Wardrobe Building Part 3: Shut up and Take My Money

It's been quite a while since I posted about wardrobe building, so let's continue! After you've searched for inspiration and raided your closet, you're ready to take your wardrobe building to the next level. You know what you're looking for. You know what you already have. You're ready to hop on a plane and fly to Shibuya, right? Not quite. Let's be reasonable about this.

Before you even start, you should do a little bit of budgeting. This will really look different for everyone. In my case, I'm a student with many years of holiday money saved up (remember, I've been dreaming about this wardrobe for a long time!) but no job. That means that my way of "budgeting" was to set guidelines for what's "reasonable" rather than hard-and-fast numbers. Personally, based on my own situation, I decided that I could afford a handful of used brand pieces supplemented by many hand made and thrifted pieces, and cheap pieces found on the internet (on eBay, AliExpress, etc).

Do what makes sense for your situation. For the time being, I can't say I have much great advice, since I'm just on the cusp of being an adult with a paycheck and bills to pay, but maybe sometime in the next year I'll be able to come back and write more in depth about budgeting for a cute wardrobe. However, there is one rule of thumb that might be useful. If you're trying to do this on a budget, it's going to mean one of two things: either building your budget very slowly, or sacrificing quality. This is a fine line to walk, and there's no one right answer. Of course, it'd be nice to have a wardrobe full of Liz Lisa. On the other hand, if that means waiting two months just to buy one skirt even while buying used and scoping out good deals, you run the risk of never being able to actually wear the clothes that you do buy. Your taste might change in the time you're waiting to build up a wardrobe that's wearable, or your clothes might not be seasonal anymore. At the same time, you can't throw out quality either. As much as brands shouldn't matter, if you're trying to avoid any brand items, you'll inevitably fall into one trap or another. Maybe you'll end up with a wardrobe that strays too far from the spirit of the fashion you're pursuing (like trying to build a himekaji wardrobe with items bought entirely from Forever 21... it might still be cute but it will only ever loosely approximate the look you had in mind), having outfits that look extremely cheap (like trying to build a wardrobe entirely out of cheap eBay items... some of them are cute but you need high quality items to balance out the low quality ones you'll inevitably end up with), or spending an exorbitant amount of time behind your sewing machine (if you really had the time to sew an entire wardrobe by hand, you could probably afford to buy all brand in the first place). Again, where you toe the line is up to your personal situation and judgement.

The next step once you know roughly your spending limits is to do some extensive window shopping. I organized the items I'd selected from my existing wardrobe into an image on my computer  (MS paint to the rescue!) so that I could see everything all together and see how much from each category I needed.

The first iteration of my wardrobe planning.

You'll notice that I was very optimistic when I sorted through my wardrobe the first time. "This t-shirt has a peter pan collar on it. That's cute, right?" "This dress is floral, right? That's totally princessey!" You'll notice that this image has way more items than what I posted in my last wardrobe building post. This is because as I window shopped, I realized that there were a lot of pieces in my existing wardrobe that really didn't belong in my new one, and I continued to prune (and have continued to prune further since writing that post), leaving only a handful of pieces that will truly mesh with my new himekaji clothes.

After I did some window shopping.

Over the course of the next few weeks, I made adjustments to this image, collecting many items that I thought I were missing. This process was similar to the daydreaming stage, but this time I wasn't madly saving every cute Liz Lisa dress I saw. This time I was looking for more realistic inspiration. I was searching eBay and wholesale websites, trying to find cute off brand items. I was looking at auction sites to get a handle on how much used Liz Lisa tends to go for. I was still searching the Liz Lisa catalogs, but this time looking for simple and non-patterned pieces I felt I could make myself. This collage eventually turned into my first eBay haul. At this point, though, it was starting to look extremely messy, and most of the pieces I had originally photographed had been removed from my wardrobe, so I reorganized.

Reorganized, after I'd bought more of my wardrobe.

When I made my new collage, I broke the image up into "stuff I own" (left side of the green line) and "stuff I want to own" (right side of the green line). This was much easier for me to look at, and as a result it was much more useful in helping me decide what to buy. Before buying anything, I like to paste it into my collage (which again, I'm just using a simple paint document to do this) and see how it looks with the other things I have in my wardrobe.

What has worked so far for me has been a process of buying ➸ wearing ➸ dreaming etc. I've been doing roughly $50 hauls with a handful of main items, and trying to sustain on just my wardrobe in its current shape once those orders arrive. After the first haul I was disappointed to see that I really needed more of everything. I wasn't able to put together a single complete outfit. When my second haul arrived, I realized I'd gone a bit dress crazy, and that while I was maybe a good pair of shoes away from having several day's worth of cute dress coordinates, wearing fancy dresses on a daily basis was a bit much for me. However, I also noticed that I was continuously reaching for skirts that didn't exist. So I got more skirts. By buying in small chunks and attempting to wear everything before buying more, you can make sure you're building your wardrobe wisely. For the first few hauls, you won't be able to successfully dress within your capsule wardrobe until laundry day, but you'll get a sense of what areas you're really lacking in.

I'm still in the middle of this step, but I'm really happy with my progress. I hadn't looked at my first wardrobe collage in months, and it's really motivating for me to see how far I've already come.

I really hope that I can finish buying the bulk of my wardrobe soon! I'll write another post once I'm finished talking about where I did most of my shopping, what search terms were useful to me, and other odd tips related to shopping. Then pretty soon afterwards I'll probably launch into transitioning from one wardrobe to another while I fill out my Fall wardrobe.

See you next time!