I’m not sure if it’s an autism thing, or a depression thing, or just a me thing, but I find it hard to get dressed on a morning. Like, it just seems like a harder task than it needs to be. Recently I had a clearout of my wardrobe and I thought I’d try rearranging things to see if I can help make it a bit easier.

I have half-watched a couple of videos on YouTube about ‘capsule wardrobes’, and I took away from those the idea of a small set of clothes that can be mixed and matched. I’ll be honest here: that’s just clothes, right? I know people can build outfits and things but that’s definitely not me. I have clothes (and I hate buying them).

But going through my stuff I realised that I definitely do have more clothes than I need, and some stuff doesn’t mix and match as well as other stuff. So I took out 5 pairs of trousers, half a dozen hoodies and shirts, and half a dozen t-shirts and designated these as my ‘core’ clothes. It’s not perfect but mostly you could put these together in any combination and get a set of clothes that don’t make you look like a packet of Skittles. I moved my ‘nice’ clothes out of the way (I’m lucky enough to work somewhere where casual wear is acceptable so I don’t need to wear smart trousers and shirts and things regularly) and moved stuff that is only for ‘Summer wear’ out of the way too. The remainder, the legit ‘spare’ clothes, I have kept.

So now I have one rail in my wardrobe with my core rotation of trousers and tops hanging. Trousers on the left, tops on the right. Below that there’s a drawer of t-shirts, folded so they sit vertically, with the ‘core’ t-shirts in an organiser at the front of the drawer. On a morning, I take the leftmost pair of trousers, the rightmost top (unless it’s warm enough to not be needed), and the leftmost t-shirt. And that’s my clothes for the day. If something doesn’t seem right (because not everything matches really), I choose the next thing along and that should work. If I’m feeling like I want to dress up a little bit that day for work, the ‘nice’ clothes are still accessible, and if for some reason I want something from the ‘spare’ pile, they are accessible too. But neither of these are visible when I’m doing the default mode.

When I’ve washing my clothes, the core trousers and shirts go in the middle of the rail so that I’m always picking the least-recently worn stuff. Similarly, I put my core t-shirts away by putting them in the organiser at the right of the other t-shirts.

I’m going to keep the ‘spare’ clothes because I do like them, and as and when the regular stuff wears out I can replace it with the spare stuff. And if I just feel like wearing something out of that lot, I can. I did also get rid of a lot of stuff, stuff that was worn out or doesn’t fit any more, or stuff that I can comfortably say I’m not going to wear anymore. It’s got me thinking that I really don’t need any more clothes though, I was probably wasn’t able to see the wood for the trees when I was trying to get dressed before. Too much choice and too much thinking for a morning task. Now that I’ve got it slimmed down, and got a simple rule in place that takes away the need to choose, hopefully I will find things a bit easier.