An Unusual Project from Miranda

Yesterday I came across the beautiful Annual Reports made by Nicholas Felton. These are infographics representing all the minutiae of his everyday life, and combined they have a powerful effect in representing a person through data. His most impressive project is his Annual Report of 2010, which is a series of infographics representing the entire life of his father (who passed away in 2010) in charts, graphs and numbers. I felt inspired to do something similar to document my own life, and I realized this would be the perfect way to chart my style over the years. Therefore I propose the Style Log project.

Starting on January 1st, 2011, I am going to record everything I wear during the year. The first step is to begin a catalog of my entire wardrobe, which I’ve made a pretty good start on. I have clothing items divided into dresses, tops, skirts, pants, sweaters (meaning cardigans, etc), coats, legwear, shoes and miscellany (which i might divide up further into jewelry and other accessories). I’ve got these all listed in a spreadsheet, numbered according to category with a decimal system allowing for 99 items in each (more than enough for anyone’s wardrobe). For example, my brown dress with teal buttons is number 1.05. The first number represents the category of dresses, and the decimal represents the order in which I entered it into the spreadsheet (which is totally random). This decimal system allows me to keep adding items to each category as I acquire them – if I numbered my dresses 1 – 12 and my tops 13 – 16, then in the event of acquiring another dress I’d either have to shift all the numbers up one or tack the new dress on at the end. With the decimals, I can keep adding dress 1.13, 1.14, etc.

Each item has the following data next to it: color, print, fabric, length (for dresses), waist length (from base of neck to the waist of the garment, on the front), collar height (from base of neck to the lowest point of the neckline of the garment) and a general description of the style of the garment (a-line, empire, etc.). Every day I’ll log which items I wear, and at the end of the year, I’ll use the data to calculate things like what color I most often wear, average length of waist, etc. If I continue this in future years, I’ll be able to see how my style changes over time. If I can figure out how to make Daytum, a data-collecting website, work for me, calculations will be easy!

I’m also planning to make a color palette every day on Colour Lovers at lucentvictrola. These color palettes will be a really lovely way to show the color combinations I use in my style, as well as color trends in my clothing. 

Hannah (or anyone reading this), you should totally try this too! I’d be excited to see other people’s results.