Hello Reader,

There's a particular kind of wardrobe clutter that has nothing to do with clothes. The suit from a job you left a decade ago. The jeans from ten years and two sizes back. The going-out dress from a version of your life that doesn't exist anymore. None of it's really about the item, it's about what letting it go would mean. I write about this in my latest blog, How to Organise a Cluttered Wardrobe: 7 Mistakes to Fix.

I go into a lot of wardrobes for work, and that's one of seven habits I see again and again, alongside the more everyday stuff like overloaded rails and mismatched hangers. None of it is about being messy. They're just habits nobody ever built.

Here's one you can act on today, whatever else you do with your wardrobe. Swap your wire hangers for velvet ones. It's probably the cheapest, highest impact change you can make. Wire hangers distort shoulder seams over time and let anything lightweight slip straight off. Velvet ones are slim, they grip, and because they're uniform, even a modest wardrobe starts to look considered rather than chaotic, which changes how it feels every time you open the door.

The full piece also covers the proper way to do a full sort (why doing it all at once beats the drip feed approach, and what to do with the space while it's empty), and what's actually going on when we hold onto clothes that belong to a past version of ourselves.

You can read all seven, including why letting go of the identity pieces is often the hardest part, over on the blog: https://www.helensanderson.com/how-to-organise-a-cluttered-wardrobe-7-mistakes-to-fix/​

Reader, I hope at least one of these makes your mornings a bit easier.

Helen