of books might be possible—not all of them, of course. Not even adding three other bookcases will allow room for all our books. But many. Almost most.