Our Hometown Styles: Adapting from Winterless Florida

I never really think I have that many clothes until I pack to go home. It is then, with the contents of my closet removed from their usual context and deposited on my floor, that the sheer magnitude of my wardrobe truly becomes evident to me. However, I’d like to argue here that this accumulation is not necessarily my fault. Since starting uni, my wardrobe has split into two halves: the wool jumpers, plaid skirts, and oversized blazers I wear in St Andrews and the cotton button-downs, denim shorts, and mixed-and-matched bikinis I don in Florida.

Weather is a formidable force in my daily life now, where, once upon a time, I hardly gave practicality a second thought in the selection of my day’s outfit in the morning. Wearing a jumper used to be an event, one I’d pray for while still sweating in eighty-degree heat in October or wearing shorts on Christmas Day. Florida winters are more or less equivalent to Scottish summers, perpetually sunny with mild temperatures, and so for most of my life, my wardrobe very much reflected that. 

I started truly discovering my own style in Florida during high school, frequenting Goodwill with my friends and scouring our local flea market for the most enviable secondhand gems we could find. Now, I try to make it back to my local Goodwill at least once every time I’m home, and it’s honestly shocking to see how much it’s changed since I first started going there four or five years ago. It’s far more organized than it ever was before (by color now, rather than the randomly sorted free-for-all it used to be), overall cleaner and nicer (with actual hooks in the dressing rooms rather than random nail holes in the walls), and unfortunately also with higher prices, which I know is due to the recent popularity of thrifting, of which I am fully aware I am a part.

I took this picture and am thus not present in it, but you can see how seriously my friends and I took our Goodwill trips.

Ironically, Florida’s Goodwills are the perfect place to stock up on winterwear. People move to the state from up north and suddenly have no use for the heavy wool coats and sweaters that saw them through bitter New England winters, and thus to Goodwill they go and often stay; unsurprisingly, there’s no market for such items so far south, and thus there is an abundance of underpriced knitwear that I have taken advantage of in order to stock my Scotland wardrobe.

Here in Scotland, my style has certainly evolved since embracing this climate. I feel I can finally say that after two and a half years of uni I’ve finally mastered the art of layering, a phenomenon I never had to contend with for the majority of my life; even on Florida’s coldest days, a single sweater and a pair of leggings would see you through. Up until coming here, I’d had the same one coat since fourth grade, but now it has been joined by others of varying warmths, colors, and waterproofability. 

This is from my first group outing to Edinburgh in September of my first year; you can see I’m trying the layer with the socks I rolled, but I very much did not know how to dress myself warmly.

I know that the days of my Florida wardrobe really are limited, as I will graduate in a little over a year and hopefully stay permanently here in the UK. I’ll have to clear all of my bikinis out of my parents’ house and probably pare down their numbers, resigning myself to the one or two I’ll really only ever need for an occasional holiday as my adult life in a cooler climate begins. In the meantime, however, every time I’m home, I fully embrace the sundresses, floral prints, light wash denim, and tasteful absence of any kind of bra that has come to characterise the outfits I wear there, knowing it’s only a matter of time before I return here and resign myself to gloved hands and tights perpetually under my pants again.