The floor of my closet is littered with shoes. Not the shoes I wear, those are on the shoe rack, but other shoes. I’m embarrassed to say how many, but let’s just say a lot. Why do I have so many shoes? I looked to make sure, but I still only have two feet.

I decided this spring that I would try to wear every outfit in my closet, one each day. Most of them didn’t fit any more. Some of the ones that did fit, I didn’t like any more. So what did I do? What any red-blooded woman would do — bought more.

My closet is not very large. It is double-racked for tops. I have favorites that I wear all the time, and others that I seldom or never wear, but keep in case I one day decide that I would look smashing in an orange Bohemian top with fringe or that a red Mickey Mouse jacket flatters me.

We spend way too much time on clothes — shopping for clothes, deciding what to wear, washing clothes, drying clothes, storing clothes, talking about clothes, and getting rid of clothes so we can buy more clothes. The other day I went shopping and it took all afternoon just to pick out a few things.

There is a whole industry for clothes, not only for making and marketing them, but for fashion. What is in style? Are our hems too short or too long? Are the toes of our shoes too pointy? What we wear has nothing to do with whether clothes are worn out, or whether we had too many desserts and they don’t fit any more. We must keep up with the style. So, we throw away perfectly good clothes and get new ones to be in fashion.

In the olden days cloth was precious and clothes difficult to make. Pioneer women probably had only a few dresses and didn’t need a closet. They could hang the extra dress behind the door, if they had a door, and keep one good dress to wear to Sunday meetings. When a garment became too worn to wear any more, they cut it up into squares and made a quilt out of it.

Now we have walk-in closets because we have so many clothes. We have summer clothes and winter clothes. I store the things that are out of season in the attic because I don’t have room in my closet. I try to donate things to charity that I’m sure will never fit again in spite of my prayers and vows to diet. Still, I have too many clothes.

I wonder what clothes will be like in the future. Will we never wear the same thing twice? Will clothes be made out of paper and disposable after use like the paper gowns used at the doctor’s office? If dresses were paper, we wouldn’t have to worry about being in style as we would always have on the newest fashion.

Maybe clothes will be plastic like a grocery bag and thrown in the trash after being used once. We could use our closets for storage space and use old dresses to line our trash cans. We could keep a box of pop-up dresses on the dresser.

Or maybe we will go in the other direction and wear silver jump-suits like in science fiction movies. Everyone will look and dress the same in silver jumpsuits that last forever and never get dirty. That’s science fiction all right. Someone would sew a ruffle on one and we would be off again.

It’s probably just as well. I don’t think I would look very good in a silver jump- suit anyhow. And what in the world would you do if your zipper broke and you had nothing else to wear?

Copyright 2011 Sheila Moss