If you’re looking to switch up the clothes in your closet after a long year, hold off on throwing anything out. For one, that’s a big waste of your hard-earned money! If your clothes don’t have any holes or tears in them, hang on to them for now. After all, you can revamp your wardrobe without necessarily dumping any of the clothes or accessories that you haven’t worn in a while into the bin.
This idea might come as a surprise to you, especially if you’re used to going on online fashion shopping sprees whenever you wanted a new look. However, you don't always have to buy entirely new clothes to make up a whole new outfit. While you can still go online to shop hosiery, tights, and other articles of clothing, you may find it more fulfilling to work with what you already have.
Ready to switch things up with your current collection of clothing? Here are a few tips on how to re-organize your closet without throwing anything away:
Go Through Your Closet in Phases
Before you begin your revamping and reorganizing journey, there’s something you should know about re-organizing a cluttered closet. It’s not like the movies at all, where you go through a one-night overhaul of your wardrobe alone or with a friend.
Unfortunately, this process doesn’t work for everyone. Indeed, you may just find that dumping out everything from your closet onto your bed and going through each piece one by one with fresh nostalgia will do little to help you out. In fact, you might get stuck on keeping items you never wear but still feel attached to if you go about things this way. More than that, though, trying to do everything in one fell swoop can be extremely overwhelming, and you may give up before you even make it halfway through the pile.
So, instead of completely dumping out your wardrobe onto your bed, consider segregating your closet into manageable sections based on clothing types first. For instance, you can go through your tops first, and then your bottoms. After this, you can go through full-length pieces like dresses and formal wear. If you keep any of your accessories like belts, hats, and bags in there, you can go through them last.
You don’t have to do all of this in one day, either. For instance, you can schedule a specific day to go through your tops, then schedule a separate date for your bottoms. If you find yourself getting tired easily, you can also break these up into shorter sessions. Instead of spending hours organizing your tops, try taking just ten minutes to do so each day. Eventually, you’ll be done with the whole closet before you know it.
After you go through these steps, you’ll have a better gauge of how many things you already do own, and where each one figures in the hierarchy of things you’d still like to wear. You may just rediscover some old but still classic pieces that you can reintegrate into your daily attire. Another possibility is coming across items that used to be your favorites but got shoved to the back of the closet and forgotten about.
Create an Inventory of Your Wardrobe
If you own a lot of fashion items, it’s a good idea to keep an inventory of your clothing and accessories. This helps you keep tabs on the things you’re checking out and will prevent you from going over something you’ve already looked at in the past hour. This means concretely listing down all the fashion items you own. Then, you should make a note of whether you wear these items a lot, haven't worn them in a while, or are still planning to wear them in the future.
Doing this will make you think more carefully about the pieces in your closet and how to go about arranging them. When it comes to organizing your closet, you’ve got to be serious about making that change in your life. Another benefit to creating an inventory of your clothing is that you can more easily determine what kinds of ensembles you can create based on what you already own.
You can do this with a simple pen and paper, or you can go the extra mile by creating a spreadsheet on Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. If you want more flexibility, you can even create a database using Airtable or Notion.
Make New Outfit Combinations with Existing Pieces
You don’t have to look far to come up with novel outfits. It’s likely that your existing wardrobe already has a new ensemble waiting to surprise you. Odds are, you just haven’t tried out that specific outfit combination yet with the pieces you already own.
So, it's time to break away from your usual get-ups and look for other attires you can create by mixing and matching your clothes in unusual ways. This also gives you the chance to try your old clothes on in novel ways. By doing this, none of your current clothes will be wasted, and you get to breathe new life into your older pieces, too.
Do you find it difficult or tiring to put on and take off your clothes over and over while trying to create new outfit combinations? Don’t worry. You can download digital apps that let you take photos of and create a visual inventory of your clothes and accessories. There, you can literally mix and match tops, bottoms, footwear, and jewelry onto virtual mood boards. It also gives you a fresh new perspective, since you’ll be doing it away from your mirror, where you usually check how your outfits look on you. Play around with these apps for a bit, and you may just come up with new ensemble you never thought of trying out before!
When it comes to re-organizing your wardrobe space, it really will help if you get creative with it. We don’t just mean maximizing all possible spaces to put your clothes in, although that’s certainly important. We also mean figuring out the possible clothing combinations you can come up with and figuring out how they match in your wardrobe. Indeed, bringing new life to your existing clothes is one way you can make sure that nothing is ever wasted or completely dispensable.