Doctor T Designs

Although I’ve still been sewing a lot of undergarments, with a lot of recent life changes I’ve been thinking a lot more about necessary wardrobe updates again. I was thinking about it a lot before the pandemic happened; that was the last time I got a new job. As the pandemic progressed, my needs shifted, and the strong need to overhaul my wardrobe to something “work appropriate” for five days in an office went out the window. There have been a lot of shifts in my needs since then, and I’ve basically been getting by, without ever really having gone through the work of a wardrobe overhaul. A lot of the clothes I was wearing when I started my job five years ago don’t really fit anymore, and a lot of the clothes I’ve been wearing since then are starting to show signs of their continual use. So now seemed about as good a time as any to get back to considering what I need in my wardrobe to do more than just get by. I’ve been watching a lot of style YouTube, and while I think a lot of the recommendations tend to be pretty generic, a lot of the YouTubers were becoming really obsessed with the Allison Bornstein Three-Word Method, so I thought I would check out her book, Wear It Well.

Wear it Well is in some ways a pretty typical wardrobe self-help book. It goes through how to analyze your current wardrobe, clear it out and organize it, which items to fill in to have enough versatility, as well as how to use the Three Style Words method to create a “personal” style. Where this book differs a bit is how much it focuses on mental health as an end goal to the exercise. I think that it is not quite as detailed as The Curated Closet or The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up in the closet editing and planning categories, nor as detailed as Metamorphosis or Tim Gunn’s A Guide to Quality, Taste & Style where it attempts to be prescriptive in its recommendations. However, I do think that this book has some pragmatic considerations that might be somewhat lacking in the others I’ve mentioned, and might be more open-ended for people who feel that Kibbe and Gunn are too narrow in their view of style, so it could be worth taking a deeper dive.

The first major section is about the AB Closet Edit (AB = Allison Bornstein). In this method, you basically separate your “Regulars” into one pile, and your “Nevers” into a separate pile. The Regulars are things you always wear, and includes everything from sweatpants to fancy going-out tops. The Nevers are, obviously, things you never wear. The Nevers then get subdivided into three sections: the “No, Nevers,” the “Not Nows,” and the “Hows.” Obviously, the No, Nevers are the things that get pruned from the wardrobe, whereas the Not Nows can be pulled out and put into temporary storage and then sorted and (likely donated) at a later time. Things like maternity clothes, wedding gowns, or other sentimental items can go in the Not Nows and be stored in an alternate location so they aren’t cluttering up the actual closet and wardrobe. Finally, the Hows are the things that spark joy, but that you can’t really figure out how to wear. I think there is an attempt at this point to pair them with the Regulars to see if you can figure out some new looks, but these also seem to be some of the key pieces in evolving personal style once you get to the later steps of the book. The book also spends a bit of time discussing the importance of organizing (and cleaning) the closet space after going through the purge of the Never items to get a better sense of what is currently in the wardrobe, and what might be missing to prepare for the next phases of the process. There are a lot of ways that this process feels very similar to the Marie Kondo method because everything gets pulled out and sorted before being put back, but I do think the AB method allows for a bit more pragmatic analysis of the clothes in a way. In the Kondo method, if you had a ratty shirt you slept in all the time, but it did not spark joy because it was ratty, it would be gone. In the AB method, it would be part of the regulars because you are actually using it. It might be something you eventually want to replace with a cute sleep set in a print that would match your eventually formed style, but until then you could keep sleeping in the ratty shirt because practically speaking, it’s what you’ve been using. The AB method also allows for a few Emotional Overrides – things you just can’t let go, that I feel like Marie Kondo would be more encouraging of thanking and sending on their way. So, I think there is also a bit more realistic perspective of how people actually get emotionally attached to some things with the AB method.

The next portion of the book focuses on the Three-Word Method and developing personal style by finding words that resonate with both how your style is and how you want it to be. The first word is the word that comes from looking at the Regulars and should reflect your actual current style. The second word is aspirational and should help guide where you want your style to go. Many of the examples in the book showcase where the first and second word are at odds, and finding a way to balance them is what helped generate personal style. The third word is how you want to feel, and defining what that feeling means for you. Examples in the book also show how the first and third words can help ground a second word that feels a bit too extreme when not constrained by the more pragmatic words. The books spends a lot of time giving examples and explaining why keeping the selection to just three words is important to the process, as well as how to use the three words to analyze an outfit and edit it to get a better balance of the words. I like the Three-Word Method because it’s fairly streamlined, and I think it’s a bit easier to look at an outfit and decide if it’s actually hitting the style goals. However, I think that for people who want a bit more substance in this area, The Curated Closet goes more in depth in how to think about or plan a wardrobe, once you know what you are trying to achieve.

Once you’ve got your words and defined your style, the book then suggests Nine Universal Pieces that are generally useful in all wardrobes, though of course with the style of each to be defined by the three words. The suggested pieces are: a white (or black or other neutral) t-shirt, a button-down shirt, a black turtleneck, a cozy sweater, a blazer, a trench coat, denim (jeans), trousers, and a belt. I feel like most of these items tend to make a lot of “must-have” wardrobe lists, so I don’t know that there is anything particularly insightful on the list, and I do think it a bit odd that the turtleneck be black when everything else is a bit more variable in terms of color. I also think that the lack of a cocktail dress is interesting, and probably says more about the generational difference of this author than anything else, especially when compared to some of the recommendations found in the books by David Kibbe or Tim Gunn (though in his defense, Tim Gunn did provide the option of a tuxedo pant). This list is definitely a lot more gender neutral than most, which I can appreciate in terms of providing recommendations to a broader range of people, as well focusing on the most versatile pieces to go between work, errands, and going out for a variety of occasions. The list of nine items is definitely not enough to have a fully robust wardrobe, but I can appreciate that using this list to prioritize what new items to shop for (or sew) can help a wardrobe feel a bit more robust a lot quicker.

The final section of the book focuses on using style for mental health and developing rituals around getting dressed to focus on mental wellness. While some of these suggestions (taking outfit photos, making outfit formulas, getting dressed even for work from home days, working on using dress as a form of self expression) have been mentioned elsewhere, it was interesting to see how much a focus this topic was for this book. I will be honest that this was probably the least interesting part of the book for me, but also the part that probably is worth thinking about in more depth. I mean, there’s certainly enough content and self-help books about planning wardrobes and getting dressed that this topic holds some weight. I think I’ve always accepted that people who are interested in these topics are searching for a streamlined way to get dressed and feel good about themselves; I just don’t think I ever framed it from a mental health perspective before.

Overall I think Wear It Well is a pretty typical style self-help book, incorporating a lot of ideas I’ve read about in books I’ve reviewed previously. I don’t think this book goes as in-depth into any of the individual topics as any of the other books I’ve mentioned in this post, however, I think it does sit in a somewhat unique space between all of the books I’ve reviewed previously. It’s a bit of a closet declutter, a bit of a shopping and style guide, and a bit about the emotional effects of curating a wardrobe that expresses your unique style. I don’t feel like there is a lot in the book that isn’t available elsewhere on the internet (Allison’s YouTube channel has a lot of videos about this method, as well as a lot of the YouTube stylists who have been following it), so I don’t know if I would recommend it as a “must-buy”, but it is handy if you want the whole method spelled out in one place. I do think Allison’s methods presented in this book could be really good if you find the more specific style systems feel too restrictive in terms of expressing personal style, or feel like other methods were too much effort in terms of steps and planning. I don’t know that this will be my go-to book in terms of making sewing plans (I like to have a bit more structure in my planning), I do think it might be worth going through the process of the AB closet edit, figuring out my three words, and possibly prioritizing some sewing plans based on what’s missing from the nine item list. I won’t really have time to act on any of this until December at the earliest, but I can maybe do a bit of planning before then!