5 Tips on How to Build Your Wardrobe
If you want to simplify the process of creating your wardrobe try these 5 tips to help you learn how to build your wardrobe quickly.
Today I’m going to talk about how to get that dream wardrobe faster. You’re probably here, or you found me or you’re listening because you want to solve some of your style problems and feel good in your clothes. The truth is there’s a lot of stuff that has to happen inside your head as well to get you there faster.
I assume that you want to have the wardrobe of your dreams, and while that may mean something different for everyone listening today, the truth is that a wardrobe of your dream dreams is typically filled with a couple of different things.
One of those things is clothes that you love, right? No clothes that you don’t love and no clothes that you don’t wear. It only has space for things that you love. The other thing is that it’s filled with clothes that make you look your best, that accentuate your best features, your colors, your style, all of these things.
When we talk about creating a dream wardrobe a lot of us may look for shortcuts like capsule wardrobes done for you or start copying trends.
There’s a lot of different ways that we go about this and I want you to really understand that it’s such a process. You can’t really shortcut this. This is not something that you can walk into your closet and do in a day. Each step requires you to take time, effort, and introspection to figure out who you are and what you want. I do want to share five things that I have found to help you get there faster.
Some of them are things that you’re doing wrong, but some of them are ways of changing the way you think about things because the way you think has a huge impact on how you look and how your wardrobe turns out. This is something that I have only really hit this summer, especially in the last year through some of the things that I’m going to share here today.
Table of Contents
How to Build Your Wardrobe Tip#1: Shop Mindfully
Without further ado, let’s talk about the first thing that you need to do to get your dream wardrobe created faster, and that is to shop mindfully.
I used to be one of those people who I think I did this for some portions of my life but then I got into the season of motherhood where I did not know who I was or what I wanted and I found myself buying things randomly. Almost like when you’re standing in line at the checkout at the grocery store and that chocolate’s calling your name.
They call it an impulse section for a reason. A lot of us are shopping with an impulse mindset. A lot of us are shopping as a hobby. Some of those people shopping as a hobby are probably also shopping as an addiction. I’m not going to go deep down that rabbit hole. I can probably talk about that specific thing for an hour, but that’s not really what I want to focus on.
I do want to focus on the other side of this, which is shopping mindfully for things. I usually recommend that you never go shopping without a goal or a purpose in mind. To create that goal and purpose, I recommend shopping from a list, a list that you have brain dumped all the things that you could actually want and need, and then later prioritize them.
When you’re out and you’re shopping, you should be shopping for the top five prioritized things on your list. Doing this helps so much because you no longer struggle with those impulse buys or with shiny object syndrome. You walk in and something grabs your attention. But because you know that if it’s not on your list, it’s not an immediate need or want and not something that you should be focusing on you don’t purchase.
Shopping should never be an escape or a hobby or an addiction. It should be a function of building your wardrobe specifically with a purpose: adding things that you need, adding things that you see are an obvious hole in your wardrobe, and that work well with all the other things. The only way to really get around this is to be intentional about it and be very, very mindful.
How to Build Your Wardrobe Tip #2: Identify Your Style Non-Negotiables
The second tip I’d like to share with you to get to your dream wardrobe faster is to identify your style non-negotiables.
This is something I don’t think I’ve ever really talked about specifically, but it’s identifying the places in your wardrobe where you are willing to either break the rules or be very rigid with your wardrobe. You can have non-negotiables in both places. For example, one of my non-negotiables as far as style goes is shoes.
I love minimalism in clothing. I love capsule wardrobes. I love all of these ideas. However, if you go look at those things, you’ll see that a lot of times they recommend you have a small collection of shoes to go with your small collection of clothes. I personally really, really love shoes. It’s one of the few areas in my wardrobe that I don’t try to make into a capsule or make it fit anybody else’s standards.
This for me is a style non-negotiable. You need to take the time to identify what those things are for you. This gives you permission to be authentic, to be honest about what you really need in your life, and identify the things that you are willing to let go of and other things that you really want to bring in purposefully. These can cross so many areas of style too. They can go into color and style.
These first parts of determining your personal style. They can go into the rules you set for the type of clothing that you will or won’t wear. For example, I don’t have a hard and fast rule, but I don’t really wear pants anymore. That’s sort of a non-negotiable for me. And so it could go across many areas, how many things you’re going to have like the shoe story that I shared with you already.
I want you to think about the different areas of personal style and wardrobe management: defining your personal style, finding your color season, building your wardrobe, and managing your wardrobe. Think of all these areas and find the places where you are not willing to negotiate on what is important to you.
How to Build Your Wardrobe Tip #3: Accept Yourself as You Are Today
The next one is really important because style is an evolution. It is a transformation process.
When you think you have figured it all out and you’ve got everything as you like it, life’s going to throw something at you. It could be a surprise seventh pregnancy like I’m going through right now, but it could be all kinds of things. The point I want to bring up here is that my third tip here is to accept yourself as you are today. That means accepting your body as it is today.
The age you are today, the way you are today, the financial situation that you’re in today. All of these things have to be taken into account when you are trying to build out the wardrobe of your dreams because each one of them offers its own constraints and its own set of challenges that you have to overcome.
You’re going to make different decisions based on which of these things you’re going through. And you have to be flexible with who you are right now. I see this so much when women either gain weight or lose weight. I myself have been guilty of it for about four months now, actually. After baby number six I worked really hard and I ended up losing about 60 pounds.
I found that very few of my clothes still fit. But since I invested in my clothing, I was holding out trying not to buy new things, especially as I’m pregnant and many of my clothes will continue to work. I know there’s a small possibility I could gain a lot of weight and need those larger clothes. However, I have finally reached the point that I am not gaining a lot of weight.
My clothes are still way too big. And so I’m very mindfully sizing down.
Part of this is taking into account who you are right now. I see this come up a lot. I actually saw this question today in a group. A woman had recently become a mom. Her baby was very young and she was asking, when is the right time to think about buying new clothes or if she should wait and see what happens later if her old clothes fit. You know, the answer here is a blend of both of these things.
On the one hand, you should definitely wait. If your baby is less than three months old, there is some waiting that needs to happen because a lot is going to change. Your body has changed a lot. It’s still changing a lot, obviously, and this is very specific. On the other hand, you should still have a few things that fit who you are right now today that make you feel good.
This is part of going back to that first tip I shared about shopping mindfully. It’s finding two or three things to get you through this transitional period. But to be able to do that, you have to accept that the reality you’re experiencing right now is your reality. And decide that you are worth taking the time or the money or the investment to feed the person that you are today instead of waiting for some change that may or may not happen in the future.
How to Build Your Wardrobe Tip #4: Get off Pinterest
The fourth thing I want to share for when you’re trying to build your dream wardrobe is to get off Pinterest and Instagram. Don’t spend time there scrolling because when you do that, even for inspiration, you are copying something someone else has done. You are finding trends that may or may not suit you. You are finding clothing styles that may or may not fit your body type and make you look great.
You are finding beautifully laid-out infographics of capsule wardrobes in black, tan, white, and navy. And they’re full of clothes that look like it’s the perfect capsule wardrobe, but only two of those things are good for you. That’s my story at least. Pinterest can be lovely. I use it mostly for food and dreaming about being a pro gardener which I am so not. Mostly my Pinterest is filled with private recipes for myself.
I want you to get off Pinterest for ideation and Instagram is the same because it’s not teaching you anything about yourself. It’s just helping you to collect beautiful images. I’m going to go back to this whole food thing because it’s like a God-inspired analogy. I curate these recipes and I try them because I actually do really like to cook and I’m really obsessed with healthy food because I have a lot of health issues.
If you collect the recipes and never make them, they don’t do you any good. Pinterest can be the same way for your fashion. If you’re only collecting ideas and you’re never actually trying any of them and kicking them back out, it’s kind of the same thing. Back to the recipes, once I’ve made a recipe, I know if it’s a keeper or I know if it’s a trasher.
The thing is, you don’t know these things unless you are doing self-discovery. So I want you to get off of these platforms and stop randomly scrolling and dreaming and take that energy and take it back into yourself and focus on finding out who you are authentically instead of taking ideas from other people: the styles that you like, the colors that you like, what a capsule wardrobe means to you.
How to Build Your Wardrobe Tip #5: Stop Comparing Yourself to Everyone Else
The very final tip I have to help you get to that dream wardrobe faster is to stop comparing yourself to everyone else. Really, this is another function of Pinterest and Instagram and another function of that third thing I said about accepting yourself as you are today. It goes back to all of the things that we’ve talked about already.
Actually, every point that I’ve made feeds into this point because the reality is if we weren’t looking around and comparing ourselves to other people and looking at what person A has and person B has and what the Instagram influencer is doing, we wouldn’t realize that we’re lacking anything. Or if we did, it would be a true feeling of lack from what we’re seeing in our own closets and our own lives.
You get dressed to go somewhere and you realize, wow, I need this thing and I don’t have it. I really need this pair of x, y, Z tennis shoes. Maybe you’re going to a fall festival with your kids and you have a bunch of nicer shoes. You don’t really have any good sneakers or athletic wear to give you some traction, keep you safe, and help you chase your kids better.
It’s not that you were looking around on Pinterest for a fall festival outfit. It’s because you weren’t on Pinterest, you were getting dressed, you were living your life and you realized, I don’t have this thing. It’s a true lack in your wardrobe. It’s a true lack of the life that I am actually living right now today with my kids.
You are more able to authentically grab the things you need, design the wardrobe that you want, and build one that you love because everything is holistic and comes together with who you are, how you look, how you want to present yourself, and the kind of wardrobe that you want to have. It all works together. And it’s because it’s based on you.
Final Thoughts on How to Build Your Wardrobe
As I wrap up all these tips in this episode today, I know that if you are at the beginning of your journey or you’re struggling with your fashion, or you’re going through a significant life change and something is radically different and you need to be radically different because of that, a lot of this stuff seems advanced in a way, but it’s really not the stuff at the end.
The mindset stuff has to come at the beginning. You have to be ready to make a transformation in your thinking because we live in a society and a culture that is all about consumerism and having the next thing. We are bombarded with so many advertisements every single day that are intended to make us feel a lack. They’re intended to make us feel like we’re missing something.
So we’ll seek out and buy something else. One could probably argue that a celebrity Pinterest closet filled with hundreds of clothes is the dream wardrobe. I can guarantee you that unless you have a personal stylist and an entourage of beauty and makeup people, managing that closet and managing that wardrobe is not your dream.
Your dream, if you’re anything like me, which I assume you are ’cause you listen to me, is to live a life of beauty and simplicity. Fulfilling your calling, doing the things that you feel passionate about every day, the things that God has called you to do. Owning a closet the size of a small house is probably not up there on your list.
To get to that place, you have to embrace a mindset of less before you can ever really have more of that dream wardrobe. I don’t say more meaning, more stuff. I say more meaning perfectly, more for you, full of everything that makes you happy, that lights you up, that makes you look amazing, the wardrobe that you dream of that helps you be the person that you want to be.
I’ve given you some of my very best tips to help you get there faster. But if you would really love to fast-track this process, I do invite you to join the Radiant Woman Intensive. We go over all of this. I do not do any of this for you. I am here for you to take this journey to figure out all these things for yourself because I want to empower you.
I want to empower you so that when the next thing changes in your life, you don’t feel lost because all of your style knowledge was something you collected from Pinterest. I want you to feel empowered so that you know yourself, you know your body, you know your colors, you know which clothing style suits you best and you know how to put them together.
You have all of this information for yourself. You have truly learned yourself and your style.
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Take these tips on how to build your wardrobe and fast-track your personal style journey.
Stacey is the owner and creator behind Radiantly Dressed. She is a certified image consultant and AICI member focusing on creating simplicity in wardrobes via color and style.
