FASHION Magazine
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Why we buy the same thing over and over: The science behind your closet of repeat offenders
Photography by Carlo Mendoza with styling by Rei Breidis for Judy Inc The 5 items our staff buys over and over »
In Breakfast at Tiffany’s, we first meet an elegant if forlorn Holly Golightly peering into the windows of Tiffany & Co. She’s wearing sunglasses and a long black dress. Fast-forward a few scenes and we see her scrambling to get ready for a meeting, hastily slipping her lithe frame into a little black dress. And in the penultimate scene, she leaves the police station for a flight to Brazil and changes into—you guessed it—a black dress. We never actually see Holly’s closet, but it seems pretty plausible that there are at least a few more black dresses in there. She may be a fictional character, but Holly Golightly’s tendency to amass multiple versions of the same item is a classic case of art imitating life. When I moved out of my apartment in December, my boyfriend packed up my bedroom and marvelled at how many pairs of dark blue skinny jeans I own. “There’s your hoard of denim,” he said, pointing to a large, overflowing suitcase (it needed to be expanded to accommodate them all). I’ve personally declared a moratorium on my mother purchasing any more navy-blue suits, and a friend recently made me vow to step in if she tries to buy another pair of black flats. Even Jenna Lyons admits to having an entire rack of white shirts in her closet. So why, even with shelves of blue jeans, closets full of navy suits and countless pairs of black ballerinas, do we keep buying more?
