Swap till you drop
Sharing and trading clothes is a great way to avoid losing your shirt
Like any couple, Jessica Rosenthal and Michelle Newton revel in everyday routines: cooking together, jogging, hitting the pilates studio, and attending to the wants of their giant schnauzer Gracie. Unlike many twosomes, however, they have another beloved ritual: swapping clothes.
"You basically double your wardrobe," said Rosenthal, 24. "It's pretty cool."
Coupledom is often a day-and-night exercise in sharing, whether it's splitting bills or divvying up DVR space. But for some lovebirds, sharing a life also means sharing apparel - a scenario that, in today's generally cheerless financial climate, is now yielding benefits economic as well as sartorial.
"It's a great thing to be doing right now," said Kathryn Finney, the author of "How to Be a Budget Fashionista: The Ultimate Guide to Looking Fabulous for Less." "I think a lot of people are really starting to embrace it."
For Rosenthal and Newton, the style symbiosis developed after they moved in together. "We shared drawers, and we had one closet for two people," said Rosenthal, an account executive at Boston advertising firm Modernista. They quickly found that their tastes complemented one another, allowing each to expand her style options without paying the price.
It's not just couples swapping garments these days. On a recent Tuesday, clothes were piled four feet high in Sarah McKeon's Jamaica Plain apartment, and a crowd of almost 50 people sifted through the pile for something nice to wear. When it was over, the 30-year-old Simmons College nursing student declared the clothing swap a success.
"Everyone at the party wanted to see how [many] clothes we could put on in 45 minutes," McKeon said. "It was a lot of fun." More important, it was cheap.
Suzanne Agasi, a clothing swapper in San Francisco, has hosted 175 swaps and has a website devoted to her events (www.clothingswap.org). According to Agasi, the typical woman uses 20 percent of her clothes 80 percent of the time. The reason? Sometimes it's just hard to let go.
"People hold on to clothes that don't really fit or look good because it was expensive," she said. "They are painful to get rid of, but it's time we just let go and give it to a friend."
Katie Rodrigues Lima, a senior at the Art Institute of Boston, is a member of Meetup.com, a networking website for local common interest groups. Through that site, she's found many clothes-swapping parties. She concedes that there are some social stigmas about wearing used clothes. But she says you'd be surprised at what you can find.
"One lady brought Marc Jacobs to swap, which just shows that not just people who are strapped for cash are getting into clothes swapping," she said. "I encourage people to get more involved, it can be a lot fun and it really does give a strong sense of community between old and new friends."
But the appeal of swapping clothes is not just fiscal. A current trend for women is menswear-inspired sweaters, blazers, and denim, kicked off in part after Katie Holmes was snapped wearing husband Tom Cruise's pegged Prps jeans.
"Menswear is very in right now," said Finney, who says she knows women who have taken a partner's tuxedo and had it retailored for themselves.
Sometimes, of course, swapping is really about swiping. When Diane Lipovsky moved to Boston from Los Angeles to study at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, she discovered that her balmy-climate ankle socks were no longer passing muster but was reluctant to invest in climate-appropriate footwear.
Her solution: raid her husband's top dresser drawer.
"I suppose I avoid buying my own long, warm socks only to trick myself into thinking these winters won't last as long as they do," said Lipovsky, 25. Besides, "No one sees that I'm wearing his socks."
But communal costuming is not all cotton candy for breakfast. Maintenance issues, for one, can fray nerves. Stefane Barbeau admits that he can't keep up with his partner Duane Smith's clothing care instructions.
"Duane is a little more particular about what goes in the washer and what goes in the dryer," said Barbeau, who also co-owns the home store Vessel with Smith. "I have twice shrunk a sweater that happened to be his." Pausing for a moment, he added thoughtfully, "I've never done that with my own sweater."
But flaps over wash directions are nothing compared to the clothing custody battles than can ensue after a breakup.
One man who asked that his name not be used said he's shared clothes in almost all of his previous relationships, to little ill effect. But when a brief dalliance ended badly, he found himself confronted with a one-man, clothing-induced revenge machine.
"Apparently he was missing a pair of, like, $8.97 Champion shorts from Walmart," Smith recalled. "He was telling me that his mom bought them for him before she passed away. It was a horrible story, but I didn't have the shorts." 