From InStyle
By Eric Wilson
Could I get my life together in 12 months — with no new clothes?
While it seems as if the rest of the world has been caught up in a Marie Kondo–inspired whirl of tidying up, I, dear reader, have taken the decluttering craze to the next level. For an entire year I went on a shopping diet.
The rules were simple: Twelve months, no new clothes (not counting underwear and socks — I’m not a deviant, thank you very much). This was penance for a lifetime of gluttonous consumption of things I hardly needed or rarely wore. What I discovered, like so many shopping-diet enthusiasts before me, was that my relationship with fashion was not entirely healthy, and not at all rational. Day by day I cleansed my wardrobe of joy-deficient sweaters, complex-inducing jeans, and one what-was-I-thinking turquoise corduroy suit. By the end of this self-imposed fast, my closets and drawers had become neatly organized shrines to functionality, my thoughts less fractured about what to wear each day, my savings account the equivalent of a fitness model’s “after” picture…
…Still, Kondo has obviously touched a nerve for millions of dissatisfied consumers. Since the 2008 financial crisis, decluttering movements and shopping diets have proliferated as much as our “stuff” used to do. The currently popular “buy nothing” diet is self-explanatory, but there have been others, like the restrictive Great American Apparel Diet or challenges that ask shoppers to make do with what they already own, wearing only six items from their loset for a month. The “five-piece French wardrobe,” composed of only a handful of statement pieces, plus basics, takes its inspiration from the Parisian approach of elegance through restraint. But we all can’t be Carine Roitfeld.
“More and more I see people want fewer items but ones that they love and appreciate,” says Carol Davidson, an image consultant and life coach in New York City. “Basically, we are being bombarded by stimuli, constant messages in our in-boxes and voice mail. People want a more simplified lifestyle, and that starts in the closet every morning.”
Lots of factors are driving this shift, Davidson says. Concern for the environment, boredom with traditional retail, worries about the economy, and a desire for more individual styles are inspiring people to shop their own closets. “Twenty years ago the service most in demand was personal shopping,” she says. “Now it’s styling, working with what people already have.”
