They say a lady never has anything to wear anytime she’s got an occasion because her wardrobe is full of clothes, shoes and many other things that take her time to sail through before finding the perfect outfit. This is true for most ladies and also true for some men. Yes, men. I confirmed this when I paid a visit to one of my male friends and got to see what his wardrobe looked like. It wasn’t filled with assorted fashion staples as a woman’s wardrobe would be. It was a mess; everything was just mixed up —shoes, jewelry, jeans, shirts—that I was tempted to ask him why he was so untidy but then I remembered I had been in the same fix a couple of weeks back so I swallowed my criticism and told him the truth — he needed to know the five-step wardrobe detox guide.
It is no new fact that people hardly wear all their clothes. Personally, I don’t think I wear up to 30% of all the clothes I have on a normal day. To corroborate this, style experts say we only wear 20% of our wardrobe for 80% of the time. Most times I just grab the clothes my eyes first meet, wear them and get going even if I had worn them the previous week. But when it comes to an important occasion, I take my time to rummage my wardrobe and find the perfect dress. Friends would even ask, “So Victoria you had this pretty dress since and kept wearing five clothes every week?” That’s bad. Thank God I’ve been able to fix my wardrobe mess. If you are in this situation, you also need to have a wardrobe detox and declutter your wardrobe to give it a fresh look.
How to Declutter Your Wardrobe
Decluttering your wardrobe helps it breathe fine. With these simple steps in practice, you’d be having a terrific wardrobe detox as well as enhancing your style. By getting started you’d see that you just never styled your most basic outfits properly as there are more than a thousand and one ways to style them.
1. Review Your Wardrobe
This is simple. Take out everything you own in your wardrobe and create two piles. One for the stuff you love to wear (Yes-section) and the other for the items you no longer find stylish or the things that no longer fit (No-section). You should as well put the clothes you never wore throughout the previous year in the No-section because they do not deserve to remain in your wardrobe since you no longer wear them. While doing this, you could get sentimental especially if you no longer want a particular dress but because it’s a gift from a special one, you want to keep it. To be as impartial as ever, ask a friend to sit with you while you review your wardrobe. The friend would not be as sentimental as you would be. When I carried out my wardrobe detox, a friend sat by my side to help me get rid of clothes I had a thing for even when they no longer fit.
When you declutter your wardrobe this way, it gives you room to examine each item without glancing past it.
2. Keep the Pieces You Love to Wear
Repack the pieces that made it to the Yes-section into your wardrobe. They are obviously the ones you love and still want to wear. Don’t just repack them into your wardrobe. Resolve to wear them more often. Many a time, we have clothes that we have been “saving for the right occasion”. While this may seem prudent, it in itself is not cool as the right occasion or the right time may just never come. If you love a dress, create the right occasion for it and wear it more often so it doesn’t turn into wardrobe furniture.
You can organise the clothes based on their types. For instance, you could divide your wardrobe into sections and have a separate section for trousers, shirts, skirts, jackets, jewelry, shoes, etc. You can as well have a workwear section, occasionwear section and a section for casual wear. This makes it much easier for you whenever you are in need of what to wear. You just go to the particular section and voila!
3. Return to Your No-section
Go back to the pile of clothes in the no-section and see if some of them can be salvaged. You could refix a lost button, patch a torn part, take them to a tailor to make necessary amendments or wash if dirty. After doing this, if you still want to keep them then go ahead. But if you no longer need them, you could give them to a younger sibling or to charity. If they are irreparable, simply do away with them or gradually turn them to rags for chores. To discard them, you can put the pieces in a bag to dump in the garbage truck.
4. Create Outfit Combinations
This is simply restyling the contents of your wardrobe. You can get inspiration from style influencers to see how and what they are currently wearing. There are a million ways to wear a denim jacket and a million ways to rock sneakers, for instance. Explore yourself and fish out the stylist in you. You could pair that top with another pants in a totally different way. You could as well turn a stretch dress into a skirt and wear it as though you’ve never worn it before. You could wear them with shoes you hitherto never paired with an outfit.
5. Rearrange Your Accessories
The only jewelry that should remain in a jewelry box are bracelets, earrings, bangles and rings. Necklaces should be hung up on small hangers or hooks to prevent them from getting tangled. They should be hung where you can always see them so you remember to put them on anytime you’re gussying up. Check your shoes too. Put out your stinky shoes in the sun to give them a fresh smell. To prevent your shoes from getting dusty, put them into boxes or keep your shoe rack in a cool, dry place. If your shoes and accessories made it to the no-section, carry out step number 3 again.
Now you just had a wardrobe detox. You should always declutter your wardrobe to keep it looking and breathing fine. This also opens your eyes to the hidden potentials of the outfits you hitherto overlooked.
