Tuesday, July 21, 2009

where does this stuff come from...?


Our Shopping+Style Personalities

My husband. Oh how I love my husband. He is so complex and it is oh so sexy.

But his shopping+style personality is reasonably simplistic. He typically shops based on necessity. That is not to say he is unstylish, quite the opposite really. His fashion sense has evolved from the time I met him. From skater clothes to polo shirts to urban t’s and skinny jeans. He is my man and I love him and his style. There have only been a few times that I feel the need to critique an outfit he puts together. He has a good eye and does well with what he’s got.

But like I said, he shops based on necessity. He waits to buy a pair of jeans until his last pair gets a hole in the tush. He doesn’t buy summer shirts until it’s 90 degrees out and he realizes that last year’s shirts are dingy. He then stocks up. If he finds a shirt or a pair of pants he likes, he buys in bulk. He knows what he likes and likes what he knows and l like him better for it.

So for him, he does a few big shopping trips a year. Hundreds of dollars are usually spent in the span of only a few hours and we leave, he flushed with excitement and me nauseous from the sight of the receipts.

Then there’s me. I almost never partake in large shopping trips. My last big trip was the week after my birthday not this year, but the year before, when all I wanted for my birthday was to go shopping, so friends and family spoiled me with cash and I spent a good couple of weeks buying a new spring/ summer wardrobe. I made every penny stretch – that’s my specialty.

For me, it’s about building a collection slowly – a piece here, a shoe there. I enjoy browsing marshalls, tj maxx, thrift stores for the unique, the marked down, the random. I like finding that thing I didn’t know I was looking for – and finding out that it only costs $6.

Target is my favorite. I can go there for milk or lotion or toilet paper, and end up strolling through the clothes section, especially the clearance racks. More often than not, I leave with just the items I came for, but on occasion, I find a $10 treasure or even a $2 find…target is great with marking items down super fast and super low, so you never know what you might score.

I am not a shopaholic by any means, but there is something about those little red target clearance stickers that gets me. I have a good wardrobe, with a nice eclectic mix of more pricey pieces, many from my days working at anthropologie to my target finds. I have jeans ranging from joes and sevens to my favorite no-name faded boyfriend jeans from TJ Maxx (a whopping $12). I am no snob, that’s for sure. I just like the random purchase, the building of my wardrobe, piece by piece, slowly, naturally.

With all that being said, I probably do spend more money than my husband does on clothing each year. Although his shopping sprees might break the bank, I have quite a collection of shoes and boots and jackets and jeans.

But here is the genius behind our shopping rule – Every month we each get money put aside for a haircut. He gets enough cash every month for one haircut, I get enough cash so that every three months I could get a cut and highlights. Here’s where my deal gets good. If I see some article of clothing or pair of shoes or whatever, and i want it, I buy it out of my haircut fund. If I do that, it just pushes my next haircut or highlights back another month. Or I have to choose between a haircut or color. He never gives up haircuts for clothes, and his shopping trips are not taken out of his hair money.

That is the way we make things fair. That is the way, I don’t get in trouble for buying that $12 blouse.

That is the secret to our happy marriage. No hiding. No secrets.

{and that may or may not be the reason my hair is longer than it’s been in years and my roots are showing}

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