8 Signs You Need to Clean Out Your Closet

Used to be over 70 items. Now it's 30 and shrinking.

It's the new year and everyone is looking for a fresh start. For myself and many others, decluttering and discarding items from our wardrobes can make you feel mentally lighter. Cluttered and overcrowded closets can cause stress and a decline in coord quality. If you are a beginner in the alternative fashion community, it's especially easy to get wrapped up in the idea of quantity over quality, as you try to build a large wardrobe as rapidly as possible. For others, it’s more an obsession with having the next big thing, or pursuing an unattainable version of oneself. However, before anyone even considers cleaning out their wardrobe, they must understand why it needs to be done. Whether you have or like having a small, medium, or large wardrobe, if you notice any of these red flags, then it’s probably time to declutter.

1. You always feel like you have nothing to wear.

Ah… the age old dilemma; a closet stuffed with clothes and you staring blankly without a single outfit materialising before you. It might seem ironic, but really it’s just choice paralysis. For those who don’t know, choice paralysis is the psychological phenomenon of being so overwhelmed by options that you are unable to make a decision. This is problematic as it could lead to choice fatigue. To elaborate, humans have a finite amount of willpower and mental energy with which to make decisions. A large, poorly curated wardrobe would make the decision of what to wear more draining and lead to poorer decisions throughout the day. If you declutter your wardrobe, you’ll feel less limited by your choices and create better outfits.

2. You don’t have a clear vision of your style/s.

While I believe that no one should ever box themselves into any particular aesthetic, or aesthetics, it’s just as (if not more) limiting to have too broad an idea of your style/s that you end up collecting a bunch of pieces that you like but don’t match well. It’s easy to get caught up in the idea of collecting as much alternative clothing as you can as a beginner, but eventually you’re going to get to a point where you realise that you don’t know your personal style as well as you thought and are dissatisfied with your wardrobe as a result. Decluttering will help you narrow down your style to the pieces you love and wear often.

3. You’re always running out of closet/draw space and/or coat hangers.

I was definitely guilty of stealing coat-hangers from my family’s wardrobes. Now that I’ve gotten rid of so much, I now have an excess of coat-hangers. I’ve seen wardrobe declutters where people would have large Tupperwares stuffed with stuff, or they’d have two closets, or they’d have a billion draws. How does this make your clothing visible or even accessible? I used to lament about how I, the most fashion-obsessed person in my family, had the smallest wardrobe in the house. Now it feels like I have a little too much space.

4. Your laundry pile is always excessive.

Sometimes the only prompt to do the laundry is when you’re running out of clean clothes to wear. When I had more clothing, my laundry was hardly ever close to done, not to mention that I was often fighting for the washing machine and dryer with three other family members. I also had a tendency to wear all of my favourite items the soonest after washing them and would find myself wearing increasingly worse outfits until I’d finally get off my ass and do the laundry so that I could wear all my favourite items again. Oh, and do not get me started on how I handled hand-washing my delicates. A smaller wardrobe will ask you to do the laundry more often, but it’ll be a much less intimidating task that you’ll be eager to tackle to wear the pieces you love again.

5. You have too many unworn items.

They could be the “goal” pants that are too tight, or the sequinned dress that’s too scratchy, or the platforms that are too tall, or the trendy-yet-unflattering top, or the fancy bag that’s too small and doesn’t fit your lifestyle. Most of these items represent some sort of unattainable standard you’ve set for yourself, and they’re causing you too much guilt. Who says you need to be trendy, go to fancy events, wear dangerous shoes, or be a certain weight? Owning the stuff you think you need for those things won’t turn you into the person who pursues such things, because goals are achieved through action and not “stuff”. You don’t need these items reminding you of the person you aren’t but think you should be. Let them go, along with your guilt.

6. You keep losing pieces mysteriously.

We have all tragically lost many precious items to The Clutter. Sometimes you find them after months, blinking in a light they forgot existed, and sometimes they’re swallowed into the void where all lost things remain lost forever. I like to think that if you have too many items crammed together, eventually the items are going to start eating each other, so to prevent your wardrobe from resorting to cannibalism, you should give your items enough space to exist. Less items makes it much easier to keep track of all you have, and then you won’t have to search for that one sock or earring that’s never around when you need it.

7. No matter how much you clean, the mess always returns.

Your wardrobe is one of those storage places that you’re constantly disrupting by removing stuff, adding stuff, shuffling stuff, and rummaging through your stuff to find other stuff. This is why it’s much harder to maintain a large wardrobe because it’s easier to cause mess and it’s harder to clean it up. A smaller wardrobe is much easier to maintain since you’ll always have a clear vision of what goes where, and you won’t have to fight through the “wardrobe filler” to find what you’re looking for, and then put all the “filler” back. I remember how much of an ordeal it was to find the perfect hair clips for an outfit. I had all my decora hair clips sorted into these three soup bowl sized teacups on my dresser, but in order to find what I was looking for I had to take a lot of hair clips and other accessories out of the teacups and either put them in tea cups that weren’t for hair clips, or put them on the dresser, and then once I found what I was looking for I had to put each hair clip back in the right tea cup. Sometimes I’d be in such a rush to get ready and I’d just leave the mess as it was, or I’d plop the accessories back into random tea cups. This made it harder to find what I needed the next time, and thus the cycle continued. Less items means effortless organisation. You merely take and add what you want without disrupting the rest.

Did you find any of these points enlightening? Do you think your closet could use a clean out? If so, you should definitely read ‘6 Tips to Declutter Your Alternative Wardrobe’.

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Question of the Week: When was the last time you decluttered your wardrobe? Let me know in the comments below or on social media.