Have you ever wondered just how many clothes should a woman have in her wardrobe? Do you tend to keep too many or to buy too few? Most people have a vague sense of whether or not they have the right amount of clothes. In this article, I’m explaining how you can know for sure. Alot of people have too many, plenty of people don’t have enough, and it is entirely possible to have both: too many of the wrong things and not enough of the right things. That’s why I built The Wardrobe Pyramid. It’s a downloadable guide, 5 Steps to a Closet Full of Enough. Grab the guide: The Wardrobe Pyramid and discover your Goldilocks number of clothes.
There’s a stereotype around women having huge closets stuffed with clothes, and for sure there are some of those, but a few years ago I ran a poll on LinkedIn and most of the women there said they don’t buy enough. Neither is a good option, so today I’m gonna walk you through the math to discover your Goldilocks quantity of clothing.
How Many Clothes Should a Woman Have in Her Wardrobe, the Origin Story
Back in late 2005, I was pretty frustrated with my life. My social life, that is. I was homeschooling my kids, involved in ministry, and always, it seemed, in large group settings where everything was highly controlled and there wasn’t room for anyone to speak up. Then I heard about blogs. And I started one, basically because I had alot of words that needed to go somewhere!
(Parenthetically, do you have people who really listen to you? Is there a context where your input matters? I think this is a fundamental human need.)
I was also busy thinking about individual style. A few years before that, I had discovered Carla Mathis’s book The Triumph of Individual Style and learned the basics of using artistic principles to inform personal style.
And, as I mentioned last week, I was on a budget. So I got thinking about how many clothes a person needed. In December of 2005, I stopped to count how many sweaters I had, because here in Spokane we have five months of winter and I need a sweater everyday. And that’s when I realized that there is a simple, mathematical way for me to know if I have the right number of clothes. I have been using this formula for twenty years!
The Actual Mathematical Formula
Today I’m gonna walk you through that formula and the variable you need to know to calculate your own needs. I promise it’s not hard!
Calculating your Laundry Cycle
1. The first step is to determine the maximum number of days an item might sit dirty in the laundry before it gets washed (a). This is the longest number of days something might be unavailable due to laundry before it’s ready to be worn again.
Calculate your “longest possible dirty-to-clean duration”:
– Start with your regular laundry interval (weekly, biweekly, etc.)
– Add drying time
– Consider worst-case timing. For example, if you always do laundry on Sundays and you wearing the item on Sunday while you’re doing laundry and then it goes into the hamper that night, it could sit there for a week before getting washed and dried and being available for you to wear again the following Monday.
Example scenarios:
– Weekly washer with dryer:
* Wear item day after laundry → Wait 6 days → Wash → Dry 1 day = 8 days
– Weekly washer with line-drying:
* Wear item day after laundry → Wait 6 days → Wash → Dry 2 days = 9 days
– Biweekly washer:
* Wear item day after laundry → Wait 13 days → Wash → Dry = 15-16 day
– Daily washing: If you do laundry every day, washing and drying, you could potentially get by with two sets of clothes – wear one, wash one. If you choose this strategy, your clothes will wear out really, really fast. The benefit of that is that you could always have the most current up-to-date thing.
One of my strategies for making my clothes last longer is not drying them. If you regularly use your dryer to replace ironing, I have another suggestion: Iron your clothes when they’re still damp. Ironing is incredibly fast and easy when you do this.
2. Calculate what percentage of days you need this type of item:
Examples:
– Work clothes: 5/7 = 71.4% (weekdays only)
– Gym clothes: 3/7 = 42.9% (three workouts per week)
– Special occasion wear: 1/30 = 3.3% (monthly use)
If you have a baby in that spit up stage, you might be changing your clothes multiple times per day; in that case, your percentage will be greater than 100.
- Tops (when your baby spits up): (3×7=) 21/7 = 300%
- Pants (during this same season): (1.5×7=) 10.5/7 = 150%
3. How many wears before an item needs washing:
– Jeans: Might get 3-4 wears
– Work shirts: Usually 1 wear
– Pajamas: Maybe 3-4 wears
– Exercise clothes: Always 1 wear
4. The Formula
Required Items = (Longest Cycle × Usage Percentage) ÷ Wears per Wash
5. Examples
Office Worker Example:
– Laundry cycle = 9 days (weekly washing + hang dry)
– Need work pants Mon-Fri = 71.4%
– Can wear pants twice before washing = 2
– Calculation: (9 × 0.714) ÷ 2 = 3.2
– Round up to 4 pairs of work pants
Toddler Parent Example:
– Laundry cycle = 8 days (weekly + dryer)
– Needs clothes daily = 100%
– Goes through 3 outfits per day = 3
– Calculation: (8 × 1.0) × 3 = 24 outfits needed
What Kind and How Many Clothes Should a Woman Have in Her Wardrobe?
Now you know how to calculate how to answer the question “how many clothes should a woman have in her wardrobe”. Your next step is to do the math. Start by thinking through your regular life: how many times in a week do you change clothes for different activities? Then run through the steps:
- calculate your laundry cycle
- determine your needs
- estimate the number of wears between washes
- run the math
To know exactly what styles to get, you need to understand your Style DNA. Start with your Essential Signature Style Guide.