How To Make Your Closet Double in Size (Without Buying a Thing)

What you lack is an invitation to create

Snippets from my style experiments Pinterest board.

One of the most present little demons in our head when curating our wardrobe is “I have nothing to wear.”

It doesn’t matter if you’re mostly buying designer, The Real Real or hunting down great finds at the thrift store, scarcity mindset can affect anyone. And it’s often the fuel that leads to poor spending, impulsive purchases and a closet that makes us anxious and overwhelmed.

While this isn’t a new phenomenon, it manifests itself differenty in our hyperconsumerist world.

I think part of the issue is the very fact that a lot of what we want is accessible and at our fingertips. Of course, there’s the overpriced brands and $500 investment pieces, but overall — let’s be frank — if you have the right eye and enough patience, you can find anything. And if you’re a secondhand-shopper like myself who gravitates towards the chicest, most interesting thing in the room, you know this can be a blessing and a curse!

Because of this wide-reaching accessibility of whatever you want, we start to focus on what we lack instead of what we have. How ironic that the sheer abundance of beautiful things around us can make us feel like we don’t have enough?

The solution won’t sound that groundbreaking: we need to switch from scarcity to abundance. Yes, simply extract everything from your closet and scream “I have everything I need!”

Easier said than done. But what I’ve realized recently is that we shouldn’t skip the hard part.

The hard part is catching yourself when you say“I have nothing to wear” and lean into that. Sit in it. Fight back the instant gratification you want, which can come in many forms. Plus, if you’re a clothing-loving, fashion girly that views secondhand shopping as an art and their closet like a museum, this sometimes may feel like an impossible task.

Instead, I’ve been trying to sit with that scarcity mindset and tell myself: “Okay, I don’t. Now what?”

At the end of the day, I feel this gap in my style, my identiy for a reason. My knee jerk reaction is: “I have nothing to wear, now I have to go buy something”, when it should be: “I have nothing to wear, I need to get more creative.”

I’ve shared this in the past, but the moments that my personal style developed the most were when I was traveling. Not because of where I was but because I was working from a limited number of items.

The time my luggage got lost during most of my three week trip to Europe, I felt a stylistic muscle come alive. Not only did I find interesting ways to wear the basic pieces in my carry-on, but I got creative through borrowing clothes and making the few purchases for new clothes count in more ways than one.

Creativity thrives in scarcity. You’re forced to figure out solutions instead of just receiving them easily. It’s the difficult, tiral-and-error that helps you land on a euphoric outfit. And this can apply to any parts of life that require creativity: designing your home, working on a painting, etc. Because when you have less, you have to be more adaptable and nimble to finding the right fit. And when you remove the paradox of choice from your closet, you may find it’s easier to narrow down an outfit anyway.

So, next time you feel like your closet is empty, imagine it’s the single suitcase the airport didn’t lose. Doesn’t feel that small now, does it?

A couple ways I’ve been able to find abundance in my wardrobe:

1. Wearing it “wrong”