I have just one wardrobe, yet there are two versions of me. New York Alex wears more or less the same uniform every day. Outside of special occasions, you can usually find me in a steady rotation of black jeans, gray T-shirts, navy sweaters, and the occasional chambray button-down. But Vacation Alex is a dreamer. Vacation Alex yearns for change and novelty. He badly wants to wear those printed rayon shirts that have sat untouched in the back of his closet for years, those vintage olive military trousers, and billowy linen layers in colors reminiscent of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper era. Due to that aspirational thinking, I often wind up packing eight days’ worth of clothes for a three-day trip. And even worse, it provokes a moment of sheer panic the night before my return: I often find myself standing in front of my suitcase, wondering how on earth I’ll be able to cram my entire clown car of clothes back into my suitcase for the flight home. For years, nothing softened the blow of packing and repacking, not even packing cubes or well-meaning suggestions of packing hacks from my colleagues who pack for a living. But then I discovered what has become my favorite space-saving device ever: plastic compression bags. Suddenly I found myself with the power to shrink all the clothes in my suitcase to one-third of their original size.