Extreme Closet Cleanout | Marie Kondo My Wardrobe

So my closet is a total mess right now. We have socks on the floor, clothes in random places that are not meant for storage, a very much non-color-coordinated wardrobe rail, a rack overflowing with clothes that are supposed to be in the closet, a pile of clothes that needs to be washed ASAP, and clothes that I have no idea why I still have because they're clearly too small. So in other words, we need to do a massive clean-out session. I've been meaning to do this video for a while now but I just kept pushing it and procrastinating it because I think unconsciously or consciously I was procrastinating the decluttering itself. But we've pushed past the limit of the reasonable and the clutter is just starting to drive me crazy now so we need to get it together. I like things to be neat and organized and have a dedicated space to store each item in a way that makes sense and right now that is just not the case. So the goal of this clean-out will be number one to remove the clutter and get everything properly organized and tidy and number two to bring down my wardrobe to only clothes that I genuinely love and I'm excited to wear each day. I haven't done a proper closet clean-out in ages so I have years of stuff piled up in there and a lot of it I think could find a more loving home elsewhere so let's get this started. All right let's do this. Babe come on. What? Well it looks like my magic is not going to work here so we're going to do this the manual way. This is not going to be a small clean-out we're going in full force here. So we're going to start by getting everything out of the closet and then we'll sort it all in three different piles. The keep pile, the sell slash donate pile and the discard pile for used underwear, socks and things that are damaged beyond repair. In order to decide whether I'm going to keep something or not I'm going to use five criteria that each item will have to check off for it to remain in my wardrobe. The first one is do I actually wear it and not just take it out once a year, wear it for an evening and then let it eat dust to the bottom of my closet for another year. I mean do I actually wear it regularly? Why did I buy so many cardigans? I don't know it just I don't know it just looks weird to me. I feel like cardigans were not made for me. Number two, does it fit me well? Something that fit you five years ago may not fit you anymore if you've gained or lost considerable weight. I actually used to be a lot skinnier than right now so I definitely won't fit in some of my older clothes. Pretty sure pants aren't supposed to be this short. Damn that's tight. Was I really that skinny back then? Number three, is it actually comfortable to wear? Multiple times in my life I've made the mistake of purchasing an item that checked off almost every box. Great fit, beautiful design, but the fabric just wasn't comfortable. Especially with wool sometimes I've had some extremely itchy pieces before and for some reason I thought that the itchiness would go away. Well it didn't and I ended up barely wearing the piece. So comfort is not to be overlooked. Number four, does it feel authentic to my style? Do I feel like myself when wearing it? As my style and life have evolved over the years I've become a lot more aware of what my style is, what feels like myself, what doesn't, and I've become a lot more intentional with my purchasing decisions. I'm only allowing new pieces into my wardrobe if they fit the style and the aesthetic that I feel best represent me. So on the same token I also want to be more selective with what actually gets to stay in my wardrobe. My god yeah I really really hate cardigans guys, I'm sorry. I just, I don't know man, something about them. I just don't feel comfortable, they don't feel like me. I mean not all cardigans by the way, I'm just referring to the ones that don't have any color, like the super thin and slim ones. I actually like it when they're chunky with a good shawl collar. Last but not least, as Marie Kondo would say, does it spark joy? I know it's corny but this is so important. When you look at the item, what does it make you feel? Does it elicit joy, excitement, does it lift your mood up when wearing it? In order to make it to the keep pile, each item will have to answer all five of these questions with a resounding hell yes, and if it's not a hell yes, it'll go to the sell or donate pile. This is actually a framework that I got from a podcast I was listening to, and I can't remember which one it was, but basically it's a framework for decision making, where the answer to a question has to be an excited, enthusiastic hell yeah in order for you to say yes to it, and otherwise it's a simple no. I've been using this framework in many areas of my life and I'm going to apply it to this decluttering as well. So this is a total total mess, but so far we have this pile that we're keeping, these two piles over here, this we are going to have to try on later, and this is the sell donate pile for now. Okay, so one of the reasons why I was a bit reluctant to make this video in the first place was that I think a lot of people think that I'm a minimalist, probably because of the simplicity of my thumbnails and just the fact that I have a pretty minimal aesthetic in both my style, my home decor, and even my content online, but there is a difference between enjoying a minimal aesthetic and being a minimalist. Now I'm not saying I'm the opposite of a minimalist either. There are a lot of principles of minimalism that I love and adhere to myself, but I just don't think that I can call myself one considering the amount of cloth that I have. I don't know, maybe I don't have that much, but I feel like I do, at least compared to most guys in their 20s. But then again, that's part of my job as well, so I don't know, maybe I'm just overthinking this. I could probably make a whole other video just on minimalism, but what I want to say is that even though I don't label myself as a minimalist, a big part of minimalism and something that I personally resonate with a lot is intentionality. I do think that being more intentional in all areas of your life, and in this case with your wardrobe, can really lead to an improvement in your quality of life, and that does come through in decluttering, yes, but also if you are decluttering, try to not use that as an excuse to just replenish it with an entire new wardrobe and repeat that same process every year, because then that not only defeats the purpose of the decluttering process, but it's also terrible for both the environment and your wallet. And speaking about the environment, if you're taking this time in quarantine to clean out your closet like me, I encourage you to not just throw away the things that you're getting rid of in the trash. Instead, if you're in good condition, take the time to either donate or sell them. That way you're giving a new life to these clothes, and they can find a more loving home that is not a landfill, and you're also helping people, the environment, and even making some side money at the same time. Damn, that's a lot of hangers. So this is a really cool piece that I got from Muji. It's called a Jinbei. It's like a traditional Japanese garment, kind of something that you wear indoors, kind of as a loungewear type of piece, and I really love it, so definitely keeping this. And it comes with the shorts. This is a beautiful peacoat, one of the first like more high-end pieces that I got, and I got it like five years ago, I think. It's from a French brand called Agnes Bit, and it's a beautiful black peacoat, to be honest. It fits perfectly. This is definitely a keeper. Here we have a flannel shirt. So I don't really wear flannel shirts that often, to be honest. I think it's my only flannel shirt, but I think I have two flannel shirts. Do I like this flannel shirt? I'm thinking about outfits I can pair it with. You know what? I said that it had to be a hell yeah or a no to all five of the questions, and this is obviously not a hell yes, so it's gonna be a no. Here we have a vest. I don't have a lot of vests, but the ones I do have I really like. We have this kind of gold brown one from Uniqlo, and then this one is from Arket. Love this one. This is a really cool jacket. It's reversible. It's fleece on the inside. It fits nicely, and the cool part is that the fleece on the inside can actually become the outside, and the outside can become the inside, and then it looks really cool. Let me show you. Go like this. Now you have a fleece jacket, and if you want to go the opposite way, now you got a different jacket. Really cool jacket. My god, that is one wrinkled suit. This suit stayed in my closet, but not properly hanged on a proper hanger. It stayed folded in my closet for ages after I moved here, and it is so wrinkled. I could get it dry cleaned, but in all honesty, this suit just doesn't fit me anymore, and it's a shame because I actually got it made to measure about like three years, three-ish years ago, maybe four, and it fit great at the time, because I was a lot slimmer back then, and since then I've put on some weight, some muscle as well. Not just fat, thankfully, but yeah, it just doesn't fit well anymore. They had left some fabric on the inside of the pants to kind of have some margin to let it loose a bit if necessary, and I already did that. I used up all the fabric inside, and it's still too slim. I'm sure there are men out there who are on the skinnier side that could definitely use this piece, so hopefully it finds a new owner. Welcome to my shoe closet. To be honest, for the shoes, I am going to keep almost all of them because I wear them all on a pretty regular basis. The only two that I am going to get rid of are these white sneakers from Klay. I've worn them a heck of a lot in these past two years, and they've gotten pretty scuffed up. I think I could still revive them if they went through a very, very thorough wash, but to be honest, like, I have multiple pairs of white sneakers, and these ones just don't spark as much joy anymore. I don't find myself reaching for these as often as before. Instead, I'll usually go for either my Oliver Cabell's or my Arigato's or my Tread by Everlane sneakers, so these ones I think I'll be donating. And then I will also be giving away these slip-on sneakers from Vans. I bought them a long time ago, and I wore them a whole bunch, and I really love the earth pattern on them. They look really cool, but they are just completely worn out. The earth graphic on the uppers actually used to be a pretty bold mix of white, orange, green, and shades of blue in there, and now it's just very, very faded, and the sole is just pretty worn out. So, yeah, I'm going to be giving these away, unfortunately. And this really hurts me because I really, really love these, but I'm just not wearing them anymore because they're getting quite old and faded, so I will be giving these away. As for the rest of the shoes, I will be keeping all of them. I will, however, reorganize the whole shoe closet just because right now it's a little bit of a mess. I think it can be a bit tidier and color-coordinated, so I'm gonna redo the whole thing. And by the way, these are not just my shoes. You also have my girlfriend's shoes in there, so there are quite a few pairs, but it's not all mine. And I think we're good. You know how sometimes you have a pile of clothing in the back of your closet that in the back of your mind you know is there, and you know it exists, but really you don't want to acknowledge it because then you would have to take care of it. That is this pile. Okay, so the living room closet is pretty damn messy because besides the shirts that look decent and the jewelry and watches compartment, the rest of it has pretty much been the space where I just stuff everything that I don't know where to put. The worst part is the stacks of paperwork that just keeps growing and growing because this has been the place where I just put all of the paperwork that I don't really want to take care of in the moment, and I just put it in there and leave it for tomorrow, and that tomorrow becomes the next day and the next day. So I got a lot of paperwork in there that needs to get taken care of. Okay, finally we're going to end with our socks and underwear. So the biggest thing with the socks right now is that they are just not very well organized. Everything is just all over the place. We have socks mixed in with the underwear and just all kinds of, yeah, it's a mess. We're going to change the way that we fold our socks because the way I used to do it was to just lay both socks flat like this, go once in the middle here and just fold it in thirds, and then put it like this, like this right here. But the problem with this is that you kind of have this little bit here, this weird bit that kind of sticks out, so it's not like super aesthetic. So instead we're going to do the Marie Kondo method. So basically you have the socks laid out flat like this, one on top of the other, and then you go like this, fold it once in half in the middle and then just fold it once again. And now you can put this bit upwards and it's a lot more aesthetic than having the other bit like this. So that's how we're gonna do it. There you go. We got all the socks neatly folded. We have the whites here with the grays, navies and blacks. Here we got the earth tone socks and more of the jewel tones, the reds, blues and greens. All right, I think that's a wrap. This is everything I'm going to get rid of and I've created a Depop account where I'll be listing everything I'm going to sell. So if you want to get your hands on any of the clothes that I'm selling, feel free to check it out. I'll put a link to it in the description. And if it's not all up on my Depop by the time I upload this video, it will be very shortly after. The things that are not in good enough condition to sell, I'll be donating to a charitable organization and then there's just a couple of used socks and underwear which I'll be throwing out because I'm pretty sure no one wants to wear those. I'm super happy with how I reorganize everything. The main priority was to store everything in a way that all the clothing would actually be visible when I open my closet so that I can actually see the different pieces clearly to make it easier to know what I actually own at any given time and make putting outfits together that much easier. Everything that's in the drawers I folded the Marie Kondo way so I can instantly see all the clothing when I open my drawers instead of having to scavenge through to find the jeans that I want at the bottom of the pile. I organized everything by category first, so shirts, t-shirts, pants, jackets, etc. I then color coordinated everything starting with neutrals first, so black, gray, white, and variations of cream tones, and then the different colors are sorted like a rainbow so it goes from left to right or top to bottom, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink. Organizing things this way has really taken a weight off my mind like I can actually feel myself being less stressed just from knowing that my closet is neat and tidy. Anyways I hope you enjoyed this video of me sorting my life together. If you're looking for something to do in quarantine I can definitely recommend doing a good closet decluttering session. Hope y'all have a beautiful day and I will see you in the next video. Peace.