the clothes won't do

Thoreau was famous for writing, "Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes," a maxim often trotted out as a cynical warning against something or other -- shopping? school uniforms? But fewer people are aware that the sentence goes on to say something like ...and not rather a new wearer of the clothes, so that you feel you are pouring old wine into new bottles to keep wearing the same thing, blah, blah, can't find my copy of "Walden" right now...
If moving from Raleigh to Brooklyn doesn't make you feel like a new wearer of the clothes, I don't know what could. There is hardly a single article of clothing I own that seems to make any sense in this new context. But there are a few problems. I hate shopping. I am broke. Even if I loved shopping and had money, I wouldn't know where to go and what to purchase, in this strange huge city where you can buy absolutely everything, if you only knew where it was.(and could afford it)
I realized recently that my clothes have not, actually, for the most part done, for many years, except that I got used to this fact and ceased to be bothered by it in North Carolina. it's only in New York, where I walk or take public transportation everywhere and am thus constantly confronted by other people's interesting sartorial choices, that I am again brought face to face with this fact.The clothes won't do.
I realize that writing this, I sound like a rather silly and vain person, which is far from the case. Nor am I at all interested in fashion, in keeping up with trends, or in defying them. It is only that since I was a very little child, since I can remember being conscious, that I have longed to have what I was wearing reflect the person that I was inside at that particular moment (as well as be comfortable, nonconfining, and in the case of shoes, permit me to run for a bus or flee an attacker). What do I mean by that, exactly? It seems very important,in a frivolous sort of way, yet I hardly know how to begin to explain it.