go-to outfits for fall.
remembering a barn coat, navigating trends, and wearing the same exact things on repeat.
Lately I’ve been having mild pangs of regret that I told my mom to pass along the red L.L. Bean barn jacket that I positively begged for circa 1994. When I received the coat it was brand-new and just for me, which made it a novelty in the wardrobe of my youth. Coats and jackets, especially, were things passed down from someone else and they always smelled vaguely of must and mildew thanks to New England sea air and being stored on a porch.
Like most items of clothing in my life at the time, the barn jacket was several sizes too large. It had a removable fleece liner and I wore it religiously all fall and winter with a pair of black cowboy boots, Gap kids cabbage rose leggings that a friend had outgrown, and a vanilla colored wool sweater that an older cousin had accidentally felted in the washing machine. The neck of that sweater was so tight that it made my ears turn red when I yanked it over my head, and the shrinkage made the waistband bell out awkwardly from my midsection, but the vibe was right and so I persevered. On my head, I liked to wear a wide-brimmed red hat, also felted, that I’d found in a thrift store. It being the 90s, sometimes I wore the hat brim down and sometimes I wore it brim up. All put together, the outfit felt like my own quirky approximation of what I saw in the pages of American Girl magazine or in a television sitcom that I wasn’t expressly given permission to watch. It was influenced, in other words, by what I soaked up from the world around me, and executed according to my own tastes and the things I had access to. Most importantly, it was an outfit I felt good in—a repeatable, lovable, comfortable assemblage of clothes that I still remember vividly thirty years later.
After that first season of the barn coat, I continued to pull it out of the musty porch closet every fall. It was big, and I was small, and so it still fit even after growth spurts. After that first year of constant wear though, my heart grew more fickle. I decided that the red was really more of a cranberry and that the shoulders didn’t sit quite right. It usually only got a few wears per season before shoved back in the closet. If that jacket were to materialize in my life again today I would likely have the exact same thoughts regarding the shoulders and the color, which does absolutely not stop me from tsk tsking my former self and wondering if perhaps this could have been the year I’d fall back in love with it.
It’s not reasonable to expect that a ten-year-old be able to forecast what so-called forever pieces to invest in for their fall wardrobe. I certainly can’t blame my teenaged self for thinking she’d outgrown her elementary school coat, energetically if not physically. Still, that jacket and this season’s particular enthusiasm for barn coats, has me thinking about go-to outfits, the circular nature of trends, and the value of really homing in on what I’ve loved longterm.
For me anyway, dressing sustainably has a multilayered meaning. If I’m buying something new, I want that something to have been made with care for people and planet. If I’m buying anything at all, it needs to be sustainable for my budget. And if I’m keeping an item in my very limited closet space, I want the reason to be first and foremost because I really enjoy wearing it.
So, what is it that I’m reaching for again and again this fall—and every fall of the last ten or so? Here are the details of my go-to outfits, including the old, the borrowed, the mended, and the pined for (plus two new additions). These are combinations of clothes that I personally gravitate toward and certainly not a template for how anyone else need dress themselves. Some might even call these choices boring, and frankly that’s none of my business. As I always say, there are a great many ways to grow an ethical and minimal wardrobe (or maximal one for that matter) and each of gets to decide what works for us. In case it’s helpful, these are my go-tos: