Minutes before you need to walk out the door, you try on the third outfit of the morning. Maybe the first shirt looked better? Where’s your belt – in the nightstand or under the bed? Are these pants a bit snug? Panicky sweat beads start to form. Something has got to change.
New clothes, or a trip to the thrift store, might seem to be the answer to the problem of creating an easy outfit for the day. But men and women alike often get stuck in what Peter Ngyuen calls the Cluttered Closet Cycle.
Those extra pieces just give you even more choices, and it becomes harder and harder to figure out, or even find, what to wear. When you live in a small apartment, a tiny home, or an RV, your wardrobe might be spread across your living space, tucked in ingeniously small spots.
Enter the minimalist capsule wardrobe, a limited number of clothing pieces that all look good on you, coordinate with each other, and add up to enough outfits to cover all of your needs. Instead of buying someone else’s idea of the right items, shop your own closet.
Downsize your wardrobe into a core set of options that fit your life, your body, and your preferences. Like other minimalist approaches, paring down your closet to its essence will reduce stress, and encourage you to focus on what’s really important.
Understand What You Already Go To
First up, look through the clothes you own and select your go-to pieces. These are things you wear any time they’re clean. Maybe it’s a favorite pair of jeans, the tennies you take walks in, and a hoodie for nearly every chilly day. Add in the two shirts that both look great with those jeans, one of which seems to accentuate your eyes. You get the idea. Don’t forget your best workout outfit, and the dress, or dress shirt, you wear when you have a special date.
Now look at these few items. What do they have in common? Do they feel soft to the touch? Fall loosely from the shoulders? Fit your curves or workout-enhanced shoulders? Wash up even after a day with the kids in the kindergarten class you teach? What style would you use to describe them – clean, flowy, classic, energetic?
Use these pieces as starter items for your capsule wardrobe. Take a photo of each one so you can easily page through them on your phone for reference. Create a single page and write down a few of the words you used to describe these pieces. Title this page, “My Minimalist Capsule Wardrobe.”
Take Out Things That Just Don’t Function
Next step, go through every piece of clothing you have and remove any that:
- Don’t fit you,
- Have stains that won’t come out,
- Make you feel bad every time you wear them,
- Or that you take off each time you try them on.
These start up your donate/sell/reuse/toss pile. While you might set aside other items that don’t make the cut, and consider them again next season, these non-functional clothes should not go along for the ride.
Clarify Your Wardrobe Needs
While you’ll find fantastic capsule wardrobe examples online – either to buy in total or to emulate in your shopping – these only work if they fit the fashion your life requires of you. A corporate lawyer, highschool teacher, construction foreman, and line cook all need different work outfits. Living in Minnesota in the winter versus Georgia in July dictates the thickness of fabrics and numbers of layers. If you hit the clubs to dance, or attend religious services every weekend, those special occasion outfits matter, too.
Make a list of all of the types of clothes you need: consider how often you wear sturdy work clothes, loungewear, activewear, casual, polished casual, business, and dressy categories. Now assign each one a percentage based on a typical month. It’ll be important to mirror those weightings in your capsule wardrobe, including at least one full outfit, ideally one you can mix and match with the others, as you sort.
Now go back to your weather constraints and any others. Maybe you hate scratchy fabrics, or feel uncomfortable in low-cut shirts. Use your go-to pieces to get a vibe on what you really wear. Then add these guidelines and your weightings to your Capsule Wardrobe page.
Choose A Color Palette
One thing that makes those premade capsule wardrobes so appealing is the way the items mix and match. Outfits seem to magically pour out of almost any combination. You’ll notice they feature mostly neutrals with a bit of color. So you might see white, black, taupe, and light blue. Or for a warm color palette, brown, navy, cream, and olive green. Most items are solids with just a couple of simple prints in these same colors. Pieces worn closer to the body stay simple and sleek, with any flowy or chunky items reserved for outerwear that can layer over the other pieces.
Look at the go-to items in your wardrobe and see what colors reappear. Base your neutrals on those you wear often and feel good in. Sort through your wardrobe and add clothes in similar colors. It’s fine to include two white t-shirts or multiple pairs of jeans if those are things you wear all the time. Remember that, unless you do laundry constantly, you’ll probably need to get through at least a week of outfits made up of different items, except for outerwear.
Start to pull out clothing in your chosen, similar colors until you collect 5-8 bottoms – pants, shorts, skirts, jeans, sweats – that you like and wear. Now cluster tops around bottoms, and prioritize shirts you might layer over one another as temperatures get cooler. Go for a 2:1 ratio of tops to bottoms. Now add on 2-3 mid-season jackets or sweaters, and a coat or two. Grab your shoe pile and look at the ones that fit you, function for your life, and complete the looks on your bed.
Lastly, go back and think of items you may not have included. Activewear or loungewear might be worn on a day you also wear a different item, so allow for those, too. Special occasion dress-up clothes deserve their place. Special points for layering gymwear and blazers, or dresses and great sneakers.
Now take out your My Minimalist Capsule Wardrobe page and compare it to the things you’ve chosen. If you live in a location with clearly defined seasons, it may help to have a cool months and a warm months capsule. This way you can store away one, out of reach, and swap it for the other when the time comes. Live in Colorado like me? Since a January week might range from 70 degrees F to snow, don’t hide the other season too far away.
Display Your Capsule Wardrobe
In a really tight space? A minimalist capsule wardrobe, with a consistent color theme, clothes that suit your life, and this showcase of your favorites might not need to live tucked away in a closet. Think about the last fashion boutique you happened into. The space between the matching hangers, colors grouped together, and bins of scarves and artfully displayed shoes was as much about the display as it was about the clothing.
If your closet is tiny, or non-existent, take a cue and display your carefully selected pieces in open. This might mean a rolling garment rack you can tuck into a corner, combinations of shelves and hanging rods, or tension rods across an opening. Make sure your choice proves sturdy enough for your clothes.
Stack clear plastic bins vertically in a small corner or cabinet. Look into an over-door shoe organizer. Even if you don’t live in an actual tiny home, take a page from those who do when you organize your clothing and emphasize vertical, underneath, and floating wall solutions.
Keep your clothes together if at all possible, or if not keep a single category – all jackets, all shoes – in one place.
Minimalist Capsule Wardrobes Continue to Evolve
You’ll still need to shop, to replace items, and to bend a bit to the whims of fashion. Even if you invest in classic pieces, life happens and bodies change. You might decide on a one in/one out rule of thumb, or something a bit less rigid. Develop your own sense of core style and don’t be afraid to wear outfits repeatedly. Experiment with subtle changes by adding a scarf, pushing up sleeves, or throwing on a sweater. You’ll start to feel more grounded in who you are and how you present yourself in the world.
A sense of gratitude about having clothes to bother over, a small space to organize, and another day to be on this earth puts your quest for the perfect capsule wardrobe topic into perspective. Have fun with it and see how creative you can be with your new limitations.
