A Full Closet and Nothing to Wear

I'm thirty-nine, with three children. After my third birth, my body changed. Not "a little" — really. I'd open a closet full of clothes and not understand whom they belonged to. To the girl I used to be. For the woman I was now, there was almost nothing in that closet.

The clothes hung there. Good ones, not cheap, once loved. But not one of them fit the woman standing in front of the mirror now. And every morning the same thing repeated: I'd go through everything, set pieces aside, pick them up again, and end up wearing the same thing as the day before. Not because I liked it. Because everything else didn't fit or wasn't comfortable.

I remember how hard it was just to leave the house. I couldn't put together anything "presentable." My husband would wait for me for ages and get annoyed. I was upset too. And a nursing baby in my arms on top of it — I barely belonged to myself. I'd gained weight after the birth. And not a single piece I actually liked.

My husband would say: "What's the problem? Go shopping." So I went. For hours around the mall. To pick one dress that didn't quite suit me, but was at least better than the rest. I wanted to feel feminine, attractive — not "all of this" — but I didn't understand what to buy or what to look for.

I remember coming in for a haircut, and the stylist says: "Oh, are you expecting again?!" No. I just have a big belly.

My older son and I went up the Burj Khalifa, to the observation deck. And when we headed for the elevator down, the concierge by the lift didn't want to let anyone ride with us: "Madam, you're expecting, aren't you?" No. I just have a fitted dress and a big belly.

For a long time I thought the problem was me. That I simply needed to lose weight. My body really had changed. But the answer wasn't to wait until I lost weight — it was to dress the woman standing in front of the mirror now. It turned out the problem was how I bought clothes, and what my decisions were based on.

I bought the way almost everyone buys. Without a system. Every piece for a separate occasion, for "I need something presentable right now," just to be better than the rest. Not one purchase connected to what was already hanging in the closet. That's why the closet wasn't a wardrobe but a warehouse of random things chosen in a hurry. Each one fine on its own. Together — they don't work.

That's why "nothing to wear" is almost never about an empty closet. It's about a full one, where the pieces don't add up together.

And the scale of it is bigger than it seems. On average we wear twenty to thirty percent of our wardrobe — the rest just hangs there. And we almost always err in our own favor. A large international study by the company Movinga showed this — eighteen thousand people across twenty countries. Almost everywhere, people significantly underestimated how much hung unused: in the most striking country, people thought they didn't wear about a quarter of their wardrobe — when in fact they didn't wear nearly ninety percent.

This warehouse charges a fee. In money — for everything never worn. In space — taken up by what isn't worn. And in time: those very minutes each morning in front of the open doors. Roughly one in nine women is regularly late simply because she couldn't put an outfit together. A wardrobe that's meant to help starts draining you before the day has even begun.

I write this calmly, because I've been through it myself and I see it in the women I work with. A full closet and the feeling that there's nothing to wear is not a verdict, and it's not about you as a person. It's about a system the closet doesn't have yet. And a system can be built.

Building such a system is realistic — so that in the morning you open the doors and get ready in a minute, on any day, still being yourself. But it all starts not with shopping, but with a simple question: why do we spend years buying things that then hang unused.

Read about that in my next article — "Why We Buy Clothes We Never Wear."