People-Colored Clothing Declutter

I wrote recently about how I'm drastically paring down my jewelry collection -- by "drastically" I mean I'm getting rid of ALL of it (except for my wedding ring).  I've gifted most of the collection already, and the rest of the assorted collection is getting ready to move into the hands of someone who knows someone who wants the rest.  From now on, as far as jewelry goes, I'll be happily nekkid.

This approach does not work, however, with clothes.  And I have a lot of clothes.  It's not that I do a lot of shopping; I probably buy fewer clothes than anyone in my circle of friends.  But because I take care of my clothes, mending as necessary,  they last me a long time.  (Right now, I'm wearing a black t-shirt from college, with my old dorm logo and the date "'85-'86" stenciled on the front.)   And because I'm nearly a half a century old, I've had a long time to collect a complete wardrobe.   So, between yearly yard saling, free clothes that just happen to come my way, and as-needed mending, I have accumulated a LOT of clothes.

I have so many clothes,  I developed a storage system for putting away the "off-season" clothes . . . and my system has evolved from two seasons to four.   I have so many clothes, that even with my "in-season" clothes, I've constructed elaborate schemes for choosing outfits for seven or even eight weeks into the future.  I have so many clothes, I spend my time fretting over them: organizing, deciding, categorizing . . . it's clear I've reached the stage where I don't own my clothes: they own me.

Alas, I can't do what I did with my earrings.  Even though I have the incredible career protection of tenure, and  even though I am blessed to live in a free country like the USA, I'd lose my job and my freedom if I just gave away all clothes and wore only my wedding ring.  Cold turkey is not an option.

Here's the problem with standard de-clutter advice.  They say, "if you haven't worn it for a year, get rid of it."   But what if you're an organizational, list-loving freak like me who takes that advice to mean, "Figure out a way to wear all your clothes every year"?    Should I really keep 40 different dresses that I wear two times each?  Because, man, they're taking up space in my closet, and they're taking packing/organizing/deciding space in my brain.

So I decided it's okay to come up with my own, completely arbitrary rule.  Rules, as any poet knows, do not stifle a person; they allow for creativity and flair.  Think of the difficulty of rhyme and meter; both of those are huge impositions on the English language.  And yet, when you do impose rhyme and meter, you get incandescent sentences, like this:

SHE walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that 's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes.

Byron was a free-wheeling, rule-breaking kind of guy, but when he wanted to write something beautiful, he bound himself to the rules of poetry.  And, in my own less poetic or enduring way, I created rules for the closet.

So here was my rule.  I would toss all my clothes, EXCEPT for clothes I like in these three categories:

1. Black clothes, white clothes, black-and-white clothes.
2. Brown clothes, yellow clothes, (segued to include some hot-pink clothes).
3. Personally meaningful clothes.

The third category let me keep, for example, the blue Jackie-Kennedy-esque dress that my grandmother made for my mom.  I admit there's a bunch of wiggle room in category 3, but I don't think I abused it.

But even with the wiggle room of that last category, I found that this scheme let me do a very quick, mentally easy sorting-and-giving of clothes.  I'm down to about half of my former clothes, nearly effortlessly, and still loving the variety that's left.  Better yet, almost everything in my closet matches almost everything else.  

It was after I did the sort-and-give that I realized:  categories 1 and 2 give me "people colored clothes" (at least, in the sense that those are the colors we use to describe people's skin, even though of course those are mostly ridiculous descriptions).  I have no idea what that means about my closet and my clothes and me, but I sort of like it.