By Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz
Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO — With a busy job and two young kids, Amy Zinck has many mornings when, as she puts it, “mirrors are not part of my life.”€
Luckily, she has little need for them.
For much of her career, the Chicago resident has gone to work wearing a self-prescribed uniform that has made her morning routine a think-free 15-minute affair.
No staring at the closet. No pile of discarded outfits. No regrets as she walks into the office that she is overdressed, underdressed or mismatched to tackle whatever comes her way.
Rather, Zinck, 47, reliably dons a pantsuit — usually black, though she also has gray and brown and if she “goes crazy”€ she may wear a skirt, she laughs — with a classic top and her hair pulled into a low ponytail. Her signature flourish is a scarf.
Removing the daily wardrobe headache frees up not only precious time, she said, but also her attention.
“If you’re worried about what you’re wearing, you’re not very present,”€ said Zinck, vice president of Chicago-based Terra Foundation for American Art and director of its Paris office.
Successful people have long extolled the professional virtues of having a personal uniform. But recently the spotlight has been cast on women, who are less commonly associated with sartorial sameness.
In an April essay in Harper’s Bazaar, Matilda Kahl, art director at advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, revealed that dressing pressures caused such angst one morning almost three years ago that she has since worn a daily uniform of black pants, a white silk blouse and black leather bow around her neck, prompting some co-workers to wonder at first if she had joined a cult.
The monotony of a uniform keeps many people from joining the club.
But research suggests people might perform better during the day if they didn’t start it by wracking their brains about what to wear.
Making decisions requires neurons to burn glucose, and when that fuel gets depleted, brains suffer decision fatigue that clouds thinking and makes it hard to concentrate, said Daniel Levitin, a cognitive neuroscientist and author of “The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload.”€
Trivial decisions, like whether to wear a white or blue shirt, burn glucose almost as fast as deciding what to do about the federal deficit, he said.
“If you can simplify your life and have the same thing for breakfast or wear the same thing every day, it frees you up to use your decision making for other things,” Levitin said.
Famed neurologist and author Dr. Oliver Sacks, he noted, has said he eats the same meal every day — €” sardines, tabbouleh and orange Jell-O, according to a RadioLab interview — so he doesn’t burden his brain with that choice.
Zinck’s closet is based on six of the same style of Theory pantsuit, hemmed to three lengths to accommodate different heel heights. She wears them with Petit Bateau T-shirts in the summer and Eric Bompard sweaters in cooler temperatures. She also buys a few unique pieces when they catch her eye — a deconstructed jacket or pant in different cut — but they stick to the same timeless theme.
Her abundant collection of silk scarves, which began when she was given a Hermes scarf at 16, are the differentiating focal point on the canvas of her little black suit.
The scarves are like “superhero capes,”€ she said, functional as well as decorative, serving as makeshift sarongs for her 7-year-old daughter or a sling when her 4-year-old son broke his collarbone, she said.
Required to travel often as part of her job bringing American art to other parts of the world, Zinck can pack for a weeklong trip to Paris with two suits and seven scarves.
She said people compliment her on the details, like an interesting earring or a shoe.
“When you have a uniform, anything you do that deviates, you feel like you’ve walked off the runway because everyone makes so many comments on it,”€ she said.
