The 'Short-Term Capsule Wardrobe'
A wardrobe experiment to try this week...
Look, I’ve done the whole capsule wardrobe thing—multiple times even! And it just…. doesn’t really work for me as much as I wish it did. It feels a bit too constricting, and I’m constantly trying to tweak it so that I own the ‘perfect’ capsule, which we all know doesn’t really exist. I was striving for an impossible-to-reach end goal - it drives my perfectionist tendencies a little haywire. I thought that if I just had a set of 50 items that could cater for all seasons and all occasions, I’d feel inner peace and crack the code to my personal style in one fail swoop (by the way, if this is you and you live in capsule wardrobe utopia then GO YOU - I’ll forever be a little bit jealous!!!). In the end, I’ve realised that what works for me is attempting a balance of owning an amount of clothing that can easily fit into the space that I have - whenever my rails get a little bulging is when I start to feel overwhelmed - being more mindful with new additions and developing more of an archive of pieces that I love, so appreciating that they might not be something that is at the forefront of every single outfit every season but are things that I enjoy wearing regardless of the trend churn.
The contents of my wardrobe are split across two rails: on one, I keep more out-of-season items, so right now, it’s a mix of heavy winter coats and lighter summer pieces, and then on the other, I have a mix of pieces that I’m reaching for right now. It’s more of a ‘current capsule’, shall we say? All was well and good until I returned from holiday this weekend, and it all felt, quite frankly, overwhelming. I wrote about how I packed 10 items for our trip away and found that having less with me felt freeing. Instead of feeling excited to be reunited with my clothing rail, it felt like it needed a shake-up. Enter the ‘short-term capsule wardrobe’…