Day 44 -- The Clothing Exchange

Disclaimer:  the above picture has nothing to do with the blog.  I just like it.  

Over the weekend some friends and I gathered for what we affectionately refer to as the Clothing Exchange.  In a nutshell the Clothing Exchange involves all members (and sometimes that is not even a hard and fast requirement) purging their closet and instead of dumping their cast offs at Goodwill/Salvation Army/Out of the Closet, coming together to pillage one another’s discards.  Note: whatever remains, we then donate.  Essentially, we are living out the adage, “one man (or in our case woman)’s trash is another’s treasure.” 

Over the years, we have fine-tuned the routine.  Here are some tips if you ever want to host your own Clothing Exchange: 

1.  Give all participants ample notice and time to go through their closets.  I can’t tell you how many friends responded with “I just gave away for bags to Goodwill last month.” 
2. Think about your size and your friends’ respective sizes.  It is not going to work if there aren’t some members who are more or less in the same zip (or should I say zipper) code.  But as the girls of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants prove, women of all different shapes may in fact be able to fit into the same item of clothing. 
3. In order to have a breadth of choices, you want to have at least four people.  Really, though the more people, the better the chance of there actually being good clothes. 
4. Choose your items from the discard pile carefully.  Often the cast offer will share a disclaimer as to why they fell out of love with the article of clothing (missing a button, stained, weird color, etc) – listen to these reasons.  There have been lots of items that have circled through many rounds of the Clothing Exchange.  The more times I participate, the less I take. 
5. The whole process goes smoother if Margaritas are involved.  Or wine for that matter.  Maybe even if you are really hoity-toity, martinis.