The 80/20 Rule

As I've whittled down my wardrobe to re-wear only the essentials, I have found myself wearing this Community Brunch Dress from ModCloth at least a couple of times per month.  It's the perfect blend of whimsical print, vintage style, and toned down colors so I wear it to work or out running errands a lot.  I've had this dress for years and it was one of the very last ModCloth purchases that I made and because of my closet overhaul, I wear it quite a lot.  Since I have so loved this new system, I thought it was high time we talked about it.  It's also high time I post pics of this dress since I realized I've had it forever and never taken a single outfit photo with it.

There is a lot of good advice out there for being conscious consumers and keeping clutter to a minimum.  In all my watching of Decluttering and Minimalist content, I have found a few nuggets of wisdom that I have been able to implement successfully into my daily life.  One of the most helpful has been the 80/20 rule.  The rule in a nutshell and as it applies to this particular blog is that most of us use 20% of our things 80% of the time.  It makes perfect sense because the human race has very little experience with accumulation of goods for much of its history.  Whether because most goods were handmade and therefore difficult to get, or because things were made of natural materials which breakdown over time much quicker than synthetics, or because most people for most of history lived in some sort of peasant status, having lots of stuff is fairly new to all of us and we really don't know what to do with it all.

In order to simplify, and have less decisions for our brains on a daily basis, we tend to gravitate toward the same things over and over and it averages out to about 20% of what we have.  Personally, I have untold hoardes of dresses and yet, when I am home doing farm or housework, I usually wear my gauze overalls with a tank or tee underneath.  They're comfortable and I don't mind getting them dirty.  It should also be noted that that sort of thing used to just be for the weekends, but now I am home more, so those items get far more wear.

Once I realized this, I whittled down my closet to just 20% of its original size in an attempt to really get the most wear out of everything.  This coincided with renovating my closet and really wanting to keep it looking organized and spacious.  And while I can honestly say that I wear everything in there much more, I have noticed that now that there's less in there, I still don't wear everything.  So, when I had 50 dresses in my closet, I probably wore 10 the most.  Now I have 15 dresses in my closet and regularly wear five on a rotation to work and three on a rotation at home.  There are about 3 others that get worn at least once or twice a month for nicer occasions.  So, of my 15 dresses, I am wearing 11 regularly; I am using a higher percentage of my clothes (nearly 75% instead of 20%, essentially flipping the ratio) even though I am wearing only slightly more by the numbers game alone.

The average number of times an article of clothing gets worn used to be 120 times per year*--clothes had a very long lifespan.  Thanks to fast fashion (and I would really like to lay the blame on cheap synthetic fabrics) clothing now usually gets worn as little as 5 times before being thrown away/donated/sold.  That's not nearly enough in my opinion, but I have noticed that after about 5 washes, most of my synthetic stuff is pilled up, scratchy, linty, and generally just ready to be thrown away.  In addition to setting this 80/20 rule for myself, I have also made a commitment to wear each item 30 times before discarding it or putting into storage.   I know some people create a spreadsheet to track the number of times they wear each piece, but I don't want to get that obsessive with this project just yet.

For the present, I am content to let 80% of my wardrobe stay in storage while I really make the most of what I have.  It's kind of a relief to not have to worry about what to wear for a while. because as much as I love my clothes, at times it was really stressful.  In fact, I developed this ritual of picking out my outfits for the whole week on Sunday afternoon.  I enjoyed that process, but it was time consuming and now I just grab the same things for work or play each time and go, and that feels like a perfect fit for my life right now.

Outfit Info:  Community Brunch Dress from ModCloth, Cardigan from YeMak, shoes from Honiara Vintage.

Statistic from *https://www.panaprium.com/blogs/i/times-clothing-worn