The sense of newness that comes with a new year is a perfect time to refresh and reenergize your wardrobe. My goal is to help you have a wardrobe that serves you, works for you, and actually feels like a benefit to your life instead of an area of frustration. If your wardrobe gives you a headache, read on, my friend!
A wardrobe that gives you a headache means it’s not serving you well; it’s not functional. And before you go buy a bunch of clothes to fix it, I want you to step back so that your shopping endeavors are not in vain. It’s really important to come at shopping with at least some intentionality and forethought. A random assortment of clothes don’t just happily fall together to create a cohesive wardrobe. No, you have to plan! You have to be intentional. At least a little. THAT’S what will help you build a more functional wardrobe.
So, let’s talk wardrobe strategy today. Here are three steps to building a more functional wardrobe that I want you to go through. Don’t buy any more clothes until you’ve answered thoughtfully through these! Ready? Let’s do it!
1. Decide which lifestyle(s) your wardrobe serves.
I say this all the time: your wardrobe needs to serve your lifestyle. If it doesn’t, it’s not functional. For example, if you live a very casual lifestyle but keep buying nice blouses that are too fancy to wear daily, then you don’t have what you need. You actually need cute casual clothes instead. Otherwise, your wardrobe is not serving you properly.
So, determine the main lifestyles or activities your wardrobe needs to serve, and identify the types of clothes you need for that. Is it super casual? Is your life filled with working from home and not seeing anyone and doing school drop-offs and pickups? If so, maybe your closet should be full of tees, casual tops, cute sweatshirts, casual sweaters, an array of really comfortable denim, and cool sneakers. Or do you need to dress up for work? Or perhaps your style needs to be a step down from office attire but a step up from casual wear to work from home. Start there, and then brainstorm the appropriate types of pieces. Then, when you need to get dressed for those activities, you’ll actually have what you need.
2. Be mindful of including colors that generally work together.
We could talk about colors for EVER—it’s a HUGE topic that we aren’t able to get into here. But, try to be intentional about working with some sort of color palette, at least to start out. You can expand the color palette later on, but when you start with some sort of cohesion at the beginning, it creates a very solid foundation to add more pieces onto later and keep the continuity.
For a place to start, check out my post, “Choosing Wardrobe Colors”.
3. Make sure you have a good mixture of foundational and filler items.
You could also think of your clothing items as staples and statements. In other words, you need some good, basic building blocks and some fun, statement pieces. Foundations are the things that support the outfits. They are like bread to a sandwich; they hold it all together and keep in all of the fillings.
Fillers are like the fillings of a sandwich. The meat, the cheese, and all of the things that add robust flavors and zing.
Without bread, you have a mess of fillings. Without foundational clothing items, you have a mess of fillers that don’t go with anything else. You need the foundational items to pull together all of the exciting statement pieces.
I wrote a blog post on foundations and fillers which answers questions like what the ratio should be between the two and more. Check it out HERE.
Bottom line, pay attention to both of these elements! You need foundations to pull together outfits easily, and you need fillers to make outfits exciting and keep them from being boring! When you have a good mixture of both, your wardrobe functions much more smoothly.
While there is a whole lot more that can be done to create a well-functioning wardrobe, doing these three things will take you FAR. Take a step further by checking out some of the posts I linked above!
And, if you’d like my help to go deeper in each of these areas to create your best wardrobe—like determining your lifestyle and what to look for with each lifestyle, how to include lots of colors in your wardrobe and still look cohesive, and different foundations and fillers you can include each season—join me in the PMT Style Club when it opens on January 10th. I can guide you through each of these topics and MORE with seasonal wardrobe guides, monthly workshops, live style chat Q&A sessions, and style courses. There are tons of resources waiting to help you with style! Join the wait list, HERE.
