Musings of a fashionista - Project 333, Can less really be more?

     Have you heard of Project 333? 33 items of clothing for 3 months . The general gist is you only have 33 
items in your wardrobe (including accessories, shoes and jewellery (!) but not including underwear, sleepwear, house clothes or gym clothes) and every 3 months you re-assess your stored items and select 33 items for the next season.Just the thought of it terrifies me. 

When I first heard about people having only 33 items in their closest I dismissed it straight away as crazy and not for me. I write a fashion blog, I have to have heaps of clothes right? Fashion is my thing, its what I do. Being minimalistic is just boring, surely. It took me a couple of days of thinking and reading the original blog post I had seen for me to start to consider it and ask myself some questions. Why do I have so many clothes but nothing to wear? Why do I put myself through the frustration and time-wasting of rummaging through huge piles of unwanted clothes to find an outfit? Why do I insist on putting quirky, ‘occasional’ pieces in my main wardrobe in the hopes that I will start wearing them when really they are just in the way and confuse me more?


So I decided to have a HUGE overhaul. I don’t know if I can do only 33 items but I will make a huge improvement that’s for sure. For now I am not going to include shoes or accessories. I really don’t want to as accessories are an easy way to dress up and change the look of an outfit and choosing shoes or jewellery to go with an outfit doesn't stress me nearly as much as choosing the actual clothes. I will however, put away a lot of my non-relevant shoes (ie boots as it is summer) and throw out the trashed ones to make things cleaner and easier to find what I want. I have also thrown out a lot of broken and never worn jewellery and accessories that were there ‘just because’. 

The other great thing I have realised now that I have whittled my wardrobe down to my main pieces is that it will stop me from buying things that I don’t really want, need or can’t afford. You know those things. The ones you buy because you want something new, because it’s on sale, or because it’s sort of what you were looking for but not quite right, but its close enough (or so you think). These are the items that waste your money, clog up your wardrobe and leave you with so many clothes yet nothing to wear. Now when I think about something I want or ‘need’ I will ask myself these questions.-          
- Does the colour and cut match the other things I have in my wardrobe?
- Is this filling a gap in my wardrobe (ie do I already have something the same or similar)
- Do I love it enough to wear it regularly?
- Is it quality enough to withstand being worn regularly?
And most importantly
-  Is it worthy of being 1 of only 33 items in my wardrobe! 

I have always wanted to have a wardrobe of beautiful items that all went together and all got worn. I always read the magazine articles of 'capsule wardrobes' and thought it sounded great but didn't know where to start and thought I needed new things to make it work. So I kept buying more and more clothes and it just made it worse. Once I actually assessed the key pieces I needed, and what in my wardrobe I actually wore and liked, it all became so much easier. Now that I have so much less to choose from, I feel like I have so many more outfits.  All my clothes work together and I have things that I actually like (!) in my wardrobe for the very first time. So here’s to starting out. Let’s see how it goes and I will keep you updated!