Getting back what I gave away

Sartorially, but also literally.

@lostjcrew

Early last month, I checked the weather report and there it was: an incoming block of low 70s days. Sunny. Perfect. The kind of anticipatory forecast that gets you giddy to finally, finally, leave your jacket at home.

What would I wear to celebrate the first stretch of warm spring days?

What came to mind surprised me, mostly because I no longer own it: a floral jacquard cotton skirt I bought in high school, long gone from my closet. I don’t even know when I gave it away—2005, 2010, somewhere in there? I suspect it ended up in the donation pile because it didn’t fit anymore which, okay, fair enough.

And yet—I loved that skirt. That skirt could do anything. You could graduate in it. Go to Mothers Day brunch in it. Wear it with a white tee and flip flops and ride your bike to 8am class in it. Even go to your restaurant job in it!

(I sure did, at least. The summer before college, I was a hostess at Chili’s, where I collected enough stories to write a book. The standard shift uniform was a ridiculously oversized pique polo shirt embroidered with a red chili pepper, tucked (always tucked!) into bootcut khaki pants. I hated that shirt, and regularly called in before my shift to ask the manager if I could “wear my own clothes” instead. Enforcing a dress code was apparently low on his list of things to worry about, so I’d show up in my pink skirt and a white blouse, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, ready to welcome diners into the comforting fold of Southwestern Egg Rolls and Molten Chocolate Cakes.)

Anyway, there I was last month, dreaming about the warmer temps to come, and I said to myself, I wish I could get that skirt back.

Would you believe after a few searches with keywords including ‘pink’ and ‘jacquard’ and ‘j.crew’ and ‘90s,’ I found one—new with tags!—on eBay, in a size perfect for me now?

Of course you would! Because this is 2024!

Seeing it in my closet brings me a joy I can’t even begin to describe. Like this thing I’d lost is back home with me; who cares that it’s not my original skirt.

And so, allow me to present to you with a new wardrobe hack, the complete opposite of a closet clean-out. Joy sparked by refilling one’s closet with things you once said goodbye to.

For years, the Internet (me included, sorry!) has been wagging its collective finger, admonishing everyone to get rid of anything they haven’t worn within some arbitrary amount of time. (As if “joy” is something that could be accurately measured when you’re on a clean-out rampage. I don’t know about you, but when I get in that mood, I’m ruthless.)

The result is I know I’ve given up some gems over the years, in clean-outs spurred by (imagined?) crises of personal style (or, more likely because I felt pressured into buying new, trendy shit). Those chucked items may not have suited a version of me right then but what if they have a place in my life now? I’m not talking about things that were ripped or worn beyond repair or didn’t fit my body. I mean things that were a hair off-key, no longer the “cool thing” in that very moment, but were still, by definition, wearable. All the more so once I fast-forward five, ten, fifteen years.

Take my long gone late 90s platform mules with the wood soles and brown leather uppers, stitched together with a thick, twine-like thread. They were like the footwear offspring of Candies and traditional Dutch clogs, if J.Crew made such a thing. (Of course they were J.Crew. All of this was J.Crew. I’m an elder Millennial, and lived for the catalog in the late 90s and early aughts.)

Oh, how I wish I still had those shoes. Present day me has been searching for a pair of chunky, casual-but-pulled together mules like that to wear with wide leg denim, and imagine my bemusement when I realized not only does the perfect mule exist, I used to own them.

@lostjcrew, here and here

I wore those mules on the first day of school in 9th grade, or 10th, or 11th, I honestly can’t remember anymore. I was so proud of them; they made me feel confident and stylish and tall. A guy friend, let’s call him Jacob, was assigned the desk next to mine in first period, and upon seeing my footwear, informed me that my mules were the ugliest shoes he’d ever seen.

I deflated like a cold Molten Chocolate Cake.

And while I wore them after that, I recall doing so with less confidence, my inner teenage critic hearing, suddenly, my peers’ voices over my own. I’m sure that played a role in parting ways with them sometime in college.

Which got me thinking: Maybe reclaiming the things we gave away is as much an exercise in keeping well-made, high-quality items out of landfill, as much as it is about reclaiming versions of ourselves.

Like maybe those mules represent my own intuition—that I had stumbled into something really great, maybe even aesthetically interesting, and that a point of view is something to (quite literally) wear with pride.

Or the jacquard skirt, now mine again, which I suspect reminds me of a more carefree, ambitious version of myself, when I was young and planning to move west and felt like I was on the precipice of something great and vast and wild.

I suppose we can’t ever really go back to the people we once were—and why would we want to? (Certainly not our previous entireties!) But I like the idea of rediscovering old pieces of ourselves, like objects we left behind on a trail, caught up in a tree branch or lost in the wind or left on the bench when we stopped to take a rest. I like how it feels to greet them again, a surprise reunion, and incorporate them into who we are now.

So, here we are. I’m in the life phase where I’m buying the things I once gave away. How funny if I end up with largely the same closet I had 20+ years ago?

And to that end, I already have a mini head start:

I have a sweater and two cardigans from high school that still fit, and are in great condition. I love wearing them. Better still when someone offers a compliment, and I can say, I’ve had this since 1999. I think of all the places I’ve gone in these pieces, all the versions of me they’ve known.

How much they would’ve missed if I’d given up on them.

High level: do you have items you’ve given away that you wish you could add back into your life? And deeper: if you think on it, what about them do you miss? What do they represent about a particular time in your life?

About the images: The archival J.Crew catalog images in this post are from the @lostjcrew Instagram account, which features catalog shoots from 1983-1997! If you’re into this kind of nostalgia, @jcrewarchives is another great one featuring photography from the mid to late aughts.