How to purge your wardrobe and get your life back
Emily Writes Weekly
I was desperately hoping my dear friend Vee would offer to write a guest post after they helped me clear my wardrobe. It was a full day activity with three friends and it has helped me so much. I think we got rid of about 70% of my clothes so I wouldn’t be so overwhelmed. I can’t tell you the wonders it has done for my mental health.
In good news for me and you, Vee offered to write a guide! And now you have it! It’s a long weekend this weekend (which is why you’re getting a Monday newsletter on a Sunday) and you might be isolating anyway (sorry) so happy purging!
Thank you Vee for being the best as always x
I asked Emily if I could write a guest post about wardrobe clearouts and personal style and I immediately followed up with "I promise I won't tell people to create A Capsule Wardrobe With One Crisp White Shirt”. We’ve all read those articles, bought the perfect crisp white shirt, and promptly realised our lives are not Crisp White Shirt Lives!
I love wardrobe clear outs. I live for them. I love to sit on my friend's bed and ruthlessly say, “that is hideous, why do you have it?” (It's always bought by a mum. Your mum? Your mum-in-law? Either way they wish you would wear neutral florals and bless them but no.) I love watching my friends dig out the incredible pieces they never wear because they’re hidden behind the fifteen black sacks they have on rotation (no judgement, I am a black sacks gal through and through).
Wardrobe clearouts mean watching my friends discover that actually they can wear hot pink pants with white trainers and a pro-vaccination t-shirt and look so goddamn cool that everyone at the medical centre wants to be their bestie. And even when I’m helping someone else with their wardrobe, it always spurs me to reevaluate my own closet with the kind of stern-but-fair decision-making I sometimes struggle with. Wardrobe clearouts: the best way to achieve order from chaos, at least in the course of a single day.
So! You want to clear out your wardrobe! Wanting to clear out your wardrobe is the first and extremely necessary step. If you’re more feeling like “I don't actually want to clear out my wardrobe because I am not in a psychological space to let my friends tell me that colour looks terrible on me and (lovingly) shame me for the ripped maternity leggings that are still in my bottom drawer even though my baby is seven years old next week”, then that is valid. Valid. Do not do anything you are not ready to do. Your friends and this post will be here for you when you're ready to face up to the idea that not all of your clothes need to live with you forever.
Give yourself the gift of preparation
You're with me? You want to do this? Awesome. Here are the things you will need to make this as easy as possible:
● Sturdy black rubbish bags, masking tape and a marker. You're going to sort your clothes into different piles, and labelling the clothes being donated versus the clothes being sold will make sure Recycle Boutique staff get the basically-new designer shit instead of a bag full of your holey undies that should have gone to the tip.
● New clothes hangers. This is optional but I recommend it if yours are all mismatched and make it harder than necessary to hang your shit up. If I was in your bedroom I would be throwing away every single wire hanger and I would probably make a tasteless joke about abortion first. I rate the black velvet flocked hangers from Kmart because they don’t take up a lot of space in a wardrobe and clothes don't slip off them. You can also get things like drawer dividers or those sticky 3M hooks, but I suggest waiting until you know how you want to store things from now on and then getting what you need.
● A whole day with no distractions. This is not a quick process. We spent six hours in Emily’s wardrobe and achieved everything from top to toe, but there were also four of us and we are very efficient at judging ugly clothes. I don’t recommend doing this in slow increments over days or weeks, because it will feel more overwhelming and you’re less likely to achieve a clear mental picture of what you truly love.
● A small group of friends who love you deeply and are not afraid to tell you when shit is ugly. The kind of friend you’re okay with being in your undies around, because you know they’re going to make you try on about fifty different things in three hours. Friends are optional but it makes this whole process easier and more fun. I probably wouldn't recommend more than three friends or you'll wind up just eating snacks and gossiping instead of doing anything.
● Speaking of snacks: snacks. This is thirsty work. Schedule in a break to get something to revive and reward yourselves. I recommend the kind of snack platter you would put out at casual summer drinks when you're pretending you're bougie: mozzarella balls, cherry tomatoes, baguette, hummus, snack cucumbers, strawberries. This will give you energy for your second wind.
Pro tip: do not eat your snacks while you're working because you'll get hummus on the sleeve of your best blazer.
● Drinks. Ideally not alcoholic, you have to keep your wits about you otherwise you’ll decide that silver mesh top is a perfect piece for every PTA meeting, but definitely with a lot of ice. Do drink your drinks while you're working because this is thirsty work.
● A room with enough space. You need space for everyone to sit and also room for piles. Clear your laundry off your bed so you don't accidentally put your new pjs in the junk pile.
● Speaking of laundry: do all of, or as much as possible of, your laundry in advance so you can see all your clothes including the stuff you wear all the time.
Let’s do it
Okay. We're ready. It's time. We've got our drinks and our friends and our black rubbish bags and we can do this. I believe in you. Before you start grabbing clothes, create a set of distinct pile designations. Those piles are:
● Keep (we love it, no comments.)
● Fix (we love it but it has a missing button, or it would be great without the sleeves.)
● Sell (to Recycle Boutique or a similar consignment shop. Is it worth reselling? Usually this means ‘designer label’ or ‘recognisably vintage’ and in good condition. You can sell on Trademe but honestly who has the time.)
● Donate (to the op shop, Women’s Refuge, Dress for Success, women’s prisons if you have bras in good condition. Separate things as much or as little as you have the energy for.)
● Bin (too worn out for the op shop. I know it’s hard to send things to the tip, we’ve all seen those mountains of garbage clothing, but your individual ratty singlets are not the problem here.)
You might decide it's too much effort to separate ‘Sell’ from ‘Donate’ or that you will genuinely never take something to be mended. That's fine, adjust your piles as necessary. Label your black rubbish bags and set them up next to every pile except the ‘Keep’ area.
There are a few ways to start and none of them are wrong. Marie Kondo says to take literally everything out and put it all in a pile. This is satisfying but can be overwhelming. If it is too much, then start with the closet. You could go section by section or just grab items at random. You could also start with A Drawer but drawers feel more confronting to me so let's leave those for once we're in the rhythm.
Got your first item? It's the thing that's closest to you so maybe you wear it a lot. But wearing something heaps doesn't always mean it's a keeper! You might just wear it a lot because it's there. This is when you start asking the important questions that will inform your personal style, as well as the absolute basics.
Is it worn out, ratty, faded or damaged?
If it is fixable, will you actually fix it? If you really, truly love it and it's, like, a burst seam that can actually be mended, I give you permission to put it in the pile marked ‘Fix’. Unless you're my sister, because I am sick of doing your mending.
Otherwise: throw it away. Done. First pile started.
Is it sentimental?
Warning, I am not a big sentimentalist so I have a narrow window for this. Your wedding dress? Probably 'Keep', unless you're divorced now (I am divorced now). It belonged to someone you love dearly and it reminds you of them? Go on, keep it, but that means you keep it, one item, not fifty.
If you have the energy, put it aside to get dry-cleaned or archive-boxed so it doesn't get moth-eaten. This is sentimental stuff, don't risk heartbreak. You can also store keepsake items separately from your functional wardrobe so you get more useful space for the clothes you actually wear.
Does it fit you?
No, really, does it fit you? With a very few exceptions I do not think we should hold on to clothes that are guilty shame shrines to our old bodies. If it's too small or too big, let it go. If it’s worth selling, put it in your ‘Sell’ pile. If not, donate.
Do you like it?
Yeah, it fits, but do you like how it fits? Do you like the way your body feels in it, the way you look, the colour and fabric and cut? I'm firmly on the side of “don’t put yourself through living in polyester” because I hate the way it feels against my skin and also I'm already a naturally sweaty person, I don't need help with that.
Your friends should help you on this one. We told Emily that she should never wear another item of rust-coloured clothing because it just doesn't work on her, and thank god she listened to us.
If the answer is genuinely “yes I love it” then congrats, you have a keeper. If not, into one of the piles it goes.
Do you already own it, but different?
You might have five near-identical black tent dresses, or six grey sweaters. If you want to keep them all, fill your boots. But if you want to get really brutal, you need to weigh up which are the very best black tent dresses.
Review the questions above against each of those items until you feel comfortable you've picked the ideal item. Put the others in the piles, you know the drill.
We all contain multitudes.
You are never going to wind up with just one perfect capsule wardrobe. Even if you only live three lives — work, home, and Being Cool With Friends — those are three different types of wardrobe. Women on TV get home from fancy office jobs and kick off their high heels and pour a big red wine and sit on their white couch in their tailored shift dress but that is fake and also psychopathic. Do not feel like you need to get rid of everything just because it's not aligned to the one true perfect life you wish you lived.
Look at your actual life.
Did you quit being a lawyer five years ago? Do you work exclusively from home, or in an office that shifted one step closer to the casual end of business-casual with each lockdown? Did you, like me, suffer through the absolute iron grip that workwear had on us in the 2010s? Or were you a cool Tumblr girl in your youth but now you have kids and a job and two cats? Your clothes need to serve your life as it is, and you probably have a ton of outdated shit you can donate without more than half a second’s thought.
Sometimes you just have to keep something because it's incredible.
We've all heard the phrase before, it's lost all its meaning, but some things just spark joy even though you don't necessarily wear it in your real life. For Emily, that's a vulva dress she had custom-made with a Christmas ornament on the clit. For me, it's a very wide-brimmed black witch’s hat. Not exactly sentimental, but it has to stay.
Take a break
Are you done in the wardrobe? You probably need some snacks. Get a snack and take a breather before we move to the drawers. Why are drawers so scary? My socks and undies drawer is where all my secrets live.
Drawers time!
I recommend dumping the whole drawer out, going through them, and folding the ‘Keep’ clothes as you go. I love folding clothes, which is probably weird to admit to but it's extremely satisfying. We all watched Marie Kondo back at the beginning of the pandemic and she really does know how to fold a t-shirt. Kondo-fold your shit and your drawers will be beautiful even if all your socks have secret holes in them. Which they shouldn't if you do this right. If your friends are like me they will happily fold your undies but I dunno, maybe you're squeamish, feel free to do that drawer on your own.
I am fully confident in listing the following as things to get rid of:
● Undies with holes? That ride down and feel like you're hitching them up every three steps? Elastic that cuts into your tender inner thigh? You deserve better than that. Throw them away.
● Unpaired socks when you know the partner has been missing for months? Chuck ‘em, or put them in your cleaning rags bag (single socks pulled over your hand and sprayed with all-purpose cleaner are a perfect surface duster, so you can do that to the top of your drawers once you've moved all your broken jewellery and half-read books).
● That sexy strappy lingerie that makes you feel like a ham in a string bag? Oh my god, throw it away.
● G-string undies? Let's discuss in the comments but I fundamentally do not understand how we were sold the lie that these are comfortable.
● I think we can all throw away our pantihose in the year of pandemic 2022, but you do you.
T-shirts can be tough because we wind up with so many. Keep the ones you love the most, don't keep more than a couple as “sleep shirts”, give yourself the gift of not keeping that awful corporate-branded shirt you got in a swag bag eight years ago. Throw away any that have Smell. What's Smell? Come on, you know it, that awful experience of putting on a clean t-shirt only to discover mid-morning that your fresh sweat has revived, zombie-like, something embedded in the pits of your shirt. Soaking in Napisan only does so much.
If you really have a huge number of t-shirts you don't want to part with, like maybe you were a band roadie in a past life, consider the concept of a t-shirt quilt? I dunno, there's no optimal number of t-shirts, except my gut instinct is that even if you wear a t-shirt every single day you probably don't need more than two weeks worth or your laundry situation will become overwhelming.
Put it away
Oh my god, are you almost done? Maybe? You have a big pile of ‘Keep’ clothes, and a bunch of black bags. Time to put everything away; this is where your friends can make themselves useful, especially if you have someone like me who loves to fold. I like to store my clothes like with like, and ranked by use: woven tops and day dresses together right at the front, party dresses further back, t-shirts and knit tops in one drawer, all the pants in another. Put your gym gear in the bottom drawer unless you genuinely wear it every single day, because if you have to root past your comfy workout leggings to find those cute shorts, you're just gonna give up and wear the leggings instead.
Again, I'm invoking our patron saint Marie K, whose advice on using drawer dividers in your drawers has been an absolute game-changer for me. Instead of my black wool jumpers and my black t-shirts and my black leggings all blurring into one suspicious mass, now I have separate sections where each of them live. If you're low on space, packing away your out-of-season stuff in a plastic bin can help —just don't forget that those woolly jumpers exist in six months time. Picking the right places for your clothes and then putting everything away is a fundamental part of this process. Eat more snacks if you need to bolster yourself, but do not leave anything in a pile because it will still live there three weeks later and that defeats the point of this exercise.
You're done! What next?
In the next part to this mini-series, we're going to hit the jewellery and shoes, but let's stick a pin in that because I think it helps to make some style decisions before you evaluate your accessories.
If you want to get ahead of the class because you're an overachiever, go through your jewellery and toss anything broken or seriously worn out (especially, like, that costume jewellery that loses its nickel plating and starts to smell like onions) and any shoes with holes that you’re realistically not going to get resoled.
If you still want extra credit and a kiss on the forehead from your teacher, start thinking about your Keep clothes, especially the colours and styles and items you said yes to with your whole chest. What ties them together? What are the similarities? You can probably see it a lot more clearly now that the only things in your wardrobe are the things you genuinely like.
Are we done? We're done. Finish your drink, eat the rest of your snacks, relax on a job well done. We'll come back in a couple of days on the possibly-harder topic of “okay I threw out half my clothes like you told me to, now what?” and spoiler: this is the bit where you might get to buy something new!
Love it. Love your work. Take all those black bags to the op shop and the tip, and hold in your heart the knowledge that Recycle Boutique's judgement of your clothes says literally nothing about your value as a person. They do that to everyone.
I don’t think I’m ready for the wardrobe clear out but reading this definitely made me want to be friends with Vee!
This was amazing to read!!! I can't wait to get started on my wardrobe!