It can be a daunting prospect trying to decide what to wear each day if your wardrobe contains a miss mash of things that don’t go with each other, if it lacks organisation or if it is full of things that just aren’t doing you any favours (maybe because the colours and styles aren’t flattering or simply because the clothes aren’t really ‘you’).
Here’s two reasons to do something about it:
- It will save you money. It’s a well known fact that most people wear 20% of their clothes 80% of the time – that means that you have spent your hard earned money on clothes that you’re not even wearing!
- It will save you time. The average woman spends a staggering 287 days of her life deciding what to wear (- roughly 16 minutes every week day morning, around 14 minutes on a weekend, and up to 20 minutes in the evening)!
So why not detox your wardrobe this New Year and start making the task of getting dressed in the morning a far more pleasurable and speedy endeavour! Here’s how to audit your wardrobe in three easy steps:
- Sort your clothes into 3 piles:
To Keep – items that you feel most confident wearing and which you know are flattering in terms of colour and style. Also include those that maybe aren’t perfect but that you can pair with something else or have altered/dyed so that they will work.
To Alter/Repair – items that you need to get altered/repaired but that you want to keep.
To Donate/Sell – anything that is outdated, worn/old, scruffy, the wrong colour/fabric/shape, that isn’t supporting the image you’d like to convey, or that you haven’t worn for some time (I usually suggest over a year).
- Only put the ‘To Keep’ items back into your wardrobe and where possible, organise them into categories so that you group similar items together, (e.g. hang all the trousers together). For each category, then organise the items in terms of their colour, putting similar colours together.
- Take time to review your wardrobe to create outfit combinations. You’ll usually find new outfit combinations that you hadn’t thought of simply by seeing things hung in a different place. The aim is to have a capsule wardrobe of clothes with pieces that you can mix and match. If it helps, lay things out on your bed and take photographs of the different outfits. You can keep them on your phone or print them out and put them in hanging photo pockets to hang in your wardrobe as prompts. If there are obvious ‘gaps’ in your wardrobe, make a shopping list and perhaps hit the shops whilst the sales are on and see if you can fill those gaps for half the price!
If you’d like some help and inspiration, just give me a call/drop me an email – this is one of my favourite things to do! I’d love to help you first ‘detox’ and then ‘shop your wardrobe’ to create new outfits that make you look and feel fabulous. In just 2-3 hours you’ll feel like you’ve found the real ‘you’ again and will know what combinations of clothes to wear to feel good every day of the week!