Your wardrobe: your sanctuary and your history.

UNRAVEL YOUR WARDROBE, your sanctuary and your history.

‘If you want to improve your life immediately, clean out your closet. Often what we hold onto, holds us back’. 

Cheryl Richardson.
 
 
Have you ever thought about your wardrobe as your sanctuary?

It's probably your only personal and private space in your home, the space where you are the queen.  The place where no other family member is allowed, they know they’re looking for trouble in mom's closet!


Your wardrobe tells your history.

This includes items that tell stories of past events, functions and parties you have attended. 

Clothes that gossip about your fat and slim times. There are clothes that shouldn’t have entered your house, like unwelcome guests, but you’ve let them in anyway. 

And there are the old friends you grew older with and with whom you just can't part. They make you feel comfortable and safe. 

If you are like me, your travel stories are also captured in your closet. Every time I travel I like to buy something to remind me of that trip: 
a scarf, a bracelet, maybe even a dress or a piece of leatherware. When I wear these delightful and mostly colorful pieces again, it conjures up images of that trip.


Your valuables and heirlooms 

Your wardrobe is also the space where some of your most valuable personal items live together. Not only expensive clothes, but also expensive and special jewelry and perfumes.  It may be special gifts from a special man in your life, but it could also be other thoughtful gifts that are very precious to you, because you received them from precious people.

There might also be a collection of accessories which you have collected with great care over the years.  Or the heirlooms from your mother, grandmothers or sometimes aunts.  The pearls, pendants, rings, a precious silk scarf, perhaps a very valuable leather handbag we saw them worn regularly.  

A Rose quarts brooch became a cuff bracelet.

A great granddad’s pocket watch chain with Tiger’s eye gemstone, combined with Tiger’s eye pendants, as well as some other chains, became a unique, off-centre neckpiece. 

I have handbags in leathers that are considered exotic outside South Africa, but which are abundant here: ostrich, elephant, and others like perhaps springbok and zebra. 



 Here are the updated versions of my inherited ostrich leather handbags. The strap is interchangeable.
 

You are a curator 

We become the curators of those heirlooms and if you fulfill your curatorship well, your daughter(s) will one day become the proud owner of her grandmother's heirlooms. These valuable treasures are not necessarily always genuine pieces. Even Coco Chanel did not wear genuine pieces only. Valuable items  are those that earned their treasured status through your care and sentiment.

Your investment

Yes, one's wardrobe is a valuable piece of 'real estate' in the home in terms of the money, time and emotion that has been invested and captured in it over the years.
Are you giving your wardrobe  the attention and respect it deserves? 

Do you realize how big the total investment in it is?
But more importantly, how do your clothes make you feel when you see, handle and wear them?

A holistic system and therapist

Your wardrobe content is a holistic system that is a reflection of your emotions, your lifestyle, your preferences and your persona. What we wear on a daily basis and the finishing touch to our overall appearance very often reflects our moods and our self-esteem and self-respect. The day when you don't feel your best, you dress to stay in the shadows. 
But more importantly, how do your clothes make you feel when you see, handle and wear them?

Your wardrobe content is a holistic system that is a reflection of your emotions, your lifestyle, your preferences and your persona. What we wear on a daily basis and the finishing touch to our overall appearance very often reflects our moods and our self-esteem and self-respect. The day when you don't feel your best, you dress to stay in the shadows. 
And then there’re other days when you feel on top of the world and you dress accordingly by making an effort with your make-up and hair, and spray on your evening - out perfume!  Yes, your closet is your style therapist!

I would like to encourage you to look at your wardrobe with new eyes, to see your closet as your sanctuary, your
I would like to encourage you to look at your wardrobe with new eyes, to see your closet as your sanctuary, your history (and sometimes even hysteria!), your emotional pillar, your travel companion, your 'personal brand', your inheritance and legacy. It's also your visual testimony to the world.
 

Do you feel satisfied with how the world see you? 
Because it does matter.

As a client recently said to me: 

‘Unpacking my clothes brought up so many emotions. It challenged me to think: who I really am. I also felt sad because my wardrobe reflected how I neglected myself.’”