The healing power of a wardrobe audit

A chance to rediscover the reason you fell in love with clothes in the first place

Now that my newsletter is fully up and running, I’m wondering what new angles and directions my writing might find itself in. January seems like a good opportunity to write a little more personally, to talk a little more about who I am and where I’m at. As I mentioned in last week’s post looking back on my first four months on Substack, I’m treating this as my own little magazine — I’m writing the kind of fashion content that I want to read myself, and kinda just hoping that it resonates. 

They say that novices crave encouragement, but experts crave criticism, and that’s absolutely the case for me: I’ve been writing for over ten years now, but now that I’m completely self-employed, I don’t have any colleagues to bounce ideas around with or get feedback from. So any constructive criticism I receive is super valuable, especially at this early stage into my Substack project. So if this piece is interesting, boring, relevant, not relevant, whatever — do let me know in the comments. 

January is a time for new beginnings — it’s the month to start a gym memberships, quit booze and download meditation apps. I’m not normally a big resolutions guy, but at the beginning of the year I always take some time to do a wardrobe audit. It’s not really a cleanse, it’s more about taking a look through all the clothes I own, and seeing how I feel about them. Maybe that means putting a piece or two up on Vinted or Grailed, but maybe not.

I don’t have that much stuff to get rid of these days, as I’m very much in a BIFL mindset (that’s Buy It For Life for those of you who aren’t on Reddit). I’m wary of too much branding, spend a lot of time trying stuff on, even when shopping online, and am happy to spend more to get my hands on something I’ll wear for years (otherwise known as trading up). But in the past, I’ve done a lot of clear outs. Actually, it was more like one giant, years-long cleanse. 

As I explained in my book, I used to really suck at shopping, and after I left my old job at Highsnobiety, I spent a lot of time figuring out what the hell went wrong with my shopping habits. A lot of this ended up going into the book — I spent such a big portion of it questioning society’s shopping habits, because I was putting so much energy into questioning my own. You’d think someone who was working in the heart of the industry would be a) well dressed and b) good at buying clothes but no, I sucked at both. Here’s how I put it in my book: 

“I used to be bad at shopping. Back when I was working as a fashion editor, my professional life revolved around new collections, collaborations, drops and designers. I was essentially injecting consumerism into my veins for eight hours a day. And while there are some in the industry who can endure that with their sense of self control intact, I couldn’t. I know people love to hear about personal journeys but honestly, my experience of consumerism was a pretty common one. I filled my life up with stuff that I neither liked nor needed, and spent a lot of money doing it.”

I wasn’t especially indulgent compared to most in the industry — even at the height of my bad habits, I probably owned around ten jackets and ten pairs of shoes — but I had a ton of stuff that I didn’t wear. Like most people, I ended up wearing the same things over and over again, with the majority of my belongings lingering in the back of my wardrobe. And even then, I didn’t feel great about the things I did wear. I might have been reviewing collections and interviewing designers for a living, but clothes were just something I put on my body before I headed into the office.