Can a girl have too many clothes?

Hello, Sophie here, you’ve not heard from me in a while, mainly as I’ve not had much of a chance to go charity shopping of late, which is probably a good thing – my wardrobe is fit to burst! 

An inevitable side effect of a charity shop addiction is that I have a lot of clothes. For the most part this is a good thing. I like having lots of choice when it comes to clothes and tire of wearing the same thing everyday. Also, it can be practical. When our washing machine broke down and took an absolute age to fix, we had to do emergency loads of washing in neighbours’ washing machines for my husbands and kids’ clothes but I was fine. Fortunately it was mended before I had to resort to wearing my wedding dress on the school run.

But it does have its down sides – it can take a long time to get dressed in the morning as I have too much choice and space is an ongoing problem. I don’t think my husband is willing to hand over any more of his wardrobe space. To counter this I’m currently operating a one in one out policy but with limited success. I have a clear out and take my bag of clothes to a charity shop or a swishing party, but you can see the flaw here, I come back with more.

Sometimes I think that it would be better to just splash out on a few decent items of clothing that I really like, it would probably cost the same in the long run, but where’s the fun in that? Also, although the minimal does appeal to me, I know I wouldn’t be able to do it. I went travelling a few years back and travelled very lightly. Consequently I wore the same two pairs of trousers for three months (yes, I washed them). As soon as I got home I went out and bought impractical but pretty short skirts and I never wore those trousers again.

So I’m sticking with the lots of clothes an overflowing wardrobe and a grumpy husband.

But there is one real problem with having lots of clothes and that’s packing to go away. Last week I had to pack to go to a festival and I’ll tell you all about that in my next post.

While writing this I thought do I really have a lot of clothes? I know I have loads more than my husband but is it a normal amount for a woman? So I went up to my wardrobe and counted. I have four pairs of jeans. That sounds like a normal amount to me. But then I started on my cardigans. I counted twenty two! And I’m sure there must be more hidden around the house. That’s surely excessive, even for a librarian, but at least I’m keeping the stereotype alive and well.