HOW many clothes are hanging in your wardrobe?
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How many of them do you actually wear?
How many pairs of boots are two, too many?
Spring has sprung and Minimalists are asking a lot of questions that are hitting home on my social media feeds.
Minimalists wear their favoured, few clothes over and over again.
They choose from about 30 to 40 key items in their wardrobes including shoes but not, thankfully, smalls.
I’m a fake Minimalist: I wear the same few basics over and over again but there is a bunch of other stuff hanging around that should have been moved out months, if not years, ago.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and former US president Barack Obama are closet Minimalists.
Zuckerberg always wears 50 different shades of grey T-shirts while, as president, Obama only wore a grey or blue suit with a blue tie every day.
Obama in a Vanity Fair article said: “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.”
Zuckerberg echoes Obama in an interview: “I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community.” I’ll leave that judgement up to you.
However, there are myriad reasons beyond paring down decision-making for a Minimalist dress code.
1. Less spending. Buying less stuff is good for your pocket and the planet. It’s a win-win. The social movement of conscious consumption is based around increased awareness of the impact of buying decisions on the environment and consumers’ health and life. It is also concerned with the effects of media and advertising.
2. Getting dressed is fast and efficient. Which grey-ish T-shirt will I wear today? The grey one.
3. With fewer clothes in the wardrobe rotation, you should gain a better sense of your fashion style. Of course, this is just a theory. If you pick the wrong few clothes to wear constantly, this may not be a good look for you!
4. You can identify any gaps in your wardrobe. When you can see what you actually own, you don’t have to spend money on things you don’t even need. It’s only a bargain in the mid-year sale, if you needed it in the first place!
5. Less storage space is required for your clothes.
Minimalist dressing is not the new kid on the block in fashion terms either.
Capsule wardrobe was a term coined by Susie Faux, the owner of a London boutique called Wardrobe in the 1970s.
According to Faux, a capsule wardrobe is a collection of a few essential items of clothing that don't go out of fashion, such as skirts, pants and coats, which can then be augmented with seasonal pieces.
My seven-year-old has a capsule wardrobe that would make Faux feel like a fraud.
She has summer and winter school uniforms, a ballet uniform, two hoodies, a pair of denim shorts, denim overalls and jeggings. She has a pair of school shoes, ballet slippers, black boots and runners.
Of course, she owns other items but refuses to wear anything not on the above-mentioned list.
Frustratingly, she wears her short shorts year-round.
My seven-year-old has a capsule wardrobe that would make Faux feel like a fraud. She has summer and winter school uniforms, a ballet uniform, two hoodies, a pair of denim shorts, denim overalls and jeggings.
This year she wore them to Winter Solstice in Albury and while dining al fresco at the only table not booked in windy Wagga on Saturday night.
I’d stress about it more if she wasn’t so warm to touch and didn’t have such a super immune system. (She flicked her only cold over winter within 48 hours.)
When we got within a block of our Wagga apartment after dinner on Saturday night, she tripped over and took the skin off both of her knees.
As it turned out, had she worn her jeggings they would have been toast.
There’s method in her Minimalist madness.