The Personal Uniform

Minimalist fashion has a reputation for sameness. People picture a black t-shirt, maybe a capsule wardrobe of identical basics, or the same outfit worn every day. Looking at actual minimalists shows something different. Steve Jobs wore a black tee and blue jeans. Sibu, the Japanese minimalist, wears all black and all baggy clothes. Each of these uniforms repeats every day, and no two of them match. Every committed minimalist seems to arrive at a look that is distinctly their own. Limiting the wardrobe leads each person to an individual look.

The repetition is what causes this. Wearing few things every day tests each item constantly. An item that does not prove useful stops being worn and leaves the rotation. The items that remain are, by definition, the ones that fit one particular life: its climate, its work, and its taste. Two people who apply the same test to two different lives end up with wardrobes that look nothing alike, even though both of them did the same thing.

The selection is stricter overseas, because bad purchases cost more there. I make bad purchases sometimes, like anyone. At home, a bad purchase sits unused in a closet. Living abroad on one-year apartment contracts, I have to carry everything I buy to the next country, so a mistake costs the purchase price and then costs shipping at every move. That extra cost keeps the selection strict.

My uniform came out as an Everyman look that is still distinct. It is rarely all black and uses more dark blues and dark browns. The signature pieces are 3/4 sleeve shirts, samue (the Japanese monk’s workwear), and noragi blazers (the farmer’s field jacket), worn with cropped pants. The materials are linen and cotton. A dislike of microplastics decides as many purchases as the look does.

Crocs do not match the aesthetic, and they are in the uniform anyway. They are minimalist in purpose, and they suit HCMC weather. Crocs show what the uniform is chosen for, which is use: few things, each one useful in a real life, with the look following from those choices as a side effect. A wardrobe that kept the aesthetic and dropped the usefulness would reverse that order.

The same selection applies beyond clothes. The everyday carry (EDC) goes through it more often. Clothes rotate through a week, while the carry is the same handful of objects every single day, so an object that is not useful becomes obvious within a month. These are the current items. The phone is an iPhone Air with no case, carried as built. The laptop is a MacBook Pro M3 14”, in a MOFT origami sleeve that folds into a stand; the sleeve is the one added object in the kit, and it does two jobs to justify carrying it. The earphones are AirPods Pro 3 instead of bulky headphones, though headphones are under consideration: the selection is not a fixed rule, and if the bigger headphones prove useful they get added. A Filson green Journeyman backpack holds all of it. It has been the daily staple for two years and shows no signs of aging or wear.

The whole kit has been tried and tested over years of traveling across Asia. Travel tests a carry hardest, because the carry has to be useful in an airport as well as at a desk. The Filson has been in use the longest. Most items in a carry are still being tested. The most settled items are the ones that stopped being decisions years ago and just get picked up on the way out the door. Two years of daily use without visible wear means the decision to buy the Filson was correct and did not need to be made again. A person who can list their carry quickly from memory has finished deciding what goes in it.

The sameness reputation gets this wrong. The black tee was never what mattered, and copying it produces a costume: the clothes from someone else’s uniform without the selection that produced them. What minimalists have in common is the process. Each one keeps removing items until the wardrobe and the bag are small, settled, and clearly one person’s. Seen up close, each uniform identifies the person who wears it, although from far away the uniforms look interchangeable.