Getting dressed looks like taste. Most of it is engineering. A wardrobe is a small set of parts that have to fit together in a known number of ways, stand up to weather and washing, and be read correctly by strangers in a glance. That is a system with an interface on it, and the two are designed together or not at all.
The parts
The idea that a wardrobe should be a short list goes back to Susie Faux, who opened a shop called Wardrobe in London in 1973 and used the words capsule wardrobe for a few well-made pieces that all go together. Donna Karan took it to a runway in 1985 with Seven Easy Pieces, the first collection under her own name, a bodysuit and a few garments meant to be combined into a working week. Three tops, three bottoms and two outer layers give eighteen outfits. Add one top that goes with nothing and you have paid for a part that is not in the system.
Some people went further and fixed the output. Steve Jobs wore the same black Issey Miyake turtleneck and jeans, and told Walter Isaacson for the 2011 biography that he had enough of the turtlenecks to last the rest of his life. Barack Obama told Michael Lewis in Vanity Fair in 2012 that he wore only gray or blue suits, to spend his decisions elsewhere. Matilda Kahl, an art director in New York, wrote in Harper's Bazaar in 2015 about wearing the same white shirt and black trousers to work for three years. A uniform is a system with one state. It is the default, and a default is the setting most people never change.
The constraints
The oldest constraint is heat. Outdoor makers sell clothing in three layers with the same names at every one of them: a base layer against the skin to move sweat out, a mid layer to trap air, and a shell to stop wind and water. The US Army's Extended Cold Weather Clothing System, in its third generation, is issued as seven numbered levels on the same logic, from a light undershirt at level one to an insulated parka at level seven. Each layer has one job. A garment that tries to do two, a cotton hoodie worn for warmth in rain, does neither. Cotton holds water and stops insulating when wet; walkers say cotton kills. Wool keeps most of its warmth wet. Down loses nearly all of it. These are failure modes, and the wardrobe nobody thought about fails in the first cold rain.
The joins
Parts meet at edges. Shirt cuff and jacket sleeve, trouser hem and shoe, collar and neckline, waistband and the tuck. Tailoring books, Alan Flusser's Dressing the Man of 2002 among them, spend pages on these joins because that is where an outfit usually fails: the sleeve too long to show cuff, the hem that puddles. Color is a join too. Josef Albers opened Interaction of Color, 1963, with the observation that a color is almost never seen as it physically is, because what sits beside it changes it. A wardrobe in three colors that agree has few bad joins, and each color added has to agree with every one already there.
The reading
Then the outfit is worn, and somebody reads it. Thorstein Veblen wrote in 1899 that dress is the plainest way of showing standing, because it is always in evidence and everyone sees it at first glance. Erving Goffman in 1956 called clothing part of the front, the equipment a person uses to be taken as what they mean to be taken as. Both were describing an interface: a surface that has to be legible to someone who will not read the manual.
The word for how a surface tells you what it does is affordance. James J. Gibson, a psychologist, set it out in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception in 1979 as what a thing offers an animal: a handle affords gripping. Donald Norman carried it into design in The Psychology of Everyday Things in 1988, and later split off the word signifier for the mark that tells you the affordance is there. Clothes are full of both. A zip affords opening and its pull tab signifies it. A pocket in the right place affords a phone, and a pocket in the wrong place is a part with no interface. A coat that has to be studied to be worn is a bad interface however good the cloth.
One discipline
| As a system | As an interface | |
|---|---|---|
| Parts | How many, and do they all combine | What each one says on its own |
| Constraints | Heat, rain, movement, the wash | The room, the hour, who is looking |
| Joins | Cuff to sleeve, hem to shoe, layer to layer | Color beside color, the line the eye follows |
| Failure | Wet cotton, a torn seam, a piece that goes with nothing | Being read wrong |
| Default | What goes on when there is no time to choose | The uniform, and what it tells the room |
| Maintenance | The care label, the repair, the replacement | Whether it still looks like itself after a year |
The two columns are not two jobs. The layer that keeps you warm is the layer that is seen, so it must be the right weight and the right color at once. The uniform that saves a decision every morning also tells the room something every morning. A garment is a part when it is folded and an interface when it is worn, and it is the same garment. Maintenance closes the loop: the care symbols on the label, a system run by GINETEX since 1963 and standardized as ISO 3758, are the interface to the washing machine, and the piece that cannot survive its own label leaves the system early.
So the small wardrobe is not a fashion. It is what is left when the parts are counted, the joins are checked and the surface is meant to be read. HEXMONDE keeps its clothing range short for the same reason.