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Welcome back to another episode of the.

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Everyday Style School Summer Shorts, our weekly series sharing a quick style thought or tip to help you save money, save time, and get the wardrobe you've always wanted. I'm your host, Jennifer Macky. Mary, I've been dressing women for over 25 years and and I'm on a mission to help you. Love the way you look every single day. Friend, I want you to give yourself a pat on the back for listening to this episode today. You have made a very smart choice and I am proud of you. Now, what's so special about today's episode, you ask? Let me tell you. Today I'm going to solve most of your wardrobe problems. Or at least I'm going to tell you what's causing most of your wardrobe problems. Yeah, I told you. It's a big day. So are you ready for the truth bomb and the style tip of the week? Here it is. Most of your problems are in your pants. Now, before you think my mind is in the gutter, let me be clear. I literally mean the section of your closet that contains your pants. That's almost always the source of your wardrobe problems. For the purpose of this conversation, we are including jeans, shorts, sure, even skirts. Why not? But it's not nearly as funny to say that your wardrobe problems are in your pants, jeans, shorts, and skirts. So your problems are in your pants. It is. Let's talk about it. Many, many years ago, I worked with a client who needed more tops. Her whole pre service questionnaire was about tops, how she needed to help with tops, needed to buy tops, tops, tops, tops, which, cool, whatever, we can do that. I got to her house for the closet edit and she was all tops, all the time. She did not want to talk about pants, much less try them on. She wanted to go right for the tops. But knowing what I know, I pushed back. But she was not having it. Not at all. So we, you know, we got into it a little bit and I finally said to her, let's play a game where you're the woman struggling with her wardrobe and I'm the stylist that you hired to fix it. We had a good laugh, and then she agreed to at least try on the pants. And she had a ton of pants, more than just about anyone I had ever worked with. So we pulled all the pants, all the skirts out of her closet, we put them on my little folding rack, and we got to work. All right, first pair. Oh, we don't need to try those on because they're too tight. I don't like to wear them. Second pair. Oh, I don't wear those because they're. They're too short. Another, I don't wear those because they're too long and I don't like to wear heels anymore. Another I don't wear those to work because they're lined and they get too hot. On and on and on it went. And when we got through her impressive collection of unwearable clothes, what we discovered was that she really only had three pairs of pants that she could reliably, consistently wear. The problem all along was not in her tops. It was in her pants. Almost like I knew right in our time. Today, I want to share three specific problems that are hiding in your pants and, as always, what to do about it. But let's start with why this happens. Why is actually pretty easy. In general, pants are less fun, but more difficult and more expensive to buy. Tops are easy, right? Especially if you're buying clothes with letter sizing rather than numbers. There's a lot of wiggle room. You don't have to take off your shoes to try on tops. And we think we're going to get a bigger style boost by adding more tops to our wardrobes. So that's what we buy the most of. Especially when you are using a gathering shopping strategy rather than a hunting strategy. I've said this a million times. No one comes home from just browsing with the perfect pair of black trousers that goes with everything and look like a million bucks and cost more than you probably wanted to spend, but are worth every penny. No, what we come home with is cute tops that were a good deal. Most women don't give anywhere near the same level of time, attention or investment to their bottoms as they do their tops. And over time, this causes what I like to call a closet traffic jam or closet gridlock. All these tops can't go anywhere but because they don't have the right thing to go with to create an outfit that looks like you'd like it to look. Take my client. She actually had plenty of tops, but she couldn't make good outfits out of them. So in her mind, what she thought she needed was more clothes. And because she could see 30 pairs of pants in her closet, she just assumed that wasn't the problem. Do you guys see what I'm saying? So we over buy in category A because it's easier, cheaper, and more fun, and we ignore category B and then get stuck because we can't make outfits. We assume we need more clothes and so we shop more and end up Buying Category A. It's a cycle that needs an intervention, and clearly the answer is to buy more bottoms. And we will get there. But first let's talk about three specific problems you might have in your pants. Maybe you have one of these, maybe you have three. I don't know. But here's Here are the problems in your pants. First, the number. The actual number. Most women do not have enough wearable bottoms in relation to how many tops they have, and the wearable thing is incredibly important. If your pants are too tight, too loose, too long, too short, too hot, too casual, too dressy to wear, you don't actually have pants. You might own clothes, but you don't have pants. Remember, your wardrobe is not all the clothes you own. It's all the clothes you can and do do wear. Now for you Rule Followers, there is not a set number of how many bottoms you should have in relation to your tops. And that would be really hard to gauge anyway because tops can be layered or worn on their own. And how would you even count that? Does a plain white tank count? I don't know. I don't know. I did a little research though, and one site said you should have one bottom for every two tops. I think that might be overdoing it a little bit, and as a person who loves to buy bottoms, I think that's a lot. But if you need a rough guideline, if you'd like to have a starting point, shoot for a ratio of three to one. And if you're just starting to build out this category in your closet, maybe do 4 to 1. Again, though, there is no set number. But if you feel like you are constantly running out of pants before laundry day, or that you are having to wear the same pants more often than you would like, chances are you don't have enough. Not having enough bottoms affects how functional your wardrobe is. When you don't have enough pants, you get that closet traffic jam and it makes it really, really hard to just get dressed. The second problem in your pants is variety. What I've experienced over the years is women have black pants, gray pants, and jeans. Maybe they have some tan or white or navy if they're feeling frisky, and they probably have one or two washes of denim. Women also tend to choose the same silhouettes over and over, like straight legs or wide legs. And that makes sense if you know what works for you, but it also makes your wardrobe very one. Note if the number of bottoms you have affects how functional your wardrobe is, the variety in your bottoms affects the versatility of your wardrobe. Every woman I ever worked with wanted a versatile mix and match wardrobe, but all they had was black pants and medium wash boot cut jeans. So yeah, I guess all the tops they had went with all the bottoms. And I guess in that respect it had versatility, but it all looked the same, which isn't really the point of that ideal versatile mix and match wardrobe. The point is to have fewer things that all go together but look different, which is really hard to do when half the outfit is the exact same. In turn, the basic bottoms only wardrobe strategy causes women to buy a whole lot more than they need because we're basically depending on 50% of your outfit to do 100% of the style work. So you get bored of your tops faster and you naturally buy more, trying to inject some variety and some style into your wardrobe. But like I said earlier, this only fuels the cycle and causes that closet gridlock. The final problem that might be in your pants is the fit. And I don't know, maybe this one should have been first on my list of problems because it is so important and most women don't have great fitting pants. Pants that don't fit well make your whole outfit look frumpy. I don't care how stylish or how trendy or how expensive your top is, when you pair it with ill fitting pants, it's not going to look good. And when I say fit, Yes, I mean are you wearing the correct size, which a lot of women aren't. But also, is the length right? Is the rise right, Is the cut right for your body? Are there folds of fabric where there shouldn't be? Or whiskers and drag lines where there shouldn't be? A good top can't save bad bottoms. And this was one of my biggest issues with Stitch Fix back in the day. I had so many clients who were doing Stitch Fix and they all had these really cute tops. They had great jackets, but they couldn't wear them because when they paired those cute things with their saggy jeans or their too short trousers, the tops no longer looked stylish. So what do they do? They bought more tops, which just added to the cycle. Just like the other two issues we've already talked about, Fit causes a specific issue and in this case it's the quality of your outfits. Those are the big three problems hiding in your pants. Now let's talk about what to do about it. What I don't want you to do is hit the stores or the Internet and just start buying bottoms before you do that. You have to figure out which problem you need to solve. Because like we're saying all summer, solving the wrong problem leads to wasted time and money. It leads to chaos, and it leads to you feeling like you're just not good at style. It's not the case. You're just trying to solve the wrong problem. So the first thing you got to do is you got to take inventory. How many bottoms do you have that you can and do wear for this season you're in? And when I say season, I I mean both calendar and life wise. If you've got great pants for working in an office, but you don't work in an office anymore, don't count those. If you have lots of great lined wool pants, but it's summer, don't count those. How many pants or how many bottoms do you really have and is it enough? Then look for variety and ask yourself, are you stuck in a basic bottom rut? If you buy lots of tops but your style is still lackluster, look to see if you have color or pattern or a variety of silhouettes. To shake things up a bit, a really good exercise is to randomly pick a top from your closet and then try to make at least three distinctly different outfits just by changing the bottom. That's how you get that versatile wardrobe that doesn't depend on buying more than you need. Finally, look at the fit of your bottoms with a critical eye, checking for extra fabric, gapping, pulling, pooling. Put on a neutral basic top that you know fits well and looks nice and then try all your pants on. Take pictures. It is much easier to see fit issues that way. And then make friends with a tailor. Because the better your pants fit, the more polished and put together and stylish you'll look and the more you will use the clothes that you already own. If after doing all that, you realize you need more bottoms or different bottoms or better fitting bottoms, then you can add those pieces to your wardrobe and you'll save money because you're solving the right problem. All right, that's all for this episode of Summer Shorts. I hope it encourages you to focus as much on your bottoms as you do on your tops. And it is an absolute wardrobe and style game changer. Remember your everyday matters, so get dressed for it. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time.