What you need to do before you create your first capsule wardrobe
We sometimes long for a different life, and sometimes we spend more money equipping ourselves for that than for the situations that our life actually consists of.
It's important to study what kind of life you lead, in order to figure out how to dress for it.
Perhaps you have enough high heeled shoes and party dresses for an entire season of Sex and the City, but your life actually has more activities where a pair of loafers and some nice pants will do just fine?
Heels and Feathers?
...or Students and Teaching?
Or, your closet is filled with clothes that fit your life, but you can't seem to be pleased with the outfits that you're able to make.
For most people, the day is roughly divided into three parts: Sleep, work, and leisure. If you're lucky, you get 8 hours of sleep, around 1/3 of your life.
Anyway, your days are your life, and you need a wardrobe to fit.
Even though we spend a lot of time sleeping, we will not count those hours in the context of capsule wardrobes. There are only so many outfits we need for sleep, right?
But your days and weeks are different.
An ordinary week can look like this:
What occupies the largest part of your week, should have your important capsule wardrobe.
And the one that you spend the most money and energy on.
In addition you have a few other activities during the year that may have their own dress codes, and that you may want to create capsule wardrobes for.
You may go to conferences a couple of times a year, where you have to present or speak, and there are Christmas parties and other formal gatherings, and perhaps a vacation or two during the year.
Even if these occasions happen seldom, they are important, and you must dress appropriately. You might want to plan a capsule wardrobe for each of these, and you probably have some items from the main capsule wardrobe that can be added to these.
Creating capsule wardrobes is fun and useful, but only if they are tailored to the situations that you need them for.
This is why one of the things we do before we even think about capsule wardrobes is to analyze.