I Tried A Capsule Wardrobe For 30 Days

This is everything I'm going to be wearing for the next month. Why did I slap that suitcase so hard? I'm really trying to make this dramatic. Sorry, suitcase. I didn't mean it. Now, I first heard about capsule wardrobes probably five years ago at this point, and it's always been something that's really interested me, but just like minimalism or going to the gym ever or actually having a semi-regular sleep schedule, it's something that I know would probably improve my quality of life, but I've never quite been able to muster the willpower to start. Maybe just because deep down I hate myself a little bit and I don't actually want to allow myself to enjoy my life, and so I just turn into a giant work machine and... Never mind. This is a capsule wardrobe video. Okay. So what is a capsule wardrobe, you ask? Good question, my friend. A capsule wardrobe is essentially a mini version of a wardrobe, which I realize can sound like a really pretentious way of describing the phenomenon of just not being able to afford that many clothes. Like all forms of minimalism, there's definitely a solid layer of privilege there, assuming that you even have the problem of owning a lot of stuff to begin with and that you have the money to invest in really good quality items. That being said, the idea of a capsule wardrobe is to select 30 to 40 items that you love, that fit you well, and that mix and match, and wear only those items for an entire season. The goal is to make it easier to put together outfits in the morning and to save money and avoid impulse purchases because there's a strict limit on the number of clothes you can own. Yes, getting these shots of my feet is as ridiculous as it looks. Now, the reason I'm finally deciding to try out a capsule wardrobe and the reason I'm sitting next to the suitcase right now is that I'm actually going to be in London for a month, which in combination with the fact that we're calling living with 30 pieces of clothing a challenge, just screams first world problems. This whole video is going to be like that. I'm really sorry about it. I don't know what to do. But nevertheless, I thought it would be an interesting experiment and give us both some insight into whether owning more clothing really makes you any happier or any more fashionable. Dun dun dun! Roll the clips. Editing Ashley. Hey guys! So it is the first day after filming that intro segment and honestly, so far, so good. I'm feeling good about this, although I might be a little bit biased because I have only had to pick out one outfit so far. I'm just wearing my favorite overalls that I've been wearing in every single video that I film and I layered this little lacy camisole shirt underneath to change it up a little bit. When I woke up this morning, it was really easy to choose an outfit, probably because I didn't have that many pieces to choose from. But yeah, normally, even when I'm going out to run a simple errand or to get dressed in the morning, I can spend like an hour choosing out an outfit for something as stupid as like, I need to go to the post office. I end up digging through my wardrobe for so long because I'm like, oh, this is a little too fancy for the post office. This might be a little casual for the post office. You know, we got some mail then to impress here. No, but it takes me forever and it prevents me from actually going out and enjoying my life. This morning, I just woke up, I popped something on out of my very limited options and now I'm ready to go for the day. So overall, pun intended, we were off to a strong start. This week, I realized there was something really nice about taking the pressure off my outfits, which I feel like in turn also trickled into me just caring less about my appearance overall, feeling less pressure to do my hair and makeup perfectly and just focusing on staying warm, spending time with my family and most importantly, stuffing my face with hobnobs. Okay, we're only two weeks in and I have already reworn this exact same outfit like three times. Lizzie McGuire, you are an outfit repeater. I didn't think I would settle into wearing the same outfit over and over again like this early on, but something about being in a foreign country makes me just like not really give a ---- about whether I outfit repeat or not because like who's gonna roast me, my Airbnb host? Nobody gives a ---- that I'm wearing the same thing over and over. Hello, hello, it is Tuesday night. I'm getting dressed for a date, a first date in fact. Now my normal first date prep consists of about an hour of me choosing different outfits and freaking out about whether I look like I'm trying too hard or I don't look like I tried hard enough, like trying to find the ******* effortless sexy balance that is always impossible to find. Anyways, I thought it would be easier since I only have about 40 items with me right now, but somehow I have still managed to make a gigantic mess out of my wardrobe. Clothes are everywhere. I have tried just about every combination and permutation of clothing that I currently own and I think we narrowed it down to two options. So first up, we have this outfit, which is very like French made chic. It feels like a little bit more of a classic first date outfit though, usually with a bit of an open neckline so that when you're like sitting down and chatting, there's some skin out there. I don't know, I don't know. I'm trying to be flirty. I don't know how to. All right, here's option number two. This one is a little bit more casual. I have this skirt with a leg slit so we've got some scandalous leg territory, but it's pretty conservative up top. I just threw on a vintage band tee that I own and then I'm gonna throw on these boots which have a pretty substantial heel on them so I feel like it would help dress up the outfit a little bit. I don't know, this outfit is very like LA cool girl so that's kind of why I like it because I feel like I'm always such a try hard and I'm constantly overdressed, but now I'm afraid that in London, we're going to like a bar in Soho so I feel like I might be underdressed. Why is this so hard? Okay, I ended up going for outfit number two. I added this little tortoise shell choker that I may or may not have designed myself. And this coat. Cool, but the coat's coming off later in the evening if you know what I'm saying. Okay, wish me luck. I'm gonna stress eat my croissant a little bit to ease the discomfort of vlogging in public. Here's what I'm wearing today by the way. A coat, some black jeans underneath. Probably what I'm gonna be wearing like half the time while I'm in London because it's so cold and this coat is the only really warm thing that I brought. At this point, London's winter weather was really coming for my L.A. ass and I ended up having to wear this tan coat over nearly every single one of my outfits. Even if it's not pictured here with the tan coat, like in real life, I was wearing that tan coat because I was freezing otherwise. So ultimately, I was really glad that I brought a couple accessories like this headband for example that helped me change up my look even when I was wearing the same outerwear all the time. The next weekend, I did step up my outfit game a little because it was time to head to Paris and mispronounce all the names of the pastries. Saturday night, this is what I wore to my first ever rave in a warehouse and I got these jeans so sweaty, I couldn't wear them for the rest of my trip which is how you know you've had a good rave, I think. That's how Ashley's gonna be tonight. It's gonna look good. Now as I headed back to London, I unfortunately got hit by some type of cold flu hangover bubonic plague crossover episode that left me pajamafied and in bed for the next four days straight. Hey guys, it is the day before Halloween and I am so goddamn sick. I do really wish that I had another set of pajamas. I had a black t-shirt and leggings that I wore on the train from Paris to London and I got so sweaty and disgusting in those and then I have been wearing this same pajama t-shirt. Ashley, you don't need a hoodie. You're gonna want to look cute all the time. No, no, no. Packing Ashley, oh how you were wrong. Anyways, I am gonna go to sleep and cheer on my white blood cells. Go Ashley's white blood cells. You can do it. It's around 4 p.m on Halloween and I don't have a costume. I knew this was gonna be a problem when I packed for this trip because I wanted to make sure that every single piece of clothing was something I would wear on a day-to-day basis so I didn't leave room in my suitcase for a specific Halloween costume. I told myself I was gonna thrift a Halloween costume while I was here but then obviously I was very sick for a couple days and I just managed to rally myself to go to a Halloween party. Crazy story but I'm actually going to a subscriber's Halloween party so you girls trying to dress to impress. I really bet this would be a situation where it'd be nice to not have a capsule wardrobe because then I think I could effectively DIY some type of costume or movie character out of outfits that I already own. Two hours later. I see, I would use the actual Spongebob transition but I've literally gotten an entire video copyright striked for using that before so please forgive my absolutely horrible Spongebob voice. Hello, ladies. I have attempted a look. I tried to do this vampire-y thing but I don't even own a red lipstick right now and all of the makeup stores are closed so I layered on like five layers of tinted lip balm. I tried my best. At least this dress though is doing a lot for me. I think this neckline will get the message across for people. I literally just look like a drunk girl the next morning which I guess will be my real costume later tonight if you know what I'm saying. So right now I am headed to a cafe to do a little bit of editing. I think the saving grace of my capsule wardrobe so far has been the fact that I packed one tan slash neutral color scheme and then one black color scheme. It's made it really easy to get dressed in the morning because I either decide that it's a black day or a tan day and if it's a black day, I'm wearing my black leather trench coat, my black boots. If it's a tan day, I'll wear my tan coat, tan bag, tan shoes, etc. So yeah, it's been making the whole outfit decision process pretty simple. I do miss having more variety of outfits to choose from a little bit but so far we're doing okay. Hi, guys. So I have eight days left in this challenge and I'm slowly starting to realize that I've only worn about like 60% of my wardrobe so far mostly because it is ******* cold here in England and I failed to calculate for that. Today is Sunday and I thought I would just go out and shoot some of the outfits that I haven't worn yet. Currently, I'm wearing a little mini dress and freezing my booty off but yeah, I'm gonna try to get at least a couple photos before I turn into a giant ice cube and at least get a little bit of use out of the rest of my wardrobe. Just a regular day at the office taking pics of my own feet on self timer. So I'm about to post on Instagram and I'm realizing that for the first time, my outfits are getting a little bit repetitive. Now luckily, I have an outfit repeated but because I packed so many neutral and tanned toned items in my capsule wardrobe, like the outfits are kind of blending together. It's like tan pants, tan top, tan pants. I think my point of all this is that there's just an absurd amount of pressure on Instagram to look like you have an insane amount of clothing and like even me with, you know, 40 pieces of clothing, that's a good amount of clothing. It's still noticeable when I repeat items. I will say another downside of doing this capsule wardrobe has been that I have felt restricted in the number of fashion videos that I can make. I was gonna make a fall outfit ideas video but then I realized that since I'm shooting this video, pretty much every single outfit in my fall outfit ideas video would also be in this video and I didn't want to repeat outfits between the two videos. So that is why I haven't actually done like a fall lookbook or anything yet. I've been feeling a little shitty about it because my channel is supposed to be a fashion channel and I just haven't been making fashion videos because I don't have or I feel like I don't have enough clothing to sustain that. I guess it's bringing me back to like when I first started YouTube. I had, I guess, a capsule wardrobe just based off the fact that I didn't have that much clothing and I didn't have a crazy amount of money to spend on clothing and I remember feeling really frustrated at that time because I would wear a dress on Instagram and then I felt like I couldn't wear it for another like three months because otherwise I would be outfit repeating and people wouldn't be interested. So ironically that's why I got into thrifting because it was the only affordable way that I could have enough variety of outfits to actually start doing fashion YouTube. I guess that just leads to a question to you guys Would you rather that I bought less clothing overall and I had less variety of outfits on my Instagram and you could see me reusing the same pieces over and over again or do you really like seeing new and fresh outfits every single week? I don't know. Let me know your thoughts. As the month came to a close, I was getting a little experimental with my layering in an attempt to get the most out of my capsule wardrobe. Here I layered a sweater underneath a lace cami so my boobs wouldn't freeze off in the winter cold and here I popped on a sweater over a maxi dress. This sweater was a bit long so I tied it in the back with scrunchie, flipped the tail up, and then zhooshed the front until it looked like a crop sweater that hit me perfectly at my waist. So I caved and I bought this red lipstick because- sorry for my lips There we go. I bought this red lipstick because I can't buy any clothing but I can spend like five pounds on a lipstick and change my look up a little bit. You guys know that I'm more into fashion than makeup and hair but I feel like I always forget that they're an equally valid way to change up your look especially if you are working on a small wardrobe. So today we have a red lip and a red outfit. I'm gonna be very cold today but I'm doing a little bit of a photo shoot so you know what? You suffer for the gram, kids. And that just about wraps up my month. Here is what I wore on my last ever day in London. I went for some drinks and bowling with some new friends that I had met and then earlier the next morning, slightly hungover and very sleep deprived, I slipped into a much more comfortable outfit to go to the airport and in the wise words of Miley Cyrus, hop on a plane to LAX. Nodding my head like yeah, moving my hips like yeah. Hey guys! So I am back in LA at this point amongst my worldly possessions and obsessive number of plants inside my apartment. I have been back here for around five days at this point so I thought I would share my conclusions from this whole wardrobe- capsule wardrobe experiment. Overall, I think I overwhelmingly had a positive experience. I feel like I was being really dramatic at the beginning. I was like, can I survive with only 40 pieces of clothing? The answer is like, yeah bitch, you can and 40 pieces of clothing turned out to be more than I needed. I felt like I overpacked even though I was there for an entire month. So here were the major pros of a capsule wardrobe that I found. The biggest pro of capsule wardrobes for me was the amount of time that I saved in the morning. It actually simplified my life so much. There was a huge difference not only in having less outfits to choose from but having done a lot of the mental process of selecting items that would match together when I packed. Decision fatigue is the idea that if you have to make a bunch of decisions in a day even small ones like what to wear in the morning, what to eat for breakfast, those can mentally tire you out and make it harder for you to make more important and bigger decisions later in the day. This is allegedly why like Steve Jobs wore the same thing every single day. Not that I was making any Steve Jobs level moves while I was in London but I do think it helped me feel less overwhelmed in the morning and like I had a little bit more time and brain power to spend on my actual work. Something that really surprised me was the fact that having less clothing made me want to shop less. I thought it would be the other way around and I would want to buy more stuff to fill up my wardrobe but in reality having all of these pieces that already matched perfectly together it didn't feel like there was a hole in my wardrobe. I think oftentimes the reason I'd buy something new is because I've already bought something else and then I don't quite have the right piece to match with it so I'm like forever trying to one-up my past purchases by matching them with something else. Having fewer pieces of clothing also just made me very aware of which pieces I hadn't worn yet so I didn't feel the need to go out and buy a new sweater because I knew that I had a sweater sitting in my wardrobe that I hadn't worn that month yet and I wanted to wear it before I bought anything else. Granted I did go thrifting one time during this month mostly for a video and for the fact that I didn't want to leave London without checking out the vintage shops but I made sure to not wear any of the new clothes that I bought so it wouldn't mess up the whole idea of a capsule wardrobe. There is also something comforting at the end of the day in feeling a little bit like a cartoon character in that I had a certain selection of outfits and a certain color palette that I always wore. Previously I had always thought of clothes as like a costume you could change in and out of and you could change your character every single day so like one day I want to be romantic girly Ashley one day I'm e-girl Ashley one day I'm like punk rock Ashley and I think that's a lot of fun and that's part of why I love fashion but there was also something comforting about feeling a stronger sense of identity with the clothes that I brought on this trip and feeling like I was wearing like a consistent version of myself every single day. I don't know if that makes sense or maybe I just like rely on fashion for too much of my self-identity but that was something I felt. My cons are very brief and quite obvious which is one, sometimes it's nice to have a variety of clothing for a special event like Halloween or for my job if I'm making like a 30 outfits video or a lookbook and second of all on occasion it did feel a little bit repetitive honestly it has been really nice to get creative with my outfits again I feel like I had this little like giddy moment the first day that I woke up back in my apartment and I could put together whatever outfit I wanted so what are my final takeaways from this experiment? Number one, my eyes are so much bigger than my stomach when it comes to clothing especially once you realize that textiles are not particularly nutritionally valuable and actually quite hard to digest what I mean by that is in my head I have so much more time to wear clothing than I actually do like when I was packing for this trip I was so stressed out that I wouldn't have enough clothing I was trying to like shove one last shirt in my suitcase when in reality on this trip I didn't end up wearing several of the pieces of clothing I had too many outfits and not enough time to wear all of them around a month and a half ago I did a giant closet clean out and I got rid of like half of the clothes that I owned but this experiment has made me realize that I am more than happy with way less than that I don't think that having more clothing at home made me any happier than having 40 pieces of clothing that I really liked on this trip although I might be slightly biased because I was in London and it was absolutely lovely and beautiful and everybody was lovely and had British accents and was very sweet so I think I was just happier in general and my third and final takeaway is that this month made me realize the growing gap between what I perceive that I need for my influencer life and what actually makes me happy as a regular human I've been doing YouTube full-time for around seven months now and I've slowly bought into the idea without even realizing it that influencers need a huge wardrobe with an infinite number of outfits that I need a perfect mirror for my mirror selfies that I need a big apartment so that I can have a clean background for all of my videos when in reality that is the stuff that used to frustrate me so much about YouTube I guess I really wanted to become this influencer who would have like beautiful clothes and perfectly coordinated outfits all the time that I didn't really stop to think about why I like originally started my YouTube channel which was in part to have cool outfits but also largely to show people that you didn't need all this like fancy bullshit in order to dress well I feel like so much of my life has become caught up in like trying to obtain the influencer things like the ******* house and the perfect wardrobe but in reality that was never something that I really wanted or needed so I mean this is getting way more deep than a ******* capsule wardrobe I need to like rethink a lot of my life but that's a topic for another time so what does this mean for the fate of my wardrobe? I don't think that I will be sticking strictly to a capsule wardrobe from now on just because I do like a little bit more variety and flexibility than it allows but I came up with a system that I think will work well for me in which at the beginning of each season I'm going to separate around 30 pieces of clothing onto a clothing rack and that's going to be my like pseudo capsule wardrobe on a day-to-day basis I will just choose outfits from those 30 pieces so it'll make it easier to get dressed in the morning and reduce my decision fatigue but I'll still have the freedom that if I just want to dress up really cool that day if I have a video to shoot if I have a special occasion I still have access to the rest of my clothing okay I've been sitting on my feet and they're slowly falling asleep so I guess on a concluding note I would 100% recommend you guys try a capsule wardrobe for at least a month I think it's a really really cool idea and I learned a lot of valuable lessons from it thank you guys so much for watching I'll see you guys next week bye