HOW TO KEEP YOUR WARDROBE AT A MANAGEABLE LEVEL - The Wardrobe Challenge

So earlier this year, I realised I had a huge amount of clothing, and still struggled to make “outfits” out of pieces of clothing. When I shopped, I bought things I liked, and didn’t really stop to think about what I had at home that would already go with them. This reinforced my need to shop, because then I had to buy things to go with things. When I bought a skirt, I wanted to buy the top and cardigan to go with it. So all of a sudden, the $39 skirt became $110, once I added the extra’s. This is a big part of why I just seem to buy, buy, buy.

Some people follow a rule of 3. When they see something in a store they like, they don’t allow themselves to buy it if it doesn’t go with at least 3 things they already have. On principle, this is a great move, because things like jeans and neutral pants should actually go with nearly everything. So it shouldn’t actually be too hard to follow. So why is it? Well, you have to have a good knowledge of what is in your cupboard before you can follow this rule. Ever bought something and come home to realize you have something almost identical? Or even very, very similar? Yep, me too. This is why. Buying hordes and hordes of clothing means we lose stock of what’s in our wardrobes. When we don’t wear something often enough, we forget we have it.

A good friend of mine recently moved house. She has an amazing, awe-inspiring amount of clothing. Mostly because she never throws anything out, so over the years, as fashion trends come and go, and then come around again, she’s always got something to dig out from 6 years ago that looks as though she’s just bought it. So naturally it was a real task for her to pack all her clothes when she moved. So much so, she started several months before she moved. Now, it’s been about 5 months since she moved. A few weeks ago, she came to me laughing, and said she had just found 3 boxes in her garage, buried behind all the other boxes, full of clothes. She laughed that she didn’t need to go shopping now for several weeks because she just gained half a wardrobe in the boxes. Going through them was like Christmas again for her, full of squealing and “Oh, I forgot I had that!” moments. As funny as this is, I have to draw attention to the serious aspect. We have so many clothes now we forget what we own. I asked her “how much could those clothes have meant then, for you to forget you even owned them?” She acknowledged my point, and admitted it had been a somewhat sobering moment at the end of the day for her. The bonus that came out of it, as she said, is that she didn’t feel the need to go shopping for a while because she could wear all these clothes again first.

That realisation made me think. What would it feel like to just stop shopping for a while, and wear all those clothes we’d forgotten about. I went back to my friend Google and discovered plenty of people out there had the same idea. Here was this “challenge” people were talking about. It has various forms, but most common is the 30x30 challenge.

The 30x30 challenge.

The idea is to take 30 items from your wardrobe, and mix and match them to create a new outfit for 30 days running. Firstly let it be known, I love this idea. It has great potential to teach us about whether we really get as much wear out of our clothes as we should. And for people like me, who tend to get a bit lazy, and always wear the same blouse with the same skirt, and the same shirt with the same jeans. This is a good way of being forced to play with different combinations to make new outfits, which is a fantastic principle. In fact, I’m starting this challenge this month, as a way to both hold myself accountable to things I’ve bought and also to prevent myself from shopping. The way I see it, is that making new outfits out of my current wardrobe will keep things interesting and fresh and hopefully I won’t feel as much need to buy new pieces of clothing.

But I need to also note something – are we buying so much clothing, that only wearing things we already own for a month is a challenge!!? Seriously? And this is a dig at myself as well, I’ll completely own it. A month is 30 days (give or take). It can’t really be that hard to wear things we have for such a short time. I do understand the principle behind it is more to make new combinations than to help us stop shopping. But the fact that we see this as a challenge says a lot about our modern view on shopping, and the rate at which we are consuming new pieces.

In the spirit of honesty, I do actually expect this to be a bit of a personal challenge. I am so used to seeing something I like and just buying it, I sometimes forget to stop and think. I forget to take stock of how much I am shopping, and more importantly how much I am spending. And beyond this, I also forget that sometimes (and to be honest, nearly all of the time), it wouldn’t really be that much of a big deal if I didn’t buy it. I mean, the world isn’t going to end if I don’t have 17 pairs of jeans instead of 16. And just to clarify, I haven’t counted, but I’ve probably got more than that. I am not proud of this. So, on top of this challenge, I also employed an interesting principle to my wardrobe this year.

The Probation Principle

I will elaborate on this further in the blog, but for now, I’ll explain simply. The idea behind this principle is to go through your wardrobe, take all the clothes out that you’re not really ready to throw away because you think you’ll wear them again. Then, turn the hangers around to hang the opposite way. If you wear that item in the next 3 months, you can then turn the hanger back around. At the end of 3 months, if the hanger is still the wrong way around (and you haven't worn it) you get rid of it. It’s another great way to see what you actually wear. I have many friends who have employed this, and have all reported back that they seem to wear the same things all the time, and there is about 30% of their wardrobe they just don’t wear. I think I’m the same, so I’m doing this as well. I’m half way through the 3 months currently, and there is still a fair few items I haven’t worn yet. I’ll report back on that one at the end of the 3 months.

The Capsule Wardrobe

I will touch on this again further as I plan to do a whole blog post on this concept, but for now I'll do a short introduction.
In the spirit of honesty, I’m not really ever going to be one of those people who can happily exist on 30 items of clothing on a never-ending rotation in my wardrobe. Owning that is important. Trying to be a minimalist will really only set myself up to fail. And that’s okay. This approach won’t work for everyone.

The idea behind the capsule wardrobe is to build a closet of basics, that all coordinate with each other, so that out of say, 30-40 items, you can make a huge array of outfits for any occasion, that will all blend nicely with each other. I would encourage you, to do a bit of research on this approach. There is a list of websites and resources in the back of this book that will assist you. If you are like me, and you sometimes struggle to have a vision of how many things that tan leather jacket goes with, it’s a good way to get an understanding of how your wardrobe works.

The principle, is to only have things in your wardrobe that you love. Not things that you bought on sale, because you liked the look of them, because it was a present, because when you lose that stubborn few kilos it will look amazing.

Side note: Why do we do that? Why do we have these things in our wardrobes that torment us every day? “Ha ha… you still don’t fit into me, fatty.” The feeling of disappointment, or guilt, or shame, or sadness we feel when we see them every day really isn’t worth it. I’ll come back to this. But for now, get rid of them. Put them all in a clothes basket somewhere. We’ll get to what to do with them later in the blog.

Ideally, you want to have 6 or 7 bottoms (skirts and pants), 5 or 6 tops, a few jumpers and jackets and a couple of pairs of shoes (I said a couple. Yes, 17 pairs is too many) and maybe two sensible handbags.