How I stopped having nothing to wear by having less to wear
Clothes stress me out.
“I can’t wear this top today because it goes with motorcycle boots but it’s raining and my rain jacket is JCrew…and brown boots go with my rain jacket but they’re suede and heels and it’s a long walk to work…and I’ll need a bag that closes so my laptop doesn’t get wet, so that eliminates the grey jacket, because my only bag with a zipper is brown. And I have a happy hour after work so…”
And so on. Every. Single. Day.
And this is usually the kind of thing I’m great at. I’m an obsessive minimalist at home and a project manager at work. For better or worse, I whole-heartedly believe enough that harmony can be achieved by automation and systematic planning.
And I love harmony in the morning. I’m the girl with morning checklists in muji picture frames. I’m the one who automated all the lights in her house to sync with sunrise and sunset. At 7am my coffee maker and eucalyptus oil defuser kick on and there’s a sound system that plays a morning routine playlist in every room of the house. Everything is seamless, planned, and requires no decision-making or cognitive effort.
Except my closet.
I tried everything. I’m a trier. I try. I fail. I try again. I waste money. I waste time. Try as I might, I can’t not try to fix things.
So I tried. Everything.
First, I thought the answer was to focus on quality. If I loved everything I owned and only bought expensive beautiful things (that spark joy!), then maybe my closet wouldn’t stress me out…
Then I tried Pinterest — the “buy everything the model is wearing” approach. Maybe if I just research how to wear everything I already own and buy what’s missing…
Then I tried uniforms. Just resolving myself to the same grey t-shirt, jeans and brown rider boots…
Then I tried buying “that one thing” I loved in every possible color…
Then I tried dedicating an hour every Sunday evening to planning all my outfits ahead of time…
And still… every morning, I spent an uncomfortable amount of time trying to optimize for 30 different variables, and the project manager in me cried.
Then one day, at the end of a stressful week that necessitated a particularly brutal minimalist purge, I googled “morning routines of successful people.” Like ya do. And I read about an artist who said the key to success is getting your body on autopilot. He said wasting too much energy making decisions in the morning robbed him of energy he needed to be creative later in the day.
And something sort of clicked. I got angry about the injustice of it all. Wasting time thinking about clothes is not just a mild daily annoyance, but it was putting me a disadvantage.
So I decided to solve it once and for all the only way I know how, by PM’ing the ever-living shit out of it.
The idea was pretty simple. I would plan the perfect minimalist wardrobe. It would be a fixed number of pieces that covered every weather condition and social obligation for the next 3 months. And it would follow a fixed style and color scheme.
Here’s the strategy:
Assess the current state to determine what I was wearing all the time and tease out a general style guideline. ie. dump everything on my bed and look for patterns.Pull out the 20% of my clothes that I was wearing 80% of the time and put everything else in storage.Pick a color scheme and put anything that doesn’t fit in storage.Figure out all the pieces that are missing to ensure coverage.Go shopping. Once.Commit to 37 pieces for the next 3 months and repeat the process in April.
Around step 4 I realized there was a name for this strategy, capsule wardrobes, which have been around for a while but have gotten popular during the recent minimalism trend. This amazing blog was a fantastic reference.
…and so here’s what I wore for the last 3 months:
So did it go?
First off, this absolutely works and then some. I didn’t realize how powerful paradox of choice was until I removed it. I saved a ton of time, money and above all, stress.There was a learning curve, tho not nearly as bad as I’d anticipated. I had to do a few more shopping trips to adjust stuff that wasn’t working, but the mindset shift was phenomenal. Knowing that each piece had to last for at least 3 months and will get worn at least once a week and has to serve multiple purposes, I was much more intentional about purchase decisions.My clothes seemed to last longer, which was surprising at first, but actually makes sense. Even with a bigger wardrobe, I still tended to wear the same few pieces over and over. Having the limits, made me rotate through things more evenly.Taking the rest of my clothes out of storage while I was planning the next capsule was like Christmas. Almost embarrassing how much more I appreciated things after not seeing them for 3 months. Total psychology win.I liked the concept so much, I made capsules for parts of my closet too. I built a capsules for lounging, formal stuff and sports. It went beyond my closet as well, but I’ll spare you that rabbit hole of OCD.I took pictures of what I wore each day, which turned out to be extremely helpful for reference and recalibrating. But since I took quick selfies, (usually in the bathroom at work), they weren’t great for getting a good idea about how I felt about outfits. I think this time around, I’ll take better shots and do a write-up on what I started to think of as “uniforms.”
I have to say, of all the things I’ve done in 2017, this has probably had the biggest overall impact on my day-to-day. So, if you’re like me and reading about this for the first time made you go “yes! yes! i have 100 follow up questions!” then I highly recommend checking out un-fancy.com. The girl has done. her. homework. And even if you’re not a minimalist or even care that much about clothes, there’s some basic human psychology at work that made the whole experience pretty gratifying.
Comments