Winter Wardrobe Malfunction

One of the hardest things about going to work in the winter is deciding what to wear in the morning. I don’t wear suits to work because the dress code in my office is smart casual. This suits (ha ha) me fine, but it does make dressing in the morning a complicated affair.

For starters, there are serious holes in my winter wardrobe. I don’t like wearing pants generally, so leg coverage is always an issue. I also don’t own very many jumpers, though I have a lot of three-quarter cardigans and crop jackets. They’re perfect for spring, but pretty useless on a rainy day.

Therefore, I wear lots of different layers to stay warm – opaque stockings, skirt, top, cardigan/jumper, coat/jacket, scarf, boots, etc. All the fashion magazines say this style of dressing is very boho chick (hello Sienna Miller), but it does create problems when dressing in the morning. Certain clothes can only go with certain accessories. I cannot wear a skirt unless I have opaque stockings to go with it. My denim jacket can only be worn if I’m not wearing jeans (denim on denim is a very bad combination). I only have one black jumper that goes with everything, and it is generally dirty.

This leads to the final complicating issue in the winter dressing conundrum: laundry. I don’t do the laundry very often. In fact, if I had my way I wouldn’t do the laundry at all and clothes would magically appear, clean and folded, in my cupboard. This means that we often have an uneven ratio of dirty clothes to clean clothes at our place, even more uneven when you compare dirty clothes to clean, ironed clothes.

When all these factors are added together, it makes my morning “dressing” routine a long and complicated affair. For example:

7:10am – I look in wardrobe and decide to wear blue dress, but realise my black stockings are in the clean clothes basket.

7:11am – My black stockings are wet and covered in bits of tissue (unfortunate laundry accident). It will take too long to clean, so I decide to wear pants instead. The problem is I only own three pairs of pants – an old black pair that are too small, a really really old brown pair that are too big, and jeans which are also in the wash.

7:13am – I decide on brown pants, but I can only wear them with my longish top or shortish dress (dress over pants being “in” now) to cover-up the fact that they are too big (then maybe I clip them over with safety pin so they don’t fall down).

7:15am – longish top has tooth paste stain. Shortish dress is MIA.

7:15-20am – I spend five minutes looking for shortish dress, before realising that I lent it to my mum.

7:21am – I have no more time to waste on pants dilemma, as clearly it is a dead end. Decide to go back to skirt/dress option and look for another pair of opaque stockings.

7:22am – I find one in the dirty clothes basket. It has a ladder.

7:23am – Try unsuccessfully to get tissue out of wet pair of stockings – maybe I can dry it by the heater? It takes two minutes to do one foot. Get frustrated and give up.

7:24am – I realise I have another pair of stockings right at the bottom of the dirty clothes basket. Fish it out – it also has a ladder, but fortunately can be hidden by knee high boots.

7:25: Dressed. Finally! Now where is that cardigan…

I am exaggerating, of course, but this run-down is not far from the truth. Sam, meanwhile, can get dressed and gel his hair – back when he had hair, that is, in under one minute, all in the dark. Go figure.