Dressing for the city you live in

A wardrobe is a response to a specific set of conditions: how far a person moves each day, in what weather, between which buildings, and with what carried on the shoulder. Most collections are designed for none of these, and photographed in circumstances that resemble no city at all. The distance between the two is where money goes and where unworn clothing collects.

Begin with the numbers, because they differ enormously and are rarely considered. In Copenhagen close to half of all journeys to work or study are made by bicycle, on flat ground, in wind that arrives off the sound with nothing to slow it and on something near one hundred and seventy days of rain a year. In central London a commute is a sequence of short walks joined by overheated carriages. In Manhattan a working day can involve several kilometres on hard pavement with a bag. In Los Angeles or Houston the same day may involve two hundred metres in total, from a car park to a lobby, with air conditioning at both ends. Those facts have material consequences. Wind, not temperature, is what defeats most garments: a loosely knitted wool that performs perfectly at a bus stop fails entirely at twenty kilometres an hour on a bicycle, where a densely woven shell over a thin layer beats a bulky coat that catches air. Ground conditions decide hem length and sole. Salt and grit destroy suede in a matter of weeks. Interiors matter as much as exteriors: a city of overheated offices calls for layers that can be shed in a lift, while a city of draughty older flats asks for the opposite. Against this, most buying is done for an imagined life. The wardrobe accumulates garments for the dinners, the travel and the long unhurried afternoons that the calendar does not actually contain, and the clothes for the eight hundred repeated ordinary days wear out unreplaced.

The correction is not aesthetic restraint or a smaller wardrobe on principle. It is a matter of measurement: establishing what the year actually consists of, then buying for its extremes rather than for its imagined highlights.

A fortnight of honest logging is enough. Minutes spent outdoors, distance covered on foot, the coldest and wettest conditions encountered, whether a bag is carried on one shoulder, how many times a day the body moves between very different temperatures. The pattern that emerges is usually narrower and more repetitive than expected, and it identifies the three or four garments that are doing nearly all of the work. Those are the ones worth specifying properly, and the only ones where cost per wearing justifies serious money. The conclusions are local. A cycling city rewards a mid length shell that clears a saddle, sleeves cut for a forward reach, a shoe with a sole that grips wet cobble, and a shoulder seam that does not collapse under a strap. A walking city rewards footwear above everything, and hems that survive contact with wet ground. A car city has almost no outdoor requirement at all, which frees the budget for interiors and for cloth that behaves while seated, and makes the heavy winter coat sold there largely decorative. None of this is an argument against occasion dressing, which has its own logic and does not need to be justified by frequency of use. It is an argument against letting occasion govern the whole. One good garment for the rare evening, hired or kept for years, is a rational purchase. Six of them, bought while the coat that goes out every morning has gone through at the elbow, is the ordinary shape of a wardrobe that was assembled for someone else's weather.