Unbelievable Fashion!

I am a huge fan of donating.  Over the years I have donated literally truckloads of children's and adults' clothing, toys, books, and miscellaneous household items.  There is no way to put a price on what has been given away, but I'm sure that to the folks on the receiving end, what they acquired was invaluable.  And to me, that is worth far more than keeping the stuff I didn't need anyway.

I've recently been having some health and resultant weight gain issues, and so looking in my closet one day, I realized that a good amount of what was hanging in there no longer fits.

I suppose I could have the mentality that I will lose the weight and then the outfits will again fit, but for some reason I felt more depressed just looking at that clothing than I knew I would feel by cleaning out.

So I did some radical closet surgery.  If we want to talk in surgery terms, I amputated all but the head.  Basically I eliminated 4/5 of what I had, folded it all neatly, loaded it in my car, and took it to our local thrift store.  (Shoes are in another closet and that is for another day.)  I now have only a few pairs of pants, and maybe 10 shirts.  And my judo gi of course.  Somehow it felt very freeing to do this.

As an aside, when my four children were very young, we would all work together to pull off a once a year massive yard sale.  I would weed out their outgrown clothing, and they would sort through all their toys and other belongings.  It would take us several weeks to do the sorting, pricing each item with a sticker, advertising and then the two sale days.  Two of my three daughters would help hold bags for customers, while the third daughter would watch baby Caleb, who was in his playpen near our "paying table," playing and watching the people come and go.

Once the sale was all done, we would count our earnings, and leave town on a mini family vacation.  One year we earned enough to do an overnight trip to Sea World in Ohio, all expenses paid - gas, hotel, food, and admissions.  The kids liked helping to earn our vacations, and in reality, at the time my husband and I didn't have two nickels to rub together, so this was how it had to be done.

Back to my current closet clean-out.  Mind you, all of those clothing items I eliminated were currently in style, which got me to thinking about style.  Right now most folks would not look at me and say, "Wow that is one stylish woman."  On most days I wear a simple comfortable pair of pants and a brightly colored plain t-shirt.  That's just me.  I don't really even care for t-shirts that have writing and slogans on them.  I'm more of a plain jane.  Is is style over comfort, or comfort over style?  I guess that's debatable, depending on the occasion for which a person is dressing.

Here's where I am going with this conversation.  I do love looking at the variety of styles that are out there at any given time.  Saying that does not mean I like all of them, I just like looking at the variety.  And now here's the latest in clothing style that I came across and I think you will get a kick out of watching this short video, as I did:

I don't expect that I will be wearing clothing that seems to move and change on its own any time soon, but I enjoyed being surprised at what a designer can imagine and create.

Alas, there are other closets waiting for me.  And there are always those folks that need my stuff way more than I do.  Seeing what I have seen in various other countries, I have way too much anyway.