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After moving into a house that took an age to renovate (at times it felt it would have been easier to excavate Richard III’s grave from a Leicester car park), it dawned on me that despite sacrificing a bedroom to turn it into a wardrobe, I still didn’t have enough cupboard space to house my addiction to vintage tat, Miu Miu shoes and shockingly similar jumpers. A cull would have to happen if my boyfriend was to have anywhere other than our bedroom chair to put his tracksuit bottoms.
This was not my first rodeo. When I moved back from New York to England a few years ago I managed to get rid of large armfuls of my clothes. I sold lots of them through an American consignment website, which just about covered the costs of shipping everything else to London. That haul had been unusually easy for me to part with because my outfits from that era were worryingly small — a result of walking everywhere in Manhattan, being relentlessly heartbroken and using my oven as a shoe cupboard.
The doll costumes were carted off by a cheerful lady who arrived with heavy-duty sacks and a thirst for Chanel (which, unfortunately, I was unable to help with). Anything left over was handed to friends and the rest I took great pleasure in shoving down the Salvation Army chute on West 14th Street. But still more followed me home to England, where they lingered in my basement as moth fodder patiently waiting for the house to be beautified.
On a scale of one to hoarder I’d say I’m about a 7.3. What I mainly cling to is stuff I wore on memorable occasions. I am not referring to the gowns I have donned for white-knuckle events such as the Met Gala — those dresses are mostly borrowed and collected before breakfast the next day, except for the jewels, which are sometimes unceremoniously snatched from your fingers in an in-car exchange four blocks from the museum.
No, the clothes I can’t part with are the ones that act as evidence of significant experiences: the purple and brown cardigan I chose to wear for my television presenting debut (in hindsight a weird choice); a black Saint Laurent dress I wore on my birthday in Iceland when the Northern Lights pulled a no-show; a vintage floral dress that cost about £8 but made me feel like a million bucks at Coachella.
I also keep a lot of vintage as inspiration for any future designing jobs. And then there are the endless Barbour jackets I have made for the brand, which could at this point form the basis of an outerwear museum. The idea of wading through this glut of memories or rainy-day ideas feels emotionally taxing. But my fear of letting go of the past, or being unprepared for the future, has resulted in what can only be described as a clothing fatberg clogging up my house.
I am not alone in wanting to hold on to things that help you reminisce: Chioma Nnadi, head of editorial content at British Vogue, keeps hold of a “1970s dashiki top that I stole from my dad,” she says. “I used to wear it a lot in the early noughts around New York over bell-bottoms. Every time I look at it, it reminds me of that time in my early twenties, when everything seemed possible.” The tricky thing with preserving these treasures is their propensity to get in the way of an ever-evolving style.
Model/musician/best friend Pixie Geldof is a fresh convert to the joys of the wardrobe cleanse. “At one point I kept things as trophies of my past that I wanted stored like a museum of myself, but now I realise all these things deserve life,” she says. A socially conscious turn towards shedding items that no longer serve her has had a clarifying effect on Geldof’s personal style: “I can describe it and recognise it in pieces when I’m out shopping, which also means I’m less likely to buy things ‘just because’.”
A rejection of excess in the face of ecological crisis is an encouraging movement that has been gaining traction for years. Whether that’s a result of economic constraint, activism or the cyclical nature of trends (it’s easier to buy old Miss Sixty jeans than it is to wait for them to reissue the ones from 2002) is unclear. Either way, the red carpets of the world are now awash with celebrities battling it out not for the latest couture, but rather the rarest vintage Dior, Thierry Mugler or Roberto Cavalli pieces.
Second-hand clothing resale sites are also enjoying a boom, where the young are busy liquidating their assets and entering into the circular fashion market by hunting down gently used versions of luxury items. Even the Kardashians, a clan who have surely inspired insatiable fast-fashion consumption, have sanctioned preloved clothing, launching Kardashian Kloset in 2019, providing fans the unique opportunity to snag their luxury designer “kast-offs”. Whether this was a canny endorsement of socially conscious consumption or a practical way to declutter multiple homes certainly isn’t for my acquisition-driven brain to judge — what is clear is that there has never been a trendier time to offload your stash.
If anyone is going to make a case for how cool anti-hoarding has become, it is Angela Hill, photographer, founder of Idea Books and my personal style icon, who disproves the adage that a wedding dress is for life, not just for Christmas. She blew my mind when she told me she does a complete clear-out twice a year and isn’t the least bit sentimental about her clothes: “Not in the slightest. I still have my wedding dress — it is floral silk from Demna’s first collection for Balenciaga and I love it, but I will sell it as I have just bought a great piece from Balenciaga this season.” I deeply admire this no-nonsense approach. The idea of a streamlined seasonal wardrobe with a one-in, one-out door policy sounds utterly liberating.
A project materialised recently that offered me the chance to rid myself of my gluttonous stash. I agreed to it with all the enthusiasm of Jo from Little Women offering up her hair. The remit was simple: clothing that was reflective of my style but something I would be OK to part with. The wrong-sized shoes were the easiest to fling into the bag. (I would like to start a petition for someone to create an accurate international shoe-size chart for online shopping.) Also party dresses that I rarely wore but that were swallowing up prime real estate were released into the wild. In the end I managed to cull around 50 items — not quite enough to give me the streamlined wardrobe I imagine proper grown-ups possess. I still have piles of perspex storage boxes containing such absolute must-haves as a python-print knitted hot-pant onesie.
At the tail-end of a recent trip to New York (where I greedily replenished my closet with a vintage Dior slip and Sandy Liang nurse’s dress), I was standing outside a bar when an acquaintance commented, “You’re so unsentimental, Chung.” I took a drag of my cigarette, narrowed my eyes and thought back to my wardrobe, still a jumble sale of garments lurking like the portrait of Dorian in his attic. I exhaled slowly. “Huh . . . ”
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