Our Top Tips on How to do a Closet Edit
It’s that time of year again… we’re downloading the latest day planner apps, dusting off the treadmill, and making those “living my best life” resolutions for the new year. For many of us, this involves taking a long, hard look at our overstuffed closets and realizing that it’s time for a “closet edit.” This can seem like a daunting task, and a lot of times we’re faced with a kind of paralysis when we have to decide what should stay and what should go.
Read on for our top tips for a quick and painless closet edit at this (or any) time of the year…
Create these four piles from the beginning:
Keep - items you can see yourself consistently wearing (and enjoying) that warrant space in your closet
Keepsake - items with true sentimental value that you won’t consistently wear (often put in a box or garment bag in storage)
Donate / Trash - items that aren’t adding value to your life and can go away
Tailor - items you’d genuinely like to have in the “keep” pile if they were to fit better
It’s also often helpful to make a fifth “maybe” pile. This allows you to take out things that you’re not 100% sure you want to stay or go, and it (at least temporarily) removes them from the closet so you can assess how much space your “definitely keep” items will take up. There’s also something psychologically helpful about the act of taking them out in the first place, after which the question you’re asking yourself is no longer “do I dislike this item enough to take it out?” and instead becomes “do I love this item enough to put it back in?”
When deciding the fate of ill-fitting clothes, first ask yourself how / why they’re ill-fitting. Sometimes things are simply the wrong size, and sometimes they just need some alterations to achieve a proper fit. While it’s difficult to change the actual size of a garment, that’s different from getting it tailored to fit your shape. If something is three sizes too big or small, you (or likely your alterations specialist) would have a challenging time getting a great fit, whereas taking a tuck in here and letting out a seam there can provide a significantly more flattering silhouette. If you have a great piece that you love but it just doesn’t fall quite right on your frame, we suggest taking it to a good local tailor to ask what they might be able to do with it.
Unless worn-out clothes have a keepsake / sentimental value, get those out the door. A few “junk it” shirts and pants are good to keep around for those times when you’re painting or doing really messy jobs and you don’t want to mess up any of your nice pieces, but you likely only need to have a couple of those on hand at any given time. Remember, what you wear affects how you feel mentally, and few of us feel our best in a shirt with armpit holes or pants with splitting seams.
Consider these “toss it” categories for some easy decision-making. We suggest eliminating anything that’s really faded / worn out, of poor quality, or obviously outdated (like a 5k shirt from 2003). We also advise getting rid of anything that’s blatantly too big or small, anything that fits in an uncomfortable way (which can’t be altered), and anything whose coloring makes your skin look sallow, jaundiced, red, or washed-out.
If it doesn’t make you feel good when you see / wear it, get rid of it. This can be things like a pair of pants you haven’t fit into in years which just causes feelings of body negativity, the jacket you were wearing when your ex broke up with you, etc. There are also often items that we have because they were on sale or a gift or a hand-me-down that we’ve rarely (or never worn), and these take up valuable closet real estate that could be put to much better use. If the item is taking up mental and / or physical space without adding value, it’s time to edit it out.
Enlist a friend’s help. Having a friend (or a few) to help with sorting, making decisions, and sharing the good (or not-so-good) memories associated with your clothing can help a lot. It helps the time go much more quickly and can even be fun!
If you’re working solo, add audio. Listening to music, a podcast, etc. helps to take your mind off of the work at hand and alleviates some of the “chore” feeling that we can experience when tackling a large task like a closet edit. It also helps you not to fixate as much on every piece and allows you to make decisions more quickly and easily.
Find a charity (or two) that you feel great about supporting with your donations. Often we don’t want to take something out of our closet because we know we paid x amount of dollars for it (sometimes the price tag is even still there, staring us in the face). Look into charities like That Suits You, a nonprofit which provides men with professional attire to help them get back to work and to high school seniors for prom and graduation. Knowing that the money you spent on that particular outfit is going to truly help someone else elevate their life is a wonderful feeling, and makes it a lot easier to take it out of the closet guilt-free.
Seek expert guidance. Sometimes we realize that we have too much stuff, but we genuinely don’t know what our best colors are, what fit we should be aiming for, etc., so we don’t know what’s best to keep and what’s best to let go. At Pivot, we offer 1-on-1 style consultations (both online and in-person) to address all that and much more. To find out more, click the button below to schedule a complimentary Style Strategy Call with our founder Patrick to see if one of our services might be just the right fit for you.
Until then, keep tuned in here and follow us on Instagram for more tips… Happy New Year (and happy editing)!