I got to work this morning and decided I didn’t like the clothes I’m wearing. Individually each item is fine but I think this sweater doesn’t go with these pants. It’s rare that I think my clothes really go together, since I don’t spend that much time picking my clothes out in the morning, but they don’t often strike me as bad.
These days, my clothes selection routine goes like this. I have pants on one side of my closet and shirts on the other. I generally try to rotate them so that I don’t just wear my two or three favorites all the time. Recently worn or washed clothes go to the ends of their respective sides and the center of my closet, where my pants meet my shirts are my least recently worn. (It’s sounding a little like a smart playlist in iTunes) It would be great if my least recently worn pants matched my least recently worn shirt. I could always just grab the two items in the center and I’m done. (maybe if I had the same number of pants and shirts that would work)
I have fewer pants so I usually grab the pair that’s at the center of my closet and look for the least recently worn shirt that seems to match. That seems like a pretty low effort way to pick my clothes out, but, for whatever reason, what seems to match standing in front of my closet looks awkward later in the day.
So, being pretty geeky I thought, what about a database? I could keep a database of combos that I liked. I bet that for each pair of pants I have, there is a shirt that I once wore with it that I liked. Suppose I kept track of those combos and whenever I pulled out a pair of pants for the day I could look it up and see what shirts I liked with it.
One obvious problem is that I need to mark my clothes in some non-ambiguous way. I can’t just enter “Blue Shirt” because I probably have more than one blue shirt. Even a photograph might be difficult to make out (plus it would be a hassle to photograph my clothes).
I’m apparently not the only person to consider this:
http://www.freewarefiles.com/program_16_176_11824.html
http://www.ehow.com/how_2072439_personal-clothing-database.html