Clothes we buy but never wear

As the seasons pass by and we’ve had our first few sunny days of the year, the summer trend cycle is slowly reawakening. In its wake is a wardrobe filled with unused clothes we swore we would wear. I have a quirky button-down skirt that I never wear and a navy trench coat that never feels quite right these days. It seems wasteful to neglect them, but I’d also feel guilty giving them away. For those of you who feel the same, you may be wondering: what do we do with the clothes we buy but never wear? And how can we prevent these situations in the future?

Sometimes that ‘Billie-Eilish-baggy’ look ends up emulating Dobby the house elf more than I thought it would

You’ll probably be able to find an item in your wardrobe that you had high hopes for when you bought it and have since only worn maybe three times. This could be for a number of reasons – maybe the item doesn’t fit quite the way you thought it would or maybe it doesn’t go with any of your other clothes. I’ve fallen victim to buying clothes online that I can only wear with one pair of jeans and thus end up never wearing, or seeing clothes in charity shops that look good until I try them on and realise they don’t fit at all. Sometimes that ‘Billie-Eilish-baggy’ look ends up emulating Dobby the house elf more than I thought it would. Nevertheless, the vision we had when buying clothes doesn’t always come to fruition and sometimes this is a slow-growing realisation. Sometimes the clothes were right for you at the time you bought them, but tastes change, and now they’re not your thing.

One of your choices now is to be productive about your mistakes and act quickly. This tends to mean returning your purchases before you get attached to them. Unfortunately, if you tend to err on the side of optimism, you may struggle with this. You may think to yourself, I can make this work, or it was quite cheap so there’s no point, I’m sure it’ll be perfect someday. Also, if an item of clothing was right for you at the time (like my button-down skirt) but is now not really your thing, then you obviously can’t just return it, and chances are you have succumbed to attachment.

This, for me, is what makes it so hard to let go of clothes I never wear even though I know I should. I can’t help but think back on all the good times we’ve had together: that time a girl in my seminar said she liked my skirt, or back when I used to wear it all the time and feel good in it.

In my opinion, there are now two choices: to wear, or not to wear, and it really depends on the circumstance. If, like me, you’re conscious of how much ‘stuff’ you seem to accumulate, you might want to consider being a bit more cut-throat and just getting rid of the stuff you don’t need, don’t use, and these days, don’t even like. Or, for instance, if you keep buying new clothes when you’ve got plenty of perfectly wearable ones, you could consider a similar project to the one Jess Cartner-Morley describes, where you just start wearing all the neglected items in your wardrobe – throw caution to the wind. She suggests finding that spark that drew you to the item in the first place and assessing why exactly you no longer want to wear it. Who cares if it’s a little dressy or it’s not the kind of thing you normally wear?

All in all, be true to yourself – you know what you like better than the internet does

But perhaps the main factor influencing why we stop wearing certain clothes is the sheer speed of the trend cycle. When we buy into micro-trends, we feel trendy for a few months before the trend drops off and our clothes start to feel outdated. Nowadays, I tend to be quite careful in considering whether I actually like the item of clothing I’m about to buy, or if I just like it because it’s trendy in the moment. It can be difficult to tell, especially if the trend has been building for a while. I would recommend holding off on buying something until you’re sure you like it, or try and remember whether that popular thing matched your personal tastes before it got trendy. One great way to avoid buying micro-trends is by shopping second-hand, which with the rise of online second-hand shopping sites like Vinted and the popularity of charity shopping, has become readily accessible.

All in all, be true to yourself – you know what you like better than the internet does, and you know whether you should give up those clothes you never wear better than I do. Be honest with yourself, because you really don’t need as much as you might think you do.