My new article on Return of Kings deals with a vastly underrated skill in a man’s life: the ability to maximize a few articles of clothing into many outfits in your wardrobe. The key is to have clothes that are interchangeable:

Interchangeability is, I freely admit, not a concept that I came up with. A concept I always advocate is that we are all “standing on the shoulders of giants” who have already done much of the theoretical “heavy lifting”, and thus we can learn from those who came before us rather than constantly reinventing the wheel. And in this case I learned from Antonio Centeno, a frequent guest writer at The Art of Manliness who also maintains his own website at A Tailored Suit, which is where I gleaned a good amount of my fashion knowledge. And of course, he didn’t invent this stuff either, this fashion knowledge has been around for centuries; it’s just been neglected until very recently. All I am attempting to do is simplify and collate it.

Anyway, interchangeability is the idea that, instead of having a million different individual articles of clothing, you have a relative few articles of clothing in your wardrobe that can be switched and swapped with each other depending on the occasion or event you are entering. With interchangeable clothes, you have limitless options for outfits depending on the weather, season, and level of formality and gravity of a day.

When you become fluent at interchanging articles of clothing for different occasions, you open yourself up to limitless options to make the most out of your dress shirts, ties, pants, suits, jackets, and shoes, even if your quantity of outfits is limited (and I advocate that it should be, because I’m not into the whole “spending money” thing…)

You can read the rest of this article right here