After my last blog post about The Minimalists and changing the way I live my life [dramatic, much?] I made a list of the things I wanted to de-clutter in my life.
First on the list is my wardrobe.
Now, a true minimalist only owns the bare minimum in clothing. I have seen Youtube videos where people only own 3o items. Whilst that’s great for them I never want to live my life based on what other people say is right! For me the idea of minimalism is a sliding scale and I don’t want to be at the far, far end of it! Perhaps at some point I’ll get closer to that end but right now I’m happy with being in the middle… ish.
Here is a picture of my wardrobe before I began:
It’s a bit of a mess!
Every shelf is overflowing with things! I don’t mind being a messy person – I like to think it’s a sign of my creativity [yeah, right], but I know when it comes to my wardrobe it’s because I’m lazy and own too much.
The whole bottom shelf is basically jeans and I only actually wear about 4 pairs of them, which is stupid.
I have managed to keep 2 blue pairs, a black pair, a grey pair and a purple pair because you need purple jeans. You just do!
The majority of my clothes is made up of t-shirts and jumpers. Being that I live in the beautifully weather-kind UK I didn’t get rid of any jumpers. They are my pride and joy [along with my scarves]. I suffer from what I’d consider chronic coldness – I’m never warm. Ever. So I have a good stash of jumpers to keep me going through the winter which tends to last several months. When it comes to summer my t-shirt collection is made up of very anti-minimalist items.
Of all the videos I’ve watched regarding cleansing the closet most people only have a handful of plain t-shirts. I’m sure I’ll make some good purchases soon but, for now, my t-shirts all have prints on them because I’m a teenage boy living in a woman’s body. It’s my aim to keep moving forward with my wardrobe and go through it at the end of every month but, for now, I’m happy keeping the clothes that I know I’m going to wear in the coming months with the aim of replacing items once I find good shops which sell ethical clothing – if you know any ethically sound stores in the UK please let me know!!
After 30 minutes of going through every item and asking myself ‘does this bring me joy’ I ended up with this:
Yes, it looks like I’ve only tidied up, which I did, but I have actually managed to get a good pile of clothes together to donate to a charity shop and I have a whole free shelf, now!
Like I said before, this is not the end of my journey! I am going to keep at it until I have a basic wardrobe that I can depend on for a long time which also meets my needs in terms of ethically sourced clothes, too [more on that later!].
I’m happy with my progress, though. If you’ve done this let me know how your first foray into it was – I’d love to know if anyone manages to de-clutter in one fell swoop!
Just for proof; this is the [smallish] pile of discarded items I’m donating:
Juno loved the fact that I’d piled clothes up because it gave her the opportunity to throw them all on the floor a moment after this picture was taken! Word of the wise – be forgiving of naughty dogs! I’ve learnt that shouting at her only makes her even naughtier!
As always – let me know in the comments what you think and like and share this post if you want!
Sam
Pretty Thoughtful Blog 
love this kind of thing so much
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