An Organized Wardrobe Is The Key To Making A Fashion Statement
The ones with organized wardrobes dress more flamboyantly. There’s a reason to that but it’s not what you are thinking.
by Manjul Bajaj
It is a good thing that closets are mostly private spaces and there is little reason for people to look into each other’s wardrobes on a frequent basis. The few occasions that I’ve had to look into other women’s closets have deeply dented my self-esteem. If that is how women’s closets are supposed to look like — neatly stacked piles of tops, bottoms, salwar suits, saris-blouses-petticoats which belong together, rows of dresses looking all upright and elegant as if they’ve just come back from tea at Buckingham Palace, make-up and jewellery sorters, shoes paired and ready to march out into the world at a moment’s notice — then clearly I’m not a woman, certainly not enough of a woman. In fact I’m bordering on the edge of being a middle-aged mutant ninja turtle.
My clothes closet is organized on what can best be described as the Sarojini Nagar principle. It all lies in heaps and you toss everything up in the air and if you’re fortunate you can find just what you’re looking for. And if you’re not lucky enough or particularly patient you give up and go out wearing whatever you can find. Over the years this chaos in the cupboard has led to the evolution of a signature sartorial style. First the dupattas and wraps went as they were never to be found in an uncrushed state. Then the salwars were abandoned for jeans since their Kumbh Mela act of getting separated at birth from their kurtas had become insufferable. Next to go were the bright colours — if everything in your wardrobe is black, navy or grey the chances of making a good match in a hurry rise exponentially. Finally the big over-sized T-shirts came in (to be worn around the house with those forsaken salwars) and the ‘casually inelegant mix and mismatch’ school of dressing reached its zenith. And with clothes like that the only footwear you ever need is flip-flops!
However, that is the pre-satori story. About a year ago my closet and I embarked on the path to reformation courtesy a moment of enlightenment. The problem I figured was that I had bought into an attainable ideal — A place for everything and everything in its place. I don’t want to trash this ideal as it has served me very well over the years. I have a place for my keys and my keys are always in their place. Ditto the wallet, the cheque book, the insurance papers et al. Even the stapler and the glue stick. It is a maxim that works very well as long as the object in question is one of its kind and doesn’t demand much space. Not clothes where the challenge is to fit an infinite number into a finite space.
Clothes called for some other organizational principle. I decided to give the Japanese concept of wabisabi a chance — the idea of living with imperfection. The first step was paring down and making space by giving away the clothes I no longer resonated with or fit into no matter how beautiful or expensive they were. The second step was to trade the utter chaos for some functional disorder. For me this meant turning the countless clothes I couldn’t deal with into a finite number of things I could find in an instant when I needed them. Thus my newly organized wardrobe had these neat hangars with five sleeves each.
Eight such hangars.
So forty things to know the location of.
This is how it went.
Hangar 1: Five salwars I might need in a hurry (black, white, navy, beige, maroon)
Hangar 2: Ditto for churidars
Hangar 3: Trousers
Hangar 4: White shirts
Hangar 5: Black shirts
Hangar 6: Printed shirts
Hangar 7: Formals
Hangar 8: Saris
The rest of the wardrobe was to be allowed autonomy.
A place for some things and those things always in their place was to be my new mantra. I had a feeling that it would work splendidly and I was hopeful that I would soon be stepping out into the world looking as good as my profile pictures on Facebook. However, it didn’t quite work to plan.
Alas, there is many a slip between diva hood and the Ms. I was so much in awe of the efficient 5 x 8 filing system that I had devised that I absolutely couldn’t bring myself to disturb its perfect symmetry. So here’s where I am at — I have eight neatly organized hangars of clothes I might never wear again because they look far neater on the hangar than they possibly could on me and the ‘casually inelegant mix and mismatch’ style of dressing has become even more fabulous for having to innovate and work around the fact that all the essential black, white and navy staple items of wear are busy decorating hangars whose symmetry I’m loathe to upset. You wouldn’t want to disturb such a brilliant, worthy of patenting arrangement for the shallow objective of looking well-dressed, would you now?