Audit Your Closet: The First Step To Fashion Dieting

Can you slim your wardrobe down to only 10 garments for 30 days?
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Photo by Sarah Brown on Unsplash

A few years ago, a sample of forty-two undergraduate fashion students agreed to limit their outfits to a revolving six clothing pieces over a 30-day period as part of an experiment on the influence of immersive activities on consumer attitudes and behaviors. Before starting their wardrobe diets, each student conducted an audit of their closets, summing the total number of clothing pieces -- shirts, shorts, pants, jackets, sweaters, etc. (not including undergarments, socks, or accessories) -- to get an idea of their current closet size. Despite mild tantrums, most students were able to shake off any initial embarrassment and carry out their strict regime over the entire 30-day period with greater ease than anticipated. The looming fear of being singled out for wearing the same outfit over a noticeable period of time dwindled quickly. Ultimately, most students reported favorable attitudes towards more sustainable fashion consumption practices, including decreasing their overall shopping and repurposing clothing. 

In light of this, I thought It’d be fun to encourage everyone to immerse themselves in a fashion diet. If limiting yourself to six pieces sounds a bit too minimalistic, I am going to suggest you try ten. To start, count up all the garments you own to get an idea of your current closet size. Students in the study reported owning anywhere between 38 and 500 garments, with an average of 188 pieces. So, I guess my 103 count makes this the first time I can boast about falling below average. I asked my girlfriend, a renounced fast fashionist, to audit her closet as well, and she came back with a count of 175 total pieces. She even went a step further and collected data in a neatly subcategorized spreadsheet, organized by type of garment and frequency worn (she knows I geek for datasets). While you don’t have to keep a tally of the same data, it is insightful to know that 39% of her closet consists of pieces she’s either never worn or has only worn once or twice, and while a 10-garment diet requires her to shrink her wardrobe to roughly 5%, she is already rotating only 43% of her closet on any given day. Similarly, you may be surprised to realize during your audit that you tend to circulate the same handful of garments already, making the diet easier than it seems.


After the audit, carefully pick out the ten pieces of clothing, including your preferred mix of bottoms/tops/jackets/etc. (undergarments, socks and accessories not included, of course). Note the 30-day mark on your calendar, and have fun combining the same clothing articles into different outfits. Rotating ten pieces of clothing shouldn’t be too hard since there are dozens of ways to combine them. Here’s a fun probability question: how many different ways can you combine 5 shirts, 3 pants, and 2 sweaters? The answer is 30 (5x3x2)! That’s 30 unique ‘fits over 30 days so you don’t have to worry about being an outfit repeater -- a faux pas you wouldn’t dare commit, irl or online. You can keep posting selfies and no one would even know you’ve been rotating the same few clothing pieces. Of course, you can allocate ten garments any way you’d like, depending on local weather conditions and your personal fashion style. 


I encourage you to journal your thoughts and take photos along the way to make the experience more immersive and keep yourself committed to completing your diet. My hope is that trying out this experiment will bring you slightly closer to a more conscious approach to fashion consumption and maybe even make you rethink your current shopping habits. As individual consumers, we have the unique power to reject predatory practices employed by multi-billion dollar industries looking to capitalize on our pursuit of pleasure at the expense of our ever-shrinking attention span. The fast fashion industry operates as a kind of well-oiled machine, moving at dizzying speeds to bombard shoppers with a spew of quick, cheap designs that may or may not take off in popularity, a choice overload harmful to humans, animals, and the planet. 

It is no secret that the fashion industry saturates consumers with a stream of 52 mini-seasons, one for each week of the year. To keep up with or perhaps justify the speed of these trends, companies like Forever 21, H&M and more recently e-retailers like SHEIN continuously shuffle inexpensive garments on their store racks and websites, increasing a shopper’s ability to buy new items as they become available. I think many of us can admit to buying a cute shirt or a pair of jeans just because it was on sale and never wearing it more than once or twice, if at all. Chances are some of these pieces might even be hanging in our closets with tags on! Fast fashion companies have also capitalized off the rise of influencer culture by sponsoring popular internet and fashion figures to promote their brands and create supportive media content, while collaborating with social media giants such as Instagram and Snapchat to facilitate shopping through easy swipe-technology that links a sponsored influencer's outfit to the website where their followers can buy it in a matter of seconds. Frivolous spending has never been easier!

It’s not just apparel; It’s the footwear industry too, that has been dishing out an increasing number of styles designed to keep customers searching for the next perfect pair of shoes to compliment their 'fits of the day to be shared on social media under #OOTD. The rise of subscription service companies like ShoeDazzle which allow subscribers to receive special discounts and offers like free shipping, 25% off, and other members-only benefits for a sort of promise to spend at least $39.95 (or whatever the monthly rate is) on fresh, new styles every month, has become another popular mechanism for the fashion industry to practically shove consumerism down our throats. Of course, customers have the ability to opt out of the fee on a month-by-month basis, but doing so usually requires giving customer service a call and not being suckered in by one of their sensationalized offer emails. 

The fashion industry is very good at convincing you to continuously increase your wardrobe and dispose of used items relatively quickly by adapting to social hype waves, such as the “lounge sets” and “comfort wear” that gained popularity as people stayed home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Preying on our social media dependencies during a global pandemic, a whole line of loungewear fashion designed to look and make you feel sexy while relaxing at home gained traction as celebrities and common folk alike turned to their social media accounts to showcase their stay at home ‘fits, never uploading more than one picture in the same getup, of course, because as I mentioned earlier, doing so is considered a social blunder (awfully conveniently for the fashion industry).


I won’t go into detail here about the unethicality of many large fashion brand companies and the way they harm entire communities and marine ecosystems away from our visual field because a quick Google search can tell you all you need to know about exploitative practices in the fashion industry. From outsourcing labor to stealing fashion designs, most well-known large brands are accused of a running list of violations and injustices on a global scale. I encourage you to do a little research into some of your favorite companies to see how they conduct business and further reflect on how your own practices and habits may contribute to combating harmful practices. 


The reality, at least in my opinion, is that there truly is no need to stockpile a surplus of clothing or cycle into each fashion trend. Auditing your closet and challenging yourself to this 30-day wardrobe diet are great first steps towards practicing more sustainable consumption. Growing conscious of our own consumption habits is an important step in reducing our environmental footprint and abating waste. Repurposing clothing, donating it, or selling it on second-hand clothing platforms like PoshMark instead of trashing garments are all solid steps to take towards a more sustainable lifestyle. Whether you already employ these practices in your life or not, I encourage everyone to try out the 30-day wardrobe diet and feel free to share your frustrations with me along the way! 

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