Avoid too many clothes, especially in bright colors!
This is part 1 of a 2 part post.
Recently I went through and did the old 80/20 analysis on my wardrobe again.
Sometimes I do it for a need of extra space, sometimes I do it when I move, but most of the time it is when I need to de-clutter my wardrobe for mental clarity and hence an internal style boost.
How many clothes we need, is a question that comes up all the time.
The problem is that the majority of people think that more clothes = style.
Less is more
I don’t believe that more clothes is always the best way. In fact buying more clothes is essentially just compensating for not knowing what to buy for “your look” and an attempt to cover all bases due to lack of “knowledge”
After all, I am sure we all have our favorite few outfits (or crutch outfits) that we all refer back to in case of emergency and am positive that if we tracked it we would wear approx 20% of our clothes the majority of the time, which makes buying more and more clothes pointless anyway.
How much then?
The problem still is “well how much should I have then?” I stumbled across a couple formula’s that I have adapted somewhat that gives a guide to how many articles you should have for each of the following basic items:
- Shirts
- Trousers
- Jeans
- Suits
For other articles of clothing you can apply the same general principles of these formulae, just adapt them slightly to suit your needs. If you would like to know what I would recommend for other clothing items please feel free to email me at info@stylethroughintelligence.com.
The formula’s
Basically, as a rough guide, you can calculate how many articles of each of the different pieces of clothing you need using the number of days that you are likely to wear them in one year:
D(x)= approx number of days per year that you will wear article x.
N(x) = the number of pieces of clothing x that you will need based on D(x)
The result N(x) should always be rounded up for example if the result came back as 1.34 then the answer is expressed as 2, i.e. 2 shirts.
Shirts
The number of shirts needed is the square root of the amount of days per year that you will wear them:
N(shirts) = √D(shirts)
Trousers
The number of trousers needed is the cube root:
N(trousers) = 3√D(trousers)
So as an example if you wear shirts and trousers to work each day (with or without a tie, but the tie is neglected in this example):
You would wear them for approx 50 weeks (52 – two weeks vacation) for 5 working days per week.
i.e. D (shirts and trousers) = 250
Hence:
N (shirts) = √250 = 16; and
N (trousers) = 3√250 = 7
So you will need 16 shirts and 7 pairs of trousers for work. This could potentially give you (16 x 7) 112 different combination’s to wear.
However, as I am sure you will know that not all you shirts are likely to go with all of your trousers. So let’s just assume half your shirts will match up with half of your trousers, which will give you (8 x 4) 32 different combination’s to wear. This is 6 weeks before you have to wear exactly the same thing again.
Now imagine changing it up every second time you wear an outfit, by adding a sweater. This would give you a 3 month (12 weeks) bank of potential outfits. Add a jacket and you will have half a year (6 months) etc. I am sure you get the picture.
This post will be continued in part 2.
