Organising your wardrobe sounds like housework. It’s the job you save for a rainy Sunday (or a pandemic lockdown), somewhere between defrosting the freezer and finally sorting the drawer of mystery cables. But after more than 20 years of standing inside other women’s wardrobes, I can tell you that an organised wardrobe is one of the most underrated style tools you’ll ever own. The tidiness is a side effect. The real payoff is what it does for your creativity and how quickly you can get dressed each morning.
Why an Organised Wardrobe Is a Style Tool, Not a Chore
Here’s a confession. I’m essentially lazy when it comes to getting dressed. I don’t want to spend 20 minutes rummaging every morning, and I suspect you don’t either. So my wardrobe has to do the hard work for me.
It’s arranged by garment type first (tops together, skirts together, trousers together, jackets together), then by colour within each section. Because I wear my signature colours, that means a run of pinks, reds, light greens, turquoise and cobalt blues. If I go looking for my pink jacket and it isn’t sitting between the reds and the purples, I don’t need to search. It’s in the wash or at the dry cleaner. That one small habit has saved me hours over the years.
But the time saving is only the first benefit, and honestly, it’s the least interesting one.
The Clothes You Forgot You Owned
Clutter hides things. When clothes are crammed in with no order, you stop seeing them, and what you can’t see you don’t wear.
I see it in almost every Wardrobe Edit I do, but I’ll always remember one client who firmly told me she had no green tops. When we reorganised everything by colour and garment type, we found 20 of them. Twenty! They’d been scattered through the wardrobe, buried behind jackets and folded into the wrong drawers, hung underneath other garments, so in her mind they simply didn’t exist.
And don’t get me started on those hangers that are supposed to be space-saving that concertina downwards, so you never actually see what’s on them. And if you layer more than one garment on a hanger, there is little chance you’ll wear the bottom layer.
That’s the first hidden benefit. Organising is like going shopping without spending a cent. You get back pieces you’d mentally written off, and suddenly your wardrobe feels bigger than it did yesterday.
How Order Sparks Style Creativity
This is the benefit nobody expects. You’d think creativity needs chaos, a bit of glorious mess. In a wardrobe, it’s the opposite.
When your tops are hanging in colour order, you can take one patterned skirt and literally run it along the rail. Every top that picks up a colour from the print jumps out at you. Then you do the same with your jackets and cardigans. In five minutes you’ve found combinations you’d never have spotted when everything was jammed together at random.
Order gives your eye a map. And once your eye can see the relationships between pieces (this coral echoes that print, this cobalt sharpens that navy), you start playing. That’s when getting dressed stops being a chore and becomes what I believe it really is, a small creative act you get to do every day.
You’ll Shop Smarter, Too
An organised wardrobe also changes how you shop, and this is where it starts saving you money.
There’s a name for the trap many of us fall into. Anthropologist Grant McCracken called it the Diderot effect, after the philosopher Denis Diderot, who bought one splendid new dressing gown and then felt compelled to replace everything around it because nothing else matched. One purchase made the rest look shabby, and the spending spiralled.
A cluttered wardrobe makes you far more vulnerable to that spiral. You can’t see what you already have, so you buy things that don’t connect to anything, and each orphan piece creates a “need” for something else. When your clothes are visible and grouped, you walk into a shop knowing exactly what’s missing. One new piece extends your wardrobe instead of unravelling it.
How to Organise Your Wardrobe for Inspiration
You don’t need a walk-in robe or a renovation budget. You need a few principles and an afternoon.
Clear before you sort. There’s no point organising clothes you’ll never wear. My favourite test: imagine you’re buying the item back from an op shop. Would you pay for it in its current condition? If not, let it go. If you want a more thorough process, here are 9 easily actionable ways of decluttering your wardrobe. And if letting go feels harder than it should, you’re not alone, which is why I wrote about the wardrobe grief we don’t talk about.
Group by type, then by colour. I start at white and travel through the rainbow to black. Patterned pieces go into the section of their most dominant colour. It takes an extra minute when you put the washing away, and it gives you back far more than that every morning. I’ve written about creating an ordered wardrobe in more detail if you want to go deeper.
Let your space decide the system. A wardrobe full of cubbies needs smaller categories than one long hanging rail. One of my clients, who loved micro-organising, sorted her clothes by colour contrast combinations. It wouldn’t suit me, but it made perfect sense to her visual brain, and that’s the point. The right system is the one you’ll actually keep and find useful.
Swap your hangers. Matching hangers are a small change with a surprisingly big effect. Part of why boutiques feel so inviting is the way clothes are hung, and the same trick makes your own wardrobe feel like a place you want to shop. The reason why I love the same hangers is that all garments hang at the same height; even a small height change from one hanger style to another can make a garment appear to be hiding.
Keep accessories in sight. I like my necklaces on hooks, my earrings in clear compartments and my scarves rolled and sorted by colour. If I can’t see it, I forget it’s there, and an accessory you forget is an outfit you never make.
Rotate by fabric weight. I don’t pack my whole wardrobe away each season, but I do move the woollens out in summer and the lightweight pieces out in winter. Fewer options that all work beats a crowded rail of things you can’t wear today or won’t be wearing in the next month. Melbourne is a nortoriously “4 seasons in one day” place, so I need to have more variety in weights and styles of clothes to adjust from summer one day to winter the next.
Photograph your wins. When you find a combination that works, take a photo and save it in an album on your phone. Over time, that album becomes your collection of go-to outfits, ready for the mornings when your brain isn’t.
Treat Your Organised Wardrobe Like a Kitchen
I say this a lot, and I’ll keep saying it: your wardrobe works like a kitchen. Nobody keeps dinner plates scattered through every cupboard. Like goes with like, and everything has a place you can find and return it to.
Kitchens also need regular checks. I once found a sauce in my fridge that had expired in 2016, so I’m in no position to judge. Clothes expire quietly too. When something no longer fits your body, your life or the woman you are now, it’s earned its retirement. Pass it on to someone who’ll love it, and make space for the pieces that make you feel like yourself.
So here’s your one small challenge for this week: pick a colour, any colour, and count how many tops you own in it. Then come back and tell me in the comments. Did you find your own 20 green tops?
