This chart is an example wardrobe plan from the book New Image for Men: Color and Wardrobe by Marge Swenson and Gerrie Pinckney (published in 1983). It shows all of the pieces of an imaginary wardrobe and puts them into categories according to level of formality and type of clothing. There are pieces for business, dress, and casual wear, and they include suits, sport coats, shirts, pants, ties, jewelry, belts, shoes, socks, sweaters, and jackets/coats. Each piece has attributes such as color, pattern, and material. Also, there are a number of pieces for each type of clothing at each level of formality, such as five shirts and three ties that match a suit for dress wear. This plan results in a flexible, efficient wardrobe that it is easy to make outfits with and avoids extraneous or redundant pieces that clutter up your closet.
Stephen Ramsay discusses relational databases in the chapter “Databases,” which are based on the idea that a database can be “a set of relations.” If all of the outfits that you can put together comprises a database, a wardrobe plan is analogous to a database design. A simple, old-fashioned tabular database would mean that each piece in an outfit is only used for that outfit. If you had 18 outfits that included black Louboutin pumps, you would actually have 18 pairs instead of one, which is an improbable situation. A relational database describes the reality of wardrobes much better, since a single pair of shoes can be used in many outfits (what Ramsay calls a one-to-many or 1:M relationship), thereby minimizing redundancy. In a relational database, each outfit would be a record or entity with its own primary key, and the black pumps and other pieces in the various categories (tables) would be referred to via foreign keys that can be reused in other records. Furthermore, the ways that pieces are mixed and matched, indicated here by horizontal lines that separate the levels of formality, would be described by entity relationship diagrams. However, like Ramsay notes in regard to real-world data, actual wardrobes are more complex than this idealized wardrobe plan.
Just like databases, a person’s wardrobe reveals things about him or her. The particular items of clothing they buy and the way that they make outfits can give clues about a person’s tangible and intangible characteristics such as body type, their “color season,” personality, age, occupation, socioeconomic background, etc. Likewise, what data goes into a database and what is left out, and how the database is designed, reveals the ideology of the people who made it.