How to have fewer clothes and be happier about it

One mom's quest

I love studying clothes, as if they were a field of research, and analyzing how stylish people dress. I think about clothes more than I ought. I wish I were thinking about other things, like the fruits of the spirit or constitutional law, but there you have it.

I’m not naturally stylish. I’m not good at making outfits. It’s clear to anyone who has looked at me and my shoes that I have no interest in fashion and trends, but I remain deeply curious about what people wear and why. I also enjoy buying clothes and wearing them, but I vacillate greatly between my desire to own a lot less and my desire to try something new.

From whence does this desire come?

Nature vs. nurture in the closet

Do girls love playing dress-up because they’ve been brainwashed by society that they’re supposed to be pretty little objects?

OR is there something innate in females, even from a very young age, that makes them love decoration and feeling beautiful?

OR have I just been hoodwinked by consumerist culture that I’m supposed to love and have many clothes?

A large portion of my girlhood was spent playing dress-up with my sisters.

I don’t know; we can argue about it forever. As always, it’s probably a mix of all of the above (and more). Wherever it comes from, women tend to love clothes—and having lots of them—more than men do.

Quick stats, to set the table:

• The numbers vary wildly, but on average, women have about 152 items of clothing, whereas men have about 56.¹

• Since 2017, women’s clothing has become 40% more expensive (whereas men’s clothing has become 25% more expensive). The pink tax is very real.²

• Accordingly, women spend 40% more on clothing than men do.³ (Although there are some very interesting contradictory studies coming out suggesting that Gen-Z men spend more on clothing and shoes than women! The tide is turning!⁴)

Women’s fashion also has a tremendous amount of variability in type of garment and style, whereas men’s fashion remains incredibly limited. Men have a few basic shapes, patterns, and colors to choose from, and that’s it. Women have every possible clothing option under the sun. Is this because women are naturally shallow and preening? Is it because women just enjoy clothes more? Is it simply the market responding to this difference in demand, or is the disparity being forced on us by society? Is this difference because men, on the whole, are afraid to wear something “weird” or more expressive? I dunno.

But I know that I care a lot more about clothes than Guion, who owns basically the same garment in various shades of blue. He always looks great, but he needs (and wears) very little. My entire wardrobe is probably 5x larger than his, but he also wears a lot less. He could subsist on five to six whole outfits for a year. It’s admirable—but it’s also not what I want to do for myself!

I love the work of choosing clothes, wearing them, and caring for them. I enjoy laundry and mending. I look forward to airing out my seasonal wardrobes. I take pride in garments I’ve had for a decade or more. I especially love dresses and always have, ever since I was a small child. When I was 3, my mother would try to put me in shorts or pants, and I’d tear them off, crying, “I am a girl! Put me in a dress!” What can I say? The Patriarchy (or Matriarchy??) got to me early.

Variation of what I wear most days: top tucked into skirt. (Old tank from Everlane, back when it was good, and skirt from World of Crow.) Photo from my pumping dungeon at work.

As I’m entering this (hopefully) lifelong postpartum stage, I’m thinking about my clothes, as I’ve said before. I want to be much more conscious about how I enjoy them and how I consume them.

Clothes are an environmentally wasteful thing to enjoy, for sure. But it is also hard to rank clothing against all of the other environmentally wasteful things we do (eat beef, drive daily, fly in planes, run air conditioning, etc.). So much of our modern American lives are profligate, wasteful, and unsustainable.

But I have a lot of control in this particular department, and so I’m interested in taking a cold, hard look at my closet and my consumption patterns.

How I’m taking clothing consumption more seriously

1. Take inventory of what I have.

Far and away, this has been the most effective way to curb my consumption/desire.

My closet. Not shown: Dresser that holds undergarments, pajamas, and T-shirts.

During my maternity leave, I cleaned out my closet and drawers, and then I spent (a ton of) time cataloging everything I owned with the Acloset app.

Screenshot of part of my closet in the Acloset app

The cataloging process was tedious (and shame-inducing), but now that it’s done, I’m grateful to have it as a resource. I apparently have about 200 clothing items, including shoes, which is… a lot. I definitely do not need this much. Creating an inventory in this app revealed how much I have, and it was more than a little horrifying.

But as a severely type-A person, the app has been enjoyable and useful. This app game-ifys getting dressed in the morning. It’s easier than standing in front of my open closet and wondering what to wear. It makes me more creative with putting items together. It also, importantly, challenges me to wear what I already own.

If you use it faithfully, documenting what you actually wear each day, the app identifies what you’ve never worn (or haven’t worn in a long time), thereby helping you weed out what you don’t need to keep. And if you get really into the weeds, you can also enter how much you spent on each garment, and the app will calculate its average cost per wear. SO nerdy, satisfying, and chastening.

Again, a step like this is probably only appealing to the very anal-retentive like myself, but a detail-oriented closet inventory has been HUGE for me.

Beyond that, just having a well-organized and tidy closet helps you actually see what you have and avoid buying more. Follow the Marie Kondo folding principles, etc., etc. Just like food in the back of the fridge, if you can’t see it, it won’t get used.

2. Buy only one clothing item per month until the end of the year.

I don’t feel like this will be hard for me, but maybe it will?? My company as a whole is taking this challenge together, which helps on the accountability front. And just saying this out loud makes me more intentional about avoiding marketing traps and more introspective about the moments when I’m tempted to buy.

Curbing desire remains an essential step. Culture tells us, all day long, in every possible medium, that money is everything, that stuff is good, that things will make you whole, that wanting is a state of being you should remain in perpetually.

It’s time to resist. From one of my new favorite newsletters Totally Recommend, in a post titled “Is It Even Fun to Constantly Want Things?”:

“What I’m aiming to articulate is the challenging position we find ourselves in while loving fashion as an expression of art and life, and striving to avoid the emptiness that can accompany it. What I *am* suggesting is to truly pay attention to how it feels to want things all the time—in contrast to how it feels when you don’t—you may find it’s like being released from the tight grip of a Rick Owens jacket. I think it’s personally worthwhile for me to understand that as long as I live with the misconception that ‘wanting is always good’ and that I should maximize it, I continue wanting more, and the cycle repeats. If I’m spending all of my time wanting, am I robbing myself of the ability to enjoy what I have? Am I robbing myself of the present moment?”

As my little sister’s tattoo says, be here now. With all of your clothes and with all of your desires. Try to be objective, dispassionate. Don’t let the influencers get to you. Hide out in the real world, where they can’t find you. Don’t let them control your life.

3. When I do buy, buy better.

I buy garbage from fast-fashion brands like everyone else. I want to stop doing this.

The fashion industry is one of the worst offenders on almost every metric of sustainability. It’s a huge source of global waste, labor abuse, and unethical practices.

I’m eager to identify brands that are at least trying to be mindful about the clothes they make.

It’s also really hard to find those brands. Being “green” has become such a hot marketing tactic, and the word “sustainable” is bandied about as if we all had a single accepted definition. Big brands that talk a lot about being sustainable usually aren’t.

A few things I’ve found that work for me:

• Searching the Good on You directory, which rates brands on various metrics. It’s not complete and leaves out many other aspects of “sustainability,” like where the fabric itself comes from, how it’s dyed, who does that part of the labor, etc. But it’s a start. Search the brands you buy from the most often, I dare you. You’ll be dismayed at their rating.

• Shopping secondhand, which is not a skill of mine. I really hate thrifting. It stresses me out. I don’t have the gift. I also hate shopping in person, which feels like such a boring waste of time to me. (But this means that I often make bad decisions online, so it’s really a toss-up. I’m just bad at shopping in general.) Still, it feels great to (1) use something that someone else doesn’t want anymore, (2) not contribute to the massive waste of the fashion industry, which generates 80-100 billion new garments a year, and (3) score something wonderful and old, which will be undeniably better made than whatever you’re currently wearing.

• Buying American-made clothes, if you can find them, generally means that you’re paying for clothes made by workers who receive a relatively fair wage (at least compared with all the rest of the clothes that we wear).

• Buying directly from individual seamstresses/garment makers on Etsy, where you can find more interesting handmade items and order clothes that are custom-made for your body. I have several linen pieces from this shop and this one, owned by a family in Lithuania, and I love the simple caftan I got from this massive Indian fabric storefront. Also interested in this small, handmade Slovakian brand too.

• Shopping the prairie-woman dresses from Christy Dawn, especially once they go on sale. I’m impressed by their commitments to regenerative fashion, land stewardship, reducing waste, and creating clothes made by well-paid artisans. Their dresses are expensive to me, however, so I don’t buy them often and I take care of the ones I have.

The struggle with children’s clothing

It’s harder to avoid fast fashion with my children, who go through clothes like crazy. I often can’t justify spending full-price on the nice organic brands.

Instead, my favorite options for the kiddos are to either receive hand-me-downs or shop consignment. Not novel! But if I do buy them something new, I have shopped these brands, which have primarily organic or OEKO-TEX-certified clothing, during sales: Hanna Andersson, Primary, Kate Quinn (for babies).

In the meantime, give me your bags of cast-off kid clothes! I’ll take them.

4. Donate/consign/clothing swap what I don’t wear.

I need to be more serious about this. I’m not sentimental about clothes; I don’t have an emotional attachment to them. But I do have an illogical sunk-cost attitude toward them: I spent money on this, therefore I should keep it, even if I never wear it.

It can be a paralyzing attitude, leading me (and many others) to hold onto things forever simply because we spent money on them.

Donation is not a perfect solution (only 10%-20% of donated clothes are bought; the rest go into landfills), but it’s something. Obviously, not buying is the biggest step. I’m hosting a clothing swap next month and looking forward to passing on things I no longer wear. It lessens the pain of the sunk cost.

Recommended reading/listening

• The Conscious Closet, Elizabeth L. Cline

• Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, Elizabeth L. Cline

• Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster, Dana Thomas

• Women in Clothes, ed. Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits

• Articles of Interest, podcast on the nuances of fashion and design history by Avery Trufelman (the entire season on American Ivy is impeccable)

• Totally Recommend, a fantastic Substack about fashion consumption/choices/avoiding marketing; great writing

Recommended resources

• Acloset app or Indyx app for wardrobe cataloging (Indyx is prettier, but ACloset has a far superior AI for faster tagging/identifying photos)

• Good on You directory for ratings of clothing brands on various ethical/sustainable metrics

1. The Tailored Times (2023)

2. Yahoo Finance (2024)

3. Motley Fool (2022)

4. Statista (2022)