From middle school through my 20s, the sheer act of getting dressed had rarely resulted in sartorial glory—mostly an acute sense of dread. That anxiety only seemed to increase when I moved to New York in 2011. Mornings began with me fussing in front of my crooked double-door closet trying to assemble a cohesive outfit and ended in a fit of insecurity and aesthetic self-doubt. I'd second-guess which jeans matched what shirt (and what sneakers, too!) until my face was flushed with frustration.
An act that should have taken five minutes usually ended up taking over half an hour. Nothing ever seemed to look just right. And for someone who likes clothes, it was a frustrating spot to be in. How did the fashionable people I saw walking around SoHo master this impossible skill? As one does, I turned to the niche corners of the Internet in hopes of finding a dramatic fix.
An article on the website for Need Supply, a trendy online boutique, told me if I was to pare down my wardrobe to “core pieces that you can count on day after day,” effortless style would be mine. It sounded too good to be true, like a late-night infomercial promising to fix an obscure but annoying problem. At the top of the page was a photo that featured a stark but very hip-looking corner of a room: shirts and sweaters and jackets and jeans artfully hung on a stylish metal rod that purported to be a makeshift closet of sorts. All of the clothes were devoid of primary colors and patterns. I had been living in Manhattan for a few years now, and in a city full of gray concrete and generations of all-black outfits, this self-effacing look suddenly made perfect sense.
So I got rid of everything in my closet that wasn’t some shade of black, white, or gray. I sold what I could on Grailed and then listed the leftovers on eBay. Everything that didn’t sell went out on the street in an open-faced box marked “free.” My act of reduction felt artful and deliberate. Unmoored by the chaos of patterns and colors, I was ready for my new minimalist life.
My closet now consisted of only black Levi’s jeans, an assortment of basic black or dark gray T-shirts from Uniqlo, some sweaters, a few cold-weather jackets, a handful of simple sneakers in either gray or white, and two pairs of boots. These staples became my uniform, and I wore some version of the same outfit day in, day out.
My new system worked, and it did so immediately. Suddenly, as promised, everything in my wardrobe matched with everything else. It didn’t matter if it was Monday or Friday, or if I was feeling more anxious on the particular day: My outfit looked objectively stylish. But the power of this monochromatic wardrobe was more than just convenience. The first month of dressing like this felt genuinely exciting. There was a spring in my step; my self-esteem was up. A month quickly became a year, and then it became so ingrained in my person that I realized I had been dressing like this for years.
Other people have, too: From start-up clothing labels to modern apartment design to new-wave office spaces, "minimalism"—which often feels tailor-made for Instagram—has become inescapable. There is a philosophical bent to it, too: Owning less is seen as virtuous. But minimalism can have a downside, too.
Occasionally, I’d fondly recall the wares of my old closet. I remember wearing a red plaid shirt on a date and feeling like a million bucks, and the navy polka dot button-up that was a hit with my friends. But the feel-good memories were easily overshadowed when my mind went to the “getting dressed” anxiety I once dealt with. The highs were great, but the lows were too low. Going minimal helped me find sartorial homeostasis—that spot in the middle where I always felt the most comfortable.
But three or four years into dressing like this, I found myself wrestling with new levels of anxiety. I was stressed about trying to get sober, and panic attacks seemed to strike when I was in very public places, all of which led to being diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, something that came as little surprise to me. I was given a prescription for an antidepressant that my doctor and therapist thought would specifically help manage my anxiety.
Living with anxiety and depression can make anyone an expert at disappearing. I’ve long learned to live in secret and to exist under, over, and around my own mental health—and that isolation grants an unrelenting privacy. I did my best to avoid being seen. And without necessarily realizing it, I had designed a wardrobe to enhance that invisibility. And once the positive effects of the medication and therapy kicked in, I started to miss my old closet more and more.
Earlier this spring, while at the photo shoot for an interview I was working on, I felt hopelessly out of place. It’s not that I was underdressed—I looked fine! It was that my clothes felt too quiet. All the editors and stylists looked effortlessly cool and individualistic, and so did the photographer. I was jealous of their confidence and that level of self-expression. I wore a plain dark gray T-shirt and faded black jeans with low-top gray sneakers. The tattoos on my arms and the tiny gold necklace I put on that day were the only hints that I might have some sort of personality. Then and there, it hit me: I had outgrown my minimalist wardrobe.
Slowly, I backslid toward maximalism. It started with a burnt orange button-up shirt from Acne Studios, the first instance of color in my wardrobe in nearly four years. The following month, I bought a puffer jacket from Supreme that shaded from blue to orange. Before I knew it, I was wearing these weirdly cut, roomy stucco-green pants and eyeing the wavy-patterned, ultra-colorful shirts from Dries Van Noten’s most recent runway show. The things that used to drive me up the wall—wild prints, bold colors, artful fashion—are now all I want to wear.
At the time, I shrugged off these purchases and impulses as out-of-character one-offs. In hindsight, I see I’d begun a transition. With my anxiety in check for the first time in years, I’m having fun with my wardrobe. A far cry from my days of black and gray.
While riding the subway recently, I saw an energetic teenager wearing the same blue-to-orange Supreme jacket that I own. At first glance, the jacket is the apotheosis of maximalist, self-assured personal style. And seeing it in all its arresting glory from the perspective of an onlooker, rather than the wearer, was jarring. It is the kind of outerwear that only someone young, wild, and carefree would wear. It feels good to know that kind of person still exists within my personality, too.
Fashion should never make your identity, but it’s the one thing we touch and wrap ourselves in daily. I want the elements of my life—the inside of my home, the art that hangs on my walls, the clothes I choose to wear—to complement one another. It’s about balance: My clothing should be an extension of my identity—not vice versa. I dressed diffidently, and with such a lack of individualism, for so long that my sense of personal style was swallowed whole by the beast of minimalism. I can feel it coming back these days, though—and I’m still not sure if I’m that guy who wears a Technicolor Dries Van Noten shirt. But damn, it feels good to not be wearing the same thing every day.
