Five Steps To Start A Capsule Wardrobe

Do you ever say to yourself I have nothing to wear, even though your closet may be full of clothes? It is stressful to have an overwhelming closet filled with things that you love to wear. Can you honestly agree that you wear 100% of the items that are in your wardrobe? If the answer is no then keep on reading to discover how to start effectively decluttering your closet and build a wardrobe that you will love to wear every day.

What is a Capsule Wardrobe?

A capsule wardrobe is a collection of selected essential items that are timeless and don’t go out of fashion. (You already have a capsule wardrobe in your closet). A capsule wardrobe has the items that you love to wear every day. Many minimalists claim that a capsule wardrobe should have a determined amount of items going from 30 to 50 all year long. A capsule wardrobe should be built around your lifestyle with things that make you feel happy and that you love to wear on repeat.

Steps to start a capsule wardrobe:

Step 1: Analyze your Style and Lifestyle

The most important step to building a wardrobe that you will love is to know our style. Ask yourself these questions:

  • What is my primary activity?
  • What do I like to do in my free time?
  • What staples predominate in my closet? 

These basic questions will get you started so that you can become aware of everything that you have and better understand how to strategically shop from now on.

Step 2: Track what you like to wear for 30 days

There are many ways to do this, either by manually tracking down what you wore every day in a notebook.

Step 3: Clean Out Your Closet

After documenting what you effortlessly wore during 30 days you will have a better understanding of your current capsule wardrobe that already exists in your closet. There is no magic number, a capsule is about selecting the things you love to wear, and of course, you will have cute formal dresses that you wear once a year to a wedding, or your sportswear and sleepwear. These items are not part of your capsule.

Step 4: Define your color palette

A color palette is something optional but very useful when building a capsule wardrobe because it is a reference guide for future shopping. After the experiment of wearing 30 items for 30 days you will find out what colors you like to wear more often, so these can become part of your color palette reference guide, and the next time you shop for something you can have a guideline for looking for colors that blend in with what you love to wear and already have.

Step 5: Create your wishlist!

Now that you selected your essentials and donated what you don’t love, it’s time to create a visual or mental map of your capsule or capsules to help you shop less.

Let’s say that when you divided your clothes into categories you found out that many of your “all-year basics” can be used during fall and winter, so now you don’t have an excuse to buy a new sweater, try to find new ways of layering and challenge yourself to wear your sweaters again in every season.

You might also have found in your closet cleanout that you don’t have enough fresh and breathable tops for spring, so you can make a wishlist of how many extra tops you think you might need to complete your spring capsule.