The Vivienne Files

Capsule wardrobes inspired by art and nature

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Cleaning Out a Closet Full of Impulse Purchases

Our heroine is pretty loyal to her favorite store... Every time she goes in, she just feels happy; she loves the outdoor equipment, and the feeling of love and pleasure in nature that the company really encourages. And it seems that most times she stops in, she walks out with something!

So her warm-weather closet looks like this:

She doesn't really struggle to get dressed, but she feels vaguely... uneasy... when she looks at her closet. She would like more focus, and maybe a clearer sense of personal style than she currently has.

Where to begin? The fastest, easiest starting place is to sort everything by color and see if she can learn something:

Oh. Dear. An equal number of navy and black garments doesn't give her a ... View the Post

How to Focus and Refine a Pretty Good Wardrobe

I am asked this question more frequently than I might have expected - it goes kind of like this: "I really like my wardrobe, for the most part, but I feel like I don't really have a good focus or defined style...."

That's tough to address, but I'm going to give it a try!

Let's start with this wardrobe; frankly, it looks pretty nice just like this!

My first thought is to sort all of the clothes by function, to see if maybe our heroine doesn't have enough pants, or needs a couple of tee shirts - that sort of solution would be pretty straightforward! But this wardrobe seems pretty well-balanced for functionality...

My next thought is to see if we can gain some insights into our heroine's preferences by sorting her wardrobe by color... ... View the Post

How Much Clothing Do You Need? A New Year’s Thought…

Could you fit your entire wardrobe for the current season in this armoire?

I could fit things in terms of physical volume, but I'd struggle with how to hang my dresses - how DO women who only have armoires hang long garments?

A couple of years ago I wrote a lengthy post with an equation to help calculate an actual number of garments that would be in your ideal wardrobe - you had to answer a few questions, and then do a calculation (or you can buy the Excel document I built that does the math for you!). It's a question that doesn't grow old... Unless you have a terribly limited wardrobe, it's something that merits repeated analysis, so that we don't wander into old patterns of over-consumption. Wasting money is almost as bad as ... View the Post

Evaluating a Wardrobe – How do the “12 Months, 12 Outfits” Wardrobes Do?

What makes a wardrobe work? And how can you tell if a wardrobe is going to be functional and versatile? Not the headiest questions in life, but still important, if you like to get dressed and enjoy the process (as well as the results!).

Ultimately, your wardrobe works if you can get dressed every day with ease and pleasure. It doesn't matter what's in there, how tidy or messy it is, or how many different colors and/or styles of things you own. It's the most subjective thing in the world...

That said, if you're struggling, I have a few ideas that you might want to consider!

First up, let's start with the black, white, grey and rust wardrobe that I finished up on December 1st:

Since I built more or less identical outfits each month for ... View the Post

Are You More “Matisse” or “Monet?” Using Art to Help Define Personal Style

A long time ago, I did a post like this comparing garments that, to me, reflected either Calder or Mondrian - i.e. fluid, curving and draping lines versus a more angular silhouette. These posts aren't easy, mostly because I really struggle to find a pair of artists that have a clearly-cut difference between them... If you have suggestions, I'd love to do this more! I think it can be important and useful to refine our preferences and to learn to clearly define what we do and don't like in our wardrobes - fewer mistakes!

In the last few months, I spent some time looking at Matisse "cut-outs" at the Modern Art Museum in Paris, and the clear demarcations between colors really caught my eye. There was something... crisp?... about how these were ... View the Post

Planning Your Complete Wardrobe – Maybe I Should Start with the Real World?

October 12, 2017

I have absolutely NOT forgotten about my desire to figure out a way to have an overall wardrobe plan - something that I think we first discussed back in July?

Theories were posited that one could choose a specific number of each category of each garment, and a certain number of pieces for each season, etc. etc. But it all felt.... forced.

So I'm going back to reality - what is currently in my closet? What have I worn in the last month or so? Maybe I should start with what I actually OWN AND WEAR, and then see if I can make sense of that...

For now, I'm sticking with a target number of 52 - i.e. one piece per week, or 13 per quarter. So right now, I isolated in my closet the last 26 pieces of "non-gym" clothing ... View the Post

Can You Plan Your ENTIRE Wardrobe? Maybe…

A few weeks ago I mentioned that I was pondering what it would mean if you used four "Whatever's Clean 13" wardrobes for your year-round wardrobe. I'm still in the "thinking about the possibilities" stages, but I wanted to share with you what I've been thinking, so far...

At the beginning, I'm starting with the original 13-piece "Whatever's Clean" wardrobe. The idea behind these 13 pieces was that they would be chosen in such a way that you literally could NOT put together an outfit that would clash; all of the colors and styles would harmonize to the point that you could, literally, wear "Whatever's Clean." (I was thinking of travel, or vacationing at a cabin, beach house etc...)

Just in order to make sure that I could fit lots of ... View the Post

How to Choose Neutral Building Blocks for a Capsule Wardrobe

April 14, 2017

So I've been using Neutral Building Blocks for a few weeks as a basis upon which I've built all kinds of interesting capsule wardrobes, but I've neglected to truly address HOW you get those Building Blocks in place. Today, I'll try to fill in this omission!

First up, I settled on the idea of 9 pieces just on instinct, because it seemed like a good number - more than half of a 4 by 4 Wardrobe, enough bottoms that you could include shorts, a skirt AND a pair of pants, four different tops so you could go from sleeveless to short-sleeved, to 3/4 sleeve to long, and then toss in a couple of 2nd layers - a jacket and a sweater.

The more I played around with the 9 pieces, the more I was pretty happy with it, but there's ... View the Post

How to Clean Out Your Closet – Use Clusters!

April 5, 2017

I personally suspect that there are as many different ways to clean out a closet as there are people on our planet! Since most people tend to wear their clothing one outfit at a time, I have been pondering an "outfit-based" way to go about decluttering and streamlining a closet...First up, let me make it clear what I mean by a cluster; to me, a cluster is a complete (typically 3-piece) outfit, with one more top tossed in to give some versatility and options:

As you can see, a cluster is a bit more than the sum of its parts - adding the 4th piece tends to really expand the number of ensembles available to you. This idea becomes really powerful when you get a few clusters working together; in this example, eight pieces ... View the Post

How to Use the Functional Method to Purge a Cluttered Wardrobe

This is the same wardrobe with which we worked yesterday; today we're going to take a different approach to getting rid of the excess and whittling down to the good stuff!

Today, we're arranging everything by function. This is a really helpful way to "self-diagnose" a common shopping pitfall - always buying the same kind of garment. I personally have a mad fondness for dresses, and for sweaters. Dresses aren't a terrible problem, because (so long as you have the appropriate shoes and other accessories) a dress is a pretty much free-standing ensemble. But too many black sweaters? BIG BIG BIG waste of money... even if the sweaters are (each and every one of them!) very beautiful...

This heroine has a ratio of tops to bottoms that is at the ... View the Post

How to Apply the Color Decluttering Method to a “Magpie” Wardrobe

Oh my... I know this woman, metaphorically speaking. She shops on payday. She buys pretty things. She loves what she buys, but never knows quite what to wear.... And this is what she sees when she opens her closet door:

She has a favorite store, which is a great place to buy a pretty accent piece... but she's never found a real personal style, in all of the very nice clothes that she owns...

So let's start her off by pulling out all of her neutral garments. She's actually not particularly opposed to the idea of neutral colors; she has black, denim, olive, white, ivory, pearl grey AND taupe in her closet. But note that it would be difficult, if not impossible to build a simple Four by Four wardrobe here. She has enough black pieces, but ... View the Post