How to clean out your closet  Wardrobe-clear-out techniques

How to clean out your closet

I don’t want to talk too much about the nitty-gritty of how to clean out your closet (By which I mean the actual CLEANING part), because there are lots of different ways you can do this. Many people swear by the “if you haven’t worn it in a year, get rid of it” maxim, for instance, and while I’ve tried the coat-hanger technique in the past, and found it a useful experiment in forcing me to be more creative with my outfits, where it falls down is that it fails to take account of the fact that there are some items of clothing which you might not get the opportunity to wear every single year, but which it would be silly to throw away nonetheless. I’m thinking here of occasion-wear, swimwear, clothes that you wear for specific pastimes… I only need swimwear if I’m going on vacation somewhere warm, for instance (I can’t even remember the last time I swam in Scotland!), but if I don’t take a beach holiday one year, it would be silly of me to throw away my bikini, just because I didn’t wear it.

There are quite a few clothes which fall into this category, so rather than approaching the question of how to clean out your closet on the basis of “when did I last wear it”, I prefer to take the more traditional approach of simply going through my closet and assessing each item on its merits. As I indicated above, I don’t do this in the space of one day, or even one weekend: in fact, it’s an on-going process, in which I give myself time to think about the item and question and decide whether I REALLY need it. In order to do this, I ask myself one simple question:

Do I feel good in it?

For me, that’s all I really need to know. If the answer is yes, the item goes back in the closet – even if I haven’t worn it recently. If the answer is no, out it goes, however much my brain might try to persuade me to keep it.

If the answer is “maybe”, however, I have one final test:

I wear it. 

If I’m really torn about an item, I simply try wearing it for the day. I’ll style an outfit around it, and go about my business: most of the time I’ll feel really uncomfortable, and will take that as a sign that the item needs to go. Occasionally, however, doing this will allow me to re-discover something I’d forgotten about, so it gets a reprieve… for now.