031/ I Put Together 21 Minimal Effort Casual Outfits in Under An Hour

...because sometimes you only have three minutes to get dressed.

Dear readers,

Right off the top, I’m letting you know this newsletter is picture heavy, and thus “too long” for your inbox. Please click-through to read the whole piece!

In my last What I’m Wearing newsletter, I shared the three levels of effort I put into an outfit: zero, minimal, and reasonable. While I try to flex my styling muscles and offer up considered and original outfits on here, some of you said you’d like to see more “minimal effort” outfits because that’s a major portion of your everyday life. And I get it, because school runs, casual weekend get-togethers, and running unglamorous but necessary errands is also my reality!

So, in an effort to keep it real, I imagined myself facing my closet and needing to run out of the house asap. What could I put together in a moment’s notice, without much thought and no time to experiment?

Well, I managed to put together 21 outfits in under an hour (and took 100 photos), and I’m going to share those with you here!

Looking back at the outfits, here are some general observations (with more specific ones under the outfit photos):

• I primarily went for my no-brainer, unfussy, versatile foundational pieces which require little-to-no steaming/ironing, and that I’m not afraid to get dirty (with one glaring exception). This reinforces the importance of nailing down your WithOut Fails (in Tibi parlance): those core, building blocks of your wardrobe which you can throw on and feel great every time. I turned to the same (mostly) WOFs over-and-over again, finding different ways to mix-and-match them.

• In “running out of the house” mode, I didn’t want to think about putting on anymore than two pieces (the bare minimum to cover my bits), which meant that the individual pieces needed to be interesting enough to stand on their own and not need much extra styling. Looking at the pieces I chose, most of them aren’t especially fashion-forward, but I would consider them to be non-basic basics, i.e. modern cuts of classic pieces.

• In each outfit, something about the outfit makes it feel unique: whether it’s a mix of textures, formal with informal, or a balance of proportions. In these casual outfits, the degree that these elements vary is relatively small, whereas in my more considered outfits, you would see a much more variance.