Log kept 4–31 May 2026 · Published: 28 October 2026 · Last updated: 28 October 2026 · Reading time: ~7 minutes · The log, the photographs and the wardrobe count in this post are my own.
I counted my wardrobe on a Sunday afternoon and got to 94 items. Not including underwear or socks, which I gave up on counting after the second drawer. Just clothes and shoes, one person, one flat.
Then, for the next four weeks, I ticked a box next to every item I wore at least once. Not how many times. Not for how long. Just: did it leave the flat, or was it worn at home in a way that counts.
Nineteen items came out of 94. That is 20%. The other 75 stayed in the wardrobe for a month, and when I went through them afterwards I found that they were not all the same kind of thing, and that only one of the four kinds was actually a problem.
How I counted
The counting was straightforward and slightly tedious. I photographed the wardrobe rail in sections, wrote each item down, and made a list on paper with a box next to each. Then each evening I ticked whatever I had worn that day.
Two rules, both of which I made up on day one and stuck to:
- Worn at home counts. If I spent a Saturday in a jumper, the jumper was worn. The question is whether the item is in use, not whether it went outside.
- One tick is enough. The moment an item is worn once, it goes in the worn column permanently. I am not interested in how many times; I am interested in whether it is part of my life at all.
The 94, split
The 19 I wore had a rough replacement value of £480. The 75 I did not had a rough value of £1,860. Total, about £2,340 of clothing, of which a fifth was doing any work.
But "75 unworn" is not one finding, it is four, and they are not equally bad. So I went through the 75 one at a time and asked a single question: why didn't you wear this?
| Why it stayed | Items | Rough value | Is that a problem? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Out of season | 22 | £440 | No. It was May. These are doing their job. |
| For an occasion | 31 | £890 | Yes. This is the big one, and the hardest to argue against. |
| Aspirational | 14 | £340 | Yes. Bought for a version of me who does not exist yet. |
| Forgotten | 8 | £190 | Yes. No defence at all. |
| Total unworn | 75 | £1,860 | 53 of the 75 are a problem. 22 are not. |
The 22 that are fine
I want to dispose of these first because they are the category most people forget. Twenty-two items were unworn because it was May and they are coats, boots and heavy jumpers. That is not a wardrobe problem. That is a wardrobe working.
If you run this experiment in November you will get the reverse number and conclude, wrongly, that you have no summer clothes and should buy some. Seasonality is the reason a one-month audit needs a one-line caveat.
The 31 that are the real problem
Thirty-one items in my wardrobe exist for occasions that happen a few times a year at most. Two dresses, a suit jacket, four pairs of "good" shoes, a wedding outfit, two party tops, a formal coat, and so on.
Between them, those 31 items have been worn a combined six times. Not six times each. Six times in total, across all 31, across the three years I can account for with any confidence.
That is about 0.2 wears per item. They cost £890. Which works out, if you are being unkind, to about £148 per wear, and I am going to be unkind, because the alternative is pretending those numbers are fine.
Here is what makes this the hardest category to argue against. Every single one of those purchases was defensible at the time. You do not buy a wedding outfit by accident. There was an actual wedding. The dress was bought for it, and worn to it, and it looked right, and that was the correct decision.
The problem is not that any one purchase was wrong. It is that the occasions do not repeat, and the clothes do not get worn out, so they accumulate. After six years I have six years of "I need something for this" sitting in a section of the rail that I do not look at unless there is another wedding.
The 14 and the 8
The aspirational group is 14 items bought for a version of myself who is slightly thinner or slightly more adventurous than the one who actually gets dressed in the morning. Two pairs of trousers from a size down. A shirt I have never worn because it needs ironing, and I do not iron. A jacket in a colour I love and do not wear.
The forgotten group is 8 items I genuinely did not remember owning until I wrote the list. A skirt I like. Two tops I have no memory of buying. These are not a judgement problem. They are a storage problem. They were at the back, or in the wrong drawer, or behind something.
Both groups are fixable in a way the occasion clothes are not. The forgotten ones can be moved forward. The aspirational ones can be admitted about. The occasion ones need a decision about the future, not the wardrobe.
The thing I got wrong
I assumed the answer was decluttering. The phrase everyone uses is "if you haven't worn it in a year, get rid of it," and the four-week log looked like the obvious way to find the candidates.
But the log does not tell you what to get rid of. It tells you what you own. The 31 occasion items would fail a "worn in the last year" test and they would also be the exact wrong things to throw away, because there is another wedding coming up and the dress is fine.
So the four-week count produced a much smaller actionable number than I expected: 22 items worth dealing with, not 75. Fourteen of those are for removing. Eight are for bringing forward so I can actually see them, which is a different job from removing. The other 53 are either in season, 22 of them, or in a category that needs a purchasing rule rather than a decluttering pass, which is the 31 occasion items.
And that is where this connects to something I have now run into three times. The replacement experiment found that the useful question was asked before the purchase, not after. The offer experiment found the same thing: an offer is only a saving if the item was on your list before you saw the sticker. This one found it a third time. The wardrobe is not a storage problem you can solve by removing things. It is a purchasing problem, and the purchase is where the decision was made.
So the rule I came out with: before you buy a piece of clothing, ask whether you would wear it on a Tuesday. Not "would I wear this?" Everyone would wear a sequin jacket. The Tuesday question is specific enough to be answerable, and it filters out both the occasion clothes and the aspirational ones in a single move.
The corollary, which is the one I actually needed: for genuine occasion clothes, rent or borrow. I am not going to stop going to weddings. But the £148 per wear on those 31 items is entirely avoidable, and the reason I did not avoid it is that buying felt simpler than hiring on the day, which is true and also how you end up with £890 of clothes you look at twice a year.
What I would do differently
I would have run the log across a season change rather than inside one. Eight weeks from mid-March to mid-May would have caught the boots and the heavy jumpers on their way out of winter and cut that 22 down considerably, which would have made the rest of the analysis cleaner. The out-of-season group is the one number in this post that is really a calendar artefact rather than a fact about me.
And I would have asked the Tuesday question in the shop from the start, rather than deriving it from a wardrobe audit afterwards. The audit told me the answer. It also cost me four weeks of ticking boxes and a Sunday afternoon counting, and it could have been a single question asked thirty-one times over six years.
Should you do this?
The four-week log, no. It is a lot of ticking for a number you can estimate in ten minutes by looking at what is at the front of the rail versus the back.
The split, yes, and it takes an afternoon. Go through the wardrobe and put every item into one of four groups: in season, occasion, aspirational, forgotten. The interesting number is not how many you have. It is how much of the total value sits in the middle two groups, because that is the money you spent on a person who does not exist or an event that happens twice a year.
What you do about it depends on which group is biggest. If it is forgotten, move things forward and you have solved it for free. If it is aspirational, you have a purchasing rule to write. If it is occasion, the answer is to stop buying for occasions and start hiring, and that is a decision about the next six years rather than about this wardrobe.
Frequently asked questions
Did you get rid of the 22 items?
Some of them. Nine went out: five of the forgotten ones I did not want, and four aspirational things I finally admitted about. That is nine of the 14 I flagged for removal. The occasion clothes are all still there. I have not solved that one and I am not going to pretend I did. The honest position is that I have decided to stop buying for occasions, and I have not yet decided what to do with the £890 already spent.
Isn't 94 items quite a lot?
It is more than I would have guessed and less than some people I know. I am not going to make a claim about what is normal, because I do not know and neither does anyone who has not counted. What I can tell you is that I would have said 50 if you had asked me on the Saturday.
Does this mean you should only own 20 items?
No, and that is the wrong lesson. The 22 out-of-season items are proof that a wardrobe needs more than the number you wear in a given month. A minimal wardrobe is a real choice but it is a different project from this one, and the £148-per-wear occasion clothes are not fixed by owning fewer T-shirts.
Would you do it again?
Not the four-week log. The Tuesday question has stuck, and I have caught myself in a shop twice since with a thing in my hand that I would not wear on a Tuesday. That is two avoided purchases and the audit paid for itself. The rest of it, the counting, the ticking, the four groups on the bed, was a way of arriving at a question I could have just started asking.
About this post
Written by Maha Alkumaish. I write about the routines and systems that survive a real working week, tested on myself before they get written about. The four-week log, the wardrobe count and the photographs in this post are my own.
All photographs in this post are my own. I was not paid or sponsored by any brand mentioned, and there are no affiliate links in this post. More about me and how these experiments are run.
Related reading on this blog:
- I tracked every "on offer" purchase for six weeks, the same pre-purchase question, applied to a yellow sticker instead of a wardrobe
- I replaced three things I'd owned for years, where the finding was that you cannot replace your way out of a problem you have not described
- I did a no-spend month with three exceptions, where the want list turned an impulse into a decision you could look at
- More Money & Simplicity posts
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