Tame Your Closet (Part I) with The Curated Closet

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll share my system that I used to overhaul my own closest, get rid of stuff, and figure out a personal style.  In this first part, I'll share some tips that I got from reading the book The Curated Closet by Anuschka Rees.  In Part II, I will cover the system I developed using an app called PM Pro. 

In trying to prune down my belongings, Marie Kondo-style, I found myself totally overwhelmed by my closet. I have some tendencies that make it difficult to have trim, stylish closet. First of all, I’m cheap — meaning I tend to prioritize quantity over quality.  I really don’t like to shop — except at Marshall’s where it frankly feels more like a treasure hunt. And even then I have a outside limit of a couple of hours before I’m done.  I’m super reluctant to get rid of things AND I don’t like to spend much mental energy on what I’m wearing. 

BUT I do feel better when I look put together, so the challenge for me was trimming my closet into only things I like AND having a plan for choosing new clothes in the future.  I needed a wardrobe system.  And if you've watched any of my videos, you know I’m a sucker for systems of any kind. 

I went looking for inspiration. After all, if someone has done all of this work before, why reinvent the wheel?  I discovered this book, The Curated Closet: a simple system for discovering your personal style and building your dream wardrobe by Anuschka Rees.  If you are at all interested in this topic, this book is definitely worth reading. Anuschka Rees is the real deal — she is a fashionista and style guru.  She went way deeper in her book than my little project needed, so I borrowed a bunch of her ideas, but mostly developed my own sped-up and simplified system.  I will probably do summary video on her book later, but for now, I’ll give her credit for many of these foundational ideas. 

So, my problem was that, pre-system, I could reach into my closet, pull something out randomly and there would be a greater than a 50% chance that I wouldn’t want to wear that article of clothing — it doesn’t look good on me, it feels weird, or it’s kind of ugly.  What I needed, was not just to get rid of the stuff I didn’t like (although that would certainly be a good start), but ultimately to have a style strategy to make better decisions and prevent myself from having an out of control closet again. 

Wardrobe Cognitive Shifts

So, first off — let’s go through some of the required cognitive shifts supplied by Anuschka Rees:

• Style does not equal Fashion - don’t confuse style with fashion.  Style is personal, fashion is what the designers have decided is hot this year.  Just because bohemian peasant blouses are in this year, doesn’t mean that you have to shift your style to include them.  If you think about icons like Audrey Hepburn with her little black dress and Elizabeth Taylor (queen of diamonds), they were notable because they DIDNT dress like everyone else. They knew their own personal style and cultivated that.  You CAN include new ideas and pieces that are in style, but you definitely don’t need to run out and buy a ton of stuff each season in order to be stylish.
• Keep only things you like - This is straight from Marie Kondo’s philosophy. Life is too short to keep OR wear things that don’t suit you, feel weird, or you don’t like.  If it doesn’t fit right — get rid of it or have it tailored.  That last piece of advice comes from Mindy Kaling. At right around 5 feet tall, I assume that every pair of pants, every skirt and every dress will need to be shortened. Either learn how to do this well yourself, or suck up the cost for having it done. It’s an imperative. 
• Minimalism as a lifestyle philosophy - this is similar to the last, but emphasizes minimalism as an objective. Remove what is nonessential.  Be able to reach into your closet and be happy with whatever you pull out (for most people, that means getting rid of 40-60% of your clothes).  Train yourself to love the space between hangers!  Okay -- I'm not there yet, but at least things no longer come out of my closet looking like they have been vacuum sealed.
• Identify your style - Find your style and embrace it. Whatever it is.  Do you need help figuring that out?  Then let’s go on to the first step. 

Step 1 - Determining Style from Preferences

Do you already know what your style is?  Could you define it?  Maybe not at the outset, but you probably have an instinctive sense of what you like.  Anuschka Rees has two different ways to get your mental juices flowing.

• Fashion Blogs - the first way is to look at a bunch of fashion blogs and catalogs to determine which fits your style. I found this process annoying and mildly depressing, but you might have better luck than I. Inevitably the blogs I found that I liked, I didn’t like uniformly.  The clothes were more expensive than I’m used to. Plus, none had my exact body type — of course.  I found it mildly depressing since the blogs I tended to like were from women who were 20 to 30 years older than me. I chose not to spend too much time thinking about that . . . .  The second way is by answering a
• Questionnaire - Anuschka has a comprehensive questionnaire in her book that takes your through your style preferences.  I found this a little overwhelming, but did manage to glean some interesting insights.  That said, on the whole, I much preferred

Step 2 - Determining Style from Past Choices

This step gathers data about your style based on what you already have in your closet, which I found much more compelling and useful.  Anuschka‘s advice was to take a photo of your outfit every morning for 20 mornings.  Well, that would take forever!  Once I’m fired up about a project I have a lot of energy and very little patience, so instead I took photos of ALL of the outfits in my closet. To be fair, after about 50 outfits, I got a little fatigued, so I took a break and took the rest the following day.  Here’s what I did: I set my iPhone up on a cabinet, aimed it at the same spot in my bedroom, switched the camera to selfie mode, put the self timer on for 10 seconds, pressed the button and then ran to get into place before the shutter went off. I used a small stool so that I could get a head to toe photo and wore shoes for the full effect.  You could do a front and side photo, but just front worked okay for me.  My mom does this on a dressmakers dummy (yes, she owns one of these), but I believe that you HAVE to be the model or else you can’t possibly tell if the outfit works on you.  

This process goes beyond determining what your style is, it seriously helps to figure out what you should get rid of.  I could scroll through all of these photos on my iPhone or iPad and immediately be assailed by a terrible outfit that I always thought I looked perfectly fine in!  But I really needed a better way to sort through and recategorize these photos. Join me in Part II to talk about the app that I found to help me out!