Playing with Proportions

Plus embarking on a "no spend"

I recently did a major deep-dive on one of my favorite niche influencers, Larissa Mills, who I’ve written about before as a gold-standard “unfussy” dresser. Larissa is in her 50s and came up in the zeitgeist because her daughter would do OOTDs with her. She has this laissez faire attitude that I totally admire. Full disclosure: I am easily excited and enthusiastic but I’ve always wished I could play it cooler.

I digress. Something I noticed while in my deep-dive is that Larissa does an A+ job of playing with the proportions of her outfits. She isn’t afraid of oversized denim with oversized sweaters or a great jacket that is a size “too big.”

Here are some of my favorite examples;

PS- getting screenshots on TikTok is hard so forgive that.

I love the baggy jeans. I adore the boxy jacket. I am impressed with how chic she looks pairing baggy with baggy. I have previously lived with an unofficial rule that I would wear an oversized sweater with a skinny/straight leg denim OR wide leg/baggy denim with a fitted top. I feel like a new world of possibilities has opened up to me!

Making my clothes work for me in new ways is all the more important because I am about one week in to a 6-week (maybe 8 week) NO SPEND on clothes that Lin inspired me to do. Lin’s substack, Out of the Bag, is one of my favorite reads and she chronicled her six week NO SPEND in 3 posts here, here and here.

Black Friday sales were really the catalyst for me (Maria wrote a great post about BF here). For the days leading up to Thanksgiving I was overwhelmed with the number of sales going on and I had a gnawing anxiety that if I wanted something NOW was the time to buy it. So I did. I bought 4 things that were top of my wish list.

But then I felt like I needed to keep going. Every email I got with “20% off sitewide” would send me down a rabbit hole of scrolling the pages to see if there was anything else I should buy while the sale was running.

Lin wrote about how the “scarcity mindset” is one of her triggers for shopping and BF really exposed that in me as well. I love shopping second-hand and already struggle with the worry that one of my Obsessions on TheRealReal will sell before I get to it. But the Black Friday sale cycle really amplified things for me.

I’m not trying to punish myself for shopping and I recognize that I am an “all or nothing” kind of girl so doing a shopping detox is something that may uniquely work for me (and not for you). So once I decided that doing a NO SHOPPING could be good; where did I start?

Well, to begin, I scrubbed my Poshmark Favorites, TheRealReal Obsessions and my Pinterest wishlist boards. I tried to look with a really critical eye and unlike anything that wouldn’t serve my closet in the long-haul. I tend to fall in love with dresses I would wear on one occasion or ANOTHER pair of black boots even though I have 5 pairs. I unliked a bunch of things so that I could minimize the number of notifications I was getting that may spur me to shop.

Then, I deleted shopping apps off my phone so that I wouldn’t be tempted to scroll so much.

And, I also told my husband and one of my best friends. I need to have good accountability in my corner to encourage and uplift me.

Not only do I hope to be able to find contentment in my current wardrobe, but I want to find myself on the other side of this NO SPEND with a good head on my shoulders of how to purchase in a way that furthers my wardrobe and not as a dopamine hit.

I’m hoping to include notes in future posts about how this is going for me and where my pain points are. Perhaps some will resonate with others the way Lin’s posts spoke to me. Do you have any shopping triggers that you have found?