Pack Your Bags, You’ve Been Traded
A few months ago, I attended a home decor event at Zinc Details, a wonderful modern design gallery and shop on Fillmore Street in San Francisco. Dwell media’s deputy editor, Aaron Britt, made a brilliant analogy linking the home and it’s furniture/items to a baseball team and it’s players.
It went something like this:
Your house is your baseball “team”, and the contents of your house — table, chairs, couch, lamps etc., are all the position players on your team. Maybe your coffee table is like that left-fielder you drafted in the third-round, but never hit for average — why is he still on the team? Do you trade him/it for a better left-fielder/table? Or draft a rookie? Or keep him/it in the line-up, and surround him/it by better players/pieces of furniture?
This same analogy applies to fashion: Your closet is your team, and your clothes are your players. They need to play well together to help you “win” sartorially. As Jslow has recently chronicled here and here, your team/closet needs constant evaluation and a good coach, ie YOU. When certain items/players get too old and run-down, sometimes you need to cut them loose and draft new players/items, or make some trades. And even though players have their strengths and weaknesses, as long as they play well together, you usually win.
Remember the Giants’ with Barry Bonds? They had one superstar, but never won a World Series. They needed better players around him, but it just didn’t work. Do you have that “Barry Bonds” item in your closet? Perhaps an expensive pair of snakeskin pumps that broke your budget so you couldn’t afford much else, and worse yet, didn’t play well with the other items in your wardrobe?
My closet really needs a new starting shortstop: something that is nimble, quick to throw on and integral to my overall fashion defense. As such, I’ve been in the process of trading in some of my utility “players” at Crossroads Trading Co. in order to afford this key member: a new black leather pencil skirt. And not just any will do: it has to fit like a glove, be soft but not too stretchy, classic and not slutty, and last forever — hopefully being inducted into my closet hall-of-fame. I’ll let you know my search goes, and who makes the team. I just hope I don’t strike out.
Needless to say I really enjoyed the blog today Paul
Very glad you enjoyed this, Kell. I hoped you might. Good luck with your run! xoxo
Loved your analogy, it was something even an old coach’s wife could understand and really relate to.
Well Hello Mom Boyd. Really glad you liked this; I thought a lot about my dad/Coach Mangin when I wrote this. And it really is true. xoxo
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