As a hoarder, I was never interested in any clearing out trends that would require me to give my stuff away. So naturally, when I heard about the capsule wardrobe challenge I remained unmoved.
I feel like this trend has been going on around the Internet for quite a while now, however, I’ve never paid any attention to it and had absolutely no interest in creating a capsule wardrobe myself.
The whole idea is to get rid of as many things in your wardrobe as possible, give it away or sell it. The main rule is to leave only a certain amount of pieces of clothing; the experts usually suggest around 30 pieces (!), which includes shoes as well. Sounds horrible, right?
It’s always been difficult for me to part with things, not even out of materialism but out of sentiment. My habit of keeping every single thing that I own would manifest itself especially badly with clothes. The classic ‘oh I’m definitely going to wear that in the future’ was my mantra for years. Until I’ve had enough.
It came to the point that I was so unhappy with how my wardrobe looked like, I finally decided to give the whole capsule wardrobe experiment a chance. I’m not going to lie, it was tough. I spent a good few hours going through my clothes and trying to decide, which pieces I wanted to give away. I ended up with one bin bag full of clothes that I was planning on donating to the charity shop. The bag wasn’t big and I definitely still had way more than 30 things in my wardrobe (not to mention shoes) but I thought it was a good start. I made some progress at last and was happy to continue.
The optimism didn’t last for long though. In my mind it was logical to go shopping to ‘replace’ all the things I’ve given away. I thought that if I want this whole new wardrobe, I need to clean out my closet and purchase new items that I can be finally happy with. Except that I only gave up one thousandth of my clothes and my wardrobe was still a mess, not to mention it looked nothing like the spotless Pinterest examples of capsule wardrobes.
I wish I could say I’m a different person now and the experiment was life-changing for me, but the truth is that here I am, two weeks into my experiment, with my closet more full and messy than ever, the bin bag full of clothes that I was so happy I could part with still in my room, because I’ve realised that maybe I’m not ready to throw it away, and I’m broke.
I think the capsule wardrobe challenge is definitely worth attempting if you’re determined to make a change and have, unlike me, at least a fraction of self-control.
