Are you in a styling rut? Is your wardrobe full of clothes but you feel like there is nothing to wear? Or do you simply have no more storage left? My reasons for wanting to clear out my wardrobe was due to two things: watching Anna from Viviannadoesmakeup go through her experience of creating a capsule wardrobe and me constantly avoiding most of the clothes in my wardrobe. I have now completely finished clearing out my wardrobe, and I will tell you how I did it.
First, remove all the clothes that you have from every nook and cranny of your house. Lay them out on a clean space, like the bed or floor, where you can have a visualisation of the amount of clothes that you have.
Then sort the clothes into 3 piles: Keep, Maybe and Bin. This is probably the most stressful part as you will have to be hard on yourself with every clothing item; if not, then you will end up not throwing anything away. When assessing any item you will have to ask yourself, 'have I worn this in the last 6 months?', 'do I feel and look good in this?', 'can I create more than one outfits with this?' and 'do I love this piece?'. If you can answer 'yes' to most of the questions, then immediately it goes into the Keep. If you are not sure of an item and you tried it on and still umming and arring, for example you have a dress that you worn in the last few months and its comfortable, but you only worn it 2~3 times, then it will go into the Maybe (where it will be reassess further). If a clothing item has stains, rips, or holes, it immediately goes into the Bin.
At this point you have two definite piles: the Keep and the Bin. Here is where the Maybe will be reassess. The Maybe pile will be split into 2 more piles: Storage and Family and Friends. If you want to keep an item, you will store it away from your main wardrobe, because if you go looking for it in the next 3 months, then it goes back into your main wardrobe. As the Family and Friends pile suggests, family and friends will go through the items and take whatever they want. The leftover clothes will go to the charity shops.
Now you put the Keep clothes back into the wardrobe (I personally categorised by outerwear, dresses, top and bottoms), and put all the Bin clothes into the bin. I ended up with 5 carrier bags which I binned. For the Storage, I folded the clothes and put them into one of my chest of draws. And lucky for me, all the clothes for my family and friends has been adopted! *After the 3 months, the clothes that have not manage to make its way back into the main wardrobe will go through the same procedure of family and friends, then the charity shops.*
This does not have to be applied only to the main wardrobe as I did it with my sports wear, lounge wear, occasional wear and shoes. I also cleared out my makeup collection (blog post? yes or no?). As I said before, I have shrunk my wardrobe more than half it size and I will update you soon on my smaller wardrobe.
I hope this is useful and if you have more tips then leave them down below!
See you soon,
Bye ♥