The Curated Closet
Page 1
Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Title Page
What is The Curated Closet?
Introduction: A tale of bargains, impulse buys, and seasonal must-haves
Closet diagnostics: Why you don’t have anything to wear
Part I: The Basics
1 / The Curated Closet philosophy
2 / Getting started: Define the status quo and set style goals
Part II: Discover Your Personal Style
3 / What your clothes say about you
4 / Discover your style, phase 1: Get inspired
5 / Discover your style, phase 2: Experiment and fine-tune
6 / Putting it all together: Your style profile
Part III: Build Your Dream Wardrobe
7 / Closet detox: The complete guide
8 / How to build a wardrobe that fits your life (not your fantasy life)
9 / Closet composition 101
10 / Selecting a versatile colour palette
11 / Working with outfit formulas
12 / Business hours: Tweaking your wardrobe for work
13 / Overhauling your wardrobe: A step-by-step road map
14 / How (and when) to build a capsule wardrobe
15 / Become your own best stylist
Part IV: The Art of Shopping
16 / How to shop like a conscious consumer
17 / Decision time: When to buy and when to keep looking
18 / How to stop overspending and make the most of your budget
19 / Assessing garment quality: A beginner’s guide
20 / Practical pointers for finding clothes that fit well
21 / Maintaining and updating your wardrobe throughout the year: A timeline
A final note
Index
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Book
For anyone who turns their bedroom upside down before going out, feels like they are wearing the same old thing or finds shopping a chore, The Curated Closet will change your wardrobe and your life.
Berlin-based style writer Anuschka Rees rejects the clichéd fashion rules and encourages you to look in your wardrobe and at your life, as well as in the mirror, to create the style guidelines that truly speak to you.
With her refreshingly practical approach, complete with expert tips, infographic questionnaires and tailored shopping strategies (and how to put them into action), get the wardrobe you’ve always wanted, develop your own personal look and live a stylish and fulfilling life.
You will never say ‘I have nothing to wear’ ever again.
About the Author
Anuschka Rees is a writer and the founder of popular style blog INTO-MIND.com.
Her minimal ethos and background in social psychology inspires her unique, life-changing approach to shopping and style. She lives in Berlin, Germany. The Curated Closet is her first book.
@anuschkarees
@intomind
What is The Curated Closet?
The Curated Closet is a wardrobe that’s perfectly tailored to your unique personal style and your life. It contains everything you need to feel confident and inspired everyday – no more and no less. It is not based on trends, style typologies or a one-size-fits-all list of ‘wardrobe essentials.’
Your life isn’t the same as everyone else’s, so why should your closet be?
Introduction
A tale of bargains, impulse buys, and seasonal must-haves
Here’s where it all started: in London, in a studio apartment in Camden Town.
That apartment was truly tiny, but the closet inside was huge and jam-packed. I had a ton of clothes – and absolutely nothing to wear.
The strange thing was that, given the time, energy and money I had spent on my clothes, you’d think I’d have a lot more to show for it. I have always been really into fashion, had a subscription to at least five different fashion magazines from age fifteen onwards, and knew my herringbone from my houndstooth early on. I went shopping almost every weekend and spent many evenings on the sofa clicking through eBay listings and checking the new arrivals page of my favourite online stores.
In short: I was really excited about fashion and definitely not a newbie. And yet, despite my clear obsession and a full closet, it routinely took me more than an hour to come up with a single outfit to wear to a party, let alone brunch on Sundays or any other occasion that called for more than my go-to jeans and a T-shirt.
Of course, in retrospect, the reasons for my wardrobe troubles now seem pretty obvious.
For starters, I was a poor student living in London, one of the most expensive cities in the world, and, like most other fashion-conscious students on a budget, I tried to make the most of what little money I had by spreading it across as many pieces as possible. I shopped exclusively at fast-fashion, low-priced retailers, kept close tabs on the sales sections at all times, and considered a T-shirt costing more than ten pounds a ‘total rip-off’. I was also a complete sucker for great deals like three-for-two, had at least ten different store cards, and would often get up in the middle of the night to stalk whatever ‘bargain’ I had found on eBay.
Ironically, I was pursuing my master’s in psychology at that time and really should have known better than to fall for the most basic sales technique there is: short-term price reductions. The fact that for most people all reasonable decision making goes out the window as soon as they are faced with huge price reductions is something you learn in Social Psychology 101. If I saw something on sale that looked interesting, I would rationalise even obvious faults with the piece and lower my standards. I felt that 20 per cent off meant I could compromise on things like fit or how the fabric felt on my skin, and of course those were always the pieces that got tossed to the back of my closet after one wear.
Apart from my questionable shopping strategy, I also had a very warped idea of what it meant to dress well. To me, having great style and dressing according to the latest trends were one and the same. And consequently, I also thought there was only one version of style, only one way to dress well that I somehow had to get behind and emulate.
In some ways this idea made things seem relatively straightforward, because it meant there are clear-cut rules and principles that would eventually turn you into the ultra-stylish, confident person you long to be, as long as you followed them. And so that’s what I tried to do. I studied fashion magazines and runway shows and then tried to hunt down as many budget-friendly alternatives to the season’s must-haves as possible. I had my seasonal colour type all figured out, was really into body-shape typologies, and filled out every style quiz I could find. I tried to stick exclusively to the recommended colours and silhouettes for my colouring and body type and went on to stock my closet with a crisp white button-down shirt, a black blazer, classic pumps, and all the other pieces that fashion magazines had identified as ‘essential’.
I bought right into the one-size-fits-all mentality that the entire fashion industry so often conveys, perhaps not out of bad will, but for simplicity’s sake and to satisfy a demand for quick fixes.
In retrospect, it’s no wonder that I was unhappy with my wardrobe. I was stuck in the typical life cycle of the fast shopper.
Because I was all about getting a good deal, I based my purchasing decisions above all on the price of a piece, rather than its quality, how well it fit into my existing wardrobe, or even how much I liked it. I never took the time to truly figure out how I wanted to dress and what type of clothes would work for my life. I didn’t have a strategy. I bought clothes on impulse and often based on other people’s opinion of them, without listening to my own creative impulses. The combination of all
these factors left me with a mishmash of no-good pieces that suited neither my style nor my life. I might have had a full closet, but I didn’t have anything to wear that I was actually excited about, and because of that, I always needed more. I kept on buying, more and more of the same low-quality stuff, usually for every new party or event that came up. But every new purchase of course just added to what was already an incoherent mess. Everything was just another quick fix.
Fast forward a couple of years: I still love fashion and still have my magazine subscriptions, but I’ve stopped chasing trends and wasting my money on flimsy polyester pieces and ‘seasonal must-haves’. I’ve learned how to buy less but choose better. I own fewer clothes now, but I actually have something to wear.
So what happened? Well, I eventually became so unhappy with the state of my wardrobe that I realised my entire approach needed a serious overhaul. Spending all that money on things I’d never end up wearing started to feel wrong. And then I had a lightbulb moment:
The people I most admire for their style aren’t those that follow every trend and dress in designer clothes from head to toe, but people like Sofia Coppola, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Grace Coddington. These women are style icons not because they follow rules but because they make their own, and each have a strong sense of style and a clear signature look.
After that realisation, I set myself a new goal. I wanted to cultivate my own personal style and sort out the mess that was my wardrobe. And on top of that I also wanted to see if there was somehow a system to all of this. Something that other women could replicate, women like me who were into fashion but for whom the traditional ‘more is more’ approach hadn’t worked out. And so I started my research. I read and reread every book I could find that was somehow related to fashion and tried out every tip I found in magazines, on myself and every willing friend and family member. I started a blog to write about my favourite techniques and continued to tweak and polish them based on the feedback I got from women of all ages from around the world.
This book is the culmination of all my research. Think of it as a toolbox full of tips, techniques, exercises and prompts designed to help you cultivate a strong personal style and build a functional wardrobe that allows you to express it.
The perfect wardrobe isn’t something that you can cook up in a weekend. Your personal style is the result of many different influences, all the people you have met over the years, all the places you have travelled. It’s a truly personal thing that can take a little digging to fully uncover. But don’t worry: the process is a lot of fun too!
Plus, once you have cultivated a strong sense of style, become your own best stylist and built a great wardrobe, those things will stay with you for the rest of your life. And if your wardrobe is important to you and you want to use clothes as a means for self-expression, those are pretty invaluable life skills to have, if you ask me.
Let’s talk strategy! A complete introduction to the five key principles that every single tip, technique and exercise in this book is based on.
1 Be selective: Reserve your closet space for items you love 100 per cent
Training yourself to become more selective is the single most effective thing you can do to upgrade your wardrobe. Try to think of your closet as an exclusive, members-only club. Only pieces that you love and are truly excited to wear get an invite. Anything ill-fitting, scratchy, worn-out, barely ‘good enough’, or that simply doesn’t suit your personal style is not invited.
Now, it may seem common sense to not buy things you don’t really like all that much, let alone keep them in your closet or even wear them, but, in reality, we often make do with imperfect things:
• We buy items that we only half like because they are on sale or a ‘good deal’.
• We wear clothes that are so uncomfortable we need to take them off as soon as we get home.
• We keep items that stopped fitting years ago just in case they fit again someday.
• We wear shoes that we can hardly walk in and that leave our feet covered in blisters.
• We force ourselves to wear pieces that we feel only so-so about because they were expensive and we don’t want to let that ‘investment’ go to waste.
• We wear worn-out, scruffy pieces around the house and hope nobody is going to stop by unannounced.
• We wear clothes that ride up and tug in all the wrong places.
• We wear outfits that don’t make us feel confident or inspired because we simply don’t have anything better in our wardrobe.
And why do we do all these things? Why do we spend our money on stuff that we don’t even like? Why do we put up with clothes that are uncomfortable?
Because it’s easier, at least in the short term. It takes less mental energy to just make a quick decision and buy that top you need for an event at work, even when you don’t really like how it fits around your bustline, than it is to spend another hour looking for one you really love. It’s easier to just keep wearing your worn-out, stretchy pair of jeans than it is to go through the oftentimes exhausting process of finding a pair that fits the individual contours of your body perfectly. Most people are also more comfortable just putting up with battered feet after a night spent in ill-fitting heels than admitting that those eighty pounds were not well spent. In the same way, it’s easier to keep telling yourself you’ll fit into your old favourites again someday, even though they’re now two sizes too small, than it is to let go of them.
Of course, all these decisions make life easier only right in that moment. In the long run, having to keep readjusting a skirt that rides up with each step or deal with straps that painfully dig into your shoulders each time you wear a no-good piece is way more stressful. It’s also stressful to have to comb through piles of clothes each morning just to find one acceptable outfit. And of course, if what you wear is important to you, not being able to find anything you truly love will affect your confidence levels eventually, and that’s stressful too.
In the long run, putting more effort into selecting the right piece always pays off.
But because of our natural human tendency to conserve energy in the short term and choose the easiest route when possible, being more selective when it comes to your wardrobe is something you actively have to practise.
As you work through this book, you will come across many different techniques that will not only help you be more selective but also make the process feel easier. You’ll learn how to assess the quality of potential new wardrobe additions and how to recognise pieces that may look great on the hanger but won’t feel good on your body by the end of a long day. You’ll develop strategies for how to resist clever marketing ploys, de-stress your shopping experience, and prevent impulse buys and other less-than-ideal purchasing decisions. And most important: You will become more and more aware of your own personal style and individual wardrobe needs and eventually be able to tell in an instant whether an item suits your style and works with the rest of your clothes or not.
2 Be authentic: Forget conventional style typologies like ‘classic’ or ‘bohemian’ and create your own unique look
Style typologies and lists of ‘wardrobe essentials’ are to style seekers what fad diets are to people who want to lose a few pounds: quick-fix, one-size-fits-all solutions that make you feel as if you are making progress for a while but ultimately won’t help you address the root of the problem.
When I was younger and still very unsure about my own style, I took these style typologies very seriously and thought if only I managed to curate every single piece recommended for my ‘type’, I would finally become the stylish and impeccably dressed woman I longed to be. Most quizzes put me in the ‘classic’ category, and so I went on to stock my wardrobe with button-down shirts, ballet flats, and, of course, a trench coat. The first time I wore that trench coat, I felt like a little girl playing dressing-up with her mother’s wardrobe, but I tried my best to ignore that feeling. I was following the advice of fashion experts after all; sure
ly they knew what they were talking about, and I probably just had to get used to my chic new look.
And that’s the problem with style typologies, lists of ‘wardrobe essentials’, and really any fashion advice that tells you what to wear or put in your wardrobe: They present you with a neat little ready-made formula for style and thereby keep you from thinking things through for yourself and following your own creative impulses. They promote the idea that ‘style’ can happen in only one of three to seven ways (depending on how many magazine pages need to be filled) and that dressing well is about how well you stick to those rules.
Fad diets, style typologies, and ‘wardrobe essentials’ lists are popular for the same reason: They satisfy a demand for a quick solution and simplify what can feel like a daunting process down to a set of easy-to-follow rules that seem manageable.
The problem is that a ready-made, one-size-fits-all approach can give you only a ready-made, one-size-fits-all wardrobe. Following rules and blueprints is not going to help you cultivate a strong sense of style, because your personal style is just that: deeply personal. Sure, you may like a lot of the same colours, materials or cuts as someone else, but the way you combine these into outfits, the pieces you choose for different occasions, and how you style your looks are all a reflection of your unique likes and dislikes and the influences that you have picked up over the years.
True personal style is always custom-made, so building a generic wardrobe makes little sense.
For example, I have a friend who always wears the most amazing flowy dresses paired with long necklaces and a hat. Based on that description, a run-of-the-mill style quiz would probably classify her as the ‘bohemian’ type and recommend she stock her wardrobe with floral pieces, fringed bags, lots of patterns and warm, bright colours. Her wardrobe in real life? Cool and monochromatic, full of understated accessories, and not a pattern in sight. Her style doesn’t fit into any of the traditional style types, and yet it’s completely cohesive. Each of her outfits represent her unique aesthetic perfectly. It’s impossible to describe her style in a few words, but that doesn’t really matter, because once you have found your personal style, it only needs to make sense to you.