076/ How To Build A Foundational Wardrobe: An Introduction To My Step-By-Step Guide

Happy new year, dear readers!

Since starting In Moda Veritas last March, I’ve written on a variety of topics that I hope you’ve found relevant and helpful wherever you are on your style journey. They include:

• the What I’m Wearing series;

• focused outfit inspiration, e.g. holiday, casual wear, transitional wear, workwear;

• mapped out shopping guides from cities around the world, e.g. Tokyo and Paris; and

• scouring sale and resale websites for the best finds for you.

Other posts are less situationally specific, and more of what I consider canon; posts which outline the foundations of my styling philosophy, and inform my approach and advice to you and my private clients. They include:

• Five Questions I Ask Myself Before I Buy Anything

• The Ins-and-Outs of Closet Editing (Part 1)

• The Ins-and-Outs of Closet Editing (Part 2)

Over the next month or two, I’ll be adding to the canon by publishing a step-by-step guide on how to build a foundational wardrobe.

My raison d’être is to help you forge a realistic and expressive relationship between what you wear and who you are (In Moda Veritas = “in style there is truth”).

Whatever your truth looks like, I strongly believe that in order to develop a functional and versatile wardrobe that you love, you need to build a solid foundation comprised of a few dozens key pieces.

In the process of building out your foundational wardrobe, you will also:

• gain a better understanding of what looks and feels great on you;

• buy less by being more selective;

• use more of what you have by finding creative and versatile ways to wear every piece; and

• find getting dressed easier and, hopefully, more joyful.

I also strongly believe that this process is beneficial to everyone, whether you’re starting to build your closet from scratch, or you already have a mature wardrobe of hundreds of pieces. It applies whether you want a tight capsule wardrobe, or a much larger one to play with.

I personally subscribe to this approach in my own life. If you’ve been following What I’m Wearing over the past year, you might be able to pick out the building blocks of my wardrobe. Sometimes my outfits are solely comprised of them; other times, they function as an anchor to my point of view while playing with more eclectic and whimsical pieces.

This will be a series for paying subscribers, so if you aren’t one yet, this is a great time to become one!

So, are you on board? I hope the answer is, “yes”!

But, wait! If you’re thinking, “Sweeeeeet, I get to go shopping and buy 30 beautiful things that I really love!”.…you will get there, but not just yet.

Because the first step to creating a foundational wardrobe is … wop wop …doing a ruthless closet edit.

There’s no way around it. If you insist on going straight to shopping, you’ll miss out on all of the benefits and learnings you get out of the closet editing process:

The bottom line is that we direct an astounding amount of mental and emotional energy towards the state of our closets.

Ultimately, I think many of you want to edit your closets for greater peace of mind. You recognize your time and energy is precious and limited, and you want to streamline your decision-making and make getting dressed less stressful — and, hopefully one day, even enjoyable?!

The closet editing process is similar to managing your inbox — tackling each email one-by-one, reading, responding, deleting, deferring, etc.

It’s an educational and enlightening exercise because it reveals a lot of your, ahem, patterns and gets to the root causes of why your wardrobe isn’t working for you right now, either in whole or in part. Often it’s also cathartic and feels like a weight being lifted from your shoulders.

All of these reasons make closet editing a worthwhile regular practice in your life.

Never mind the fact that you also need to know what you already own, and get rid of what you don’t need before you understand what you truly need to add.

If this sounds overwhelming, don’t worry, I’ve got you.

You can follow my step-by-step guide to closet editing that I’ve written about in Part 1 and Part 2 of the Ins-and-Outs of Closet Editing. If you have any questions about the process, please don’t hesitate to leave it in the comments. I’m here for you!

See you soon with my first instalment of How To Build A Foundational Wardrobe.

Love and gratitude,
Irene