The Curated Closet: A Simple System for Discovering Your Personal Style and Building Your Dream Wardrobe

This is a great outline for saving money and space on your wardrobe.

If you are frustrated by the standard quizzes and capsule rules -- pick up this book.Anuschka lays out a detailed approach to developing your personal wardrobe. She stresses that personal style is very different from being fashionable. She explains when a capsule makes sense, when a "curated" wardrobe makes sense, and how to blend both. Most importantly, she teaches you how to define your own clothing rules. She does not provide lists or pictures of what works together -- that's your homework. She does provide completed samples of each assignment. Do not purchase if you want a quick, do-it-in-one-afternoon guide. It was work; however, I have a clear set of personal rules, fabric preferences, and outfit formulas. Pieces a quick-capsule-approach guided me to discard or pack-away are now in purposeful use!While Anuschka is exceptional on the wardrobe element, I was only able to follow everything based on previous work. I'd be a bit lost on color, personalized style words, and garment basics without the prior read of Bobbie Thomas, The Power of Style (similar approach with clearer guidance on personal style & color palettes), Nancy Nix-Rice, Looking Good Every Day (required text for FIT NY Image Consultants), and Jennifer Scott, Lessons From Madame Chic (light-hearted stories underscoring and explaining personal style, quality, upkeep, yep, no quizzes her either). For me, understanding the fundamentals allowed me to maximize Anuschka's approach.Having read those books, Anuschka is exceptional at the final mechanics of building and updating a wardrobe that meets YOUR needs and style personality. Really, no book can do it all. The Curated Closet is the final piece to my personal style & wardrobe journey!Madame Chic -- put me in the proper mindsetLooking Good Everyday -- provided the nuts and boltsThe Power of Style -- prompted detail work on my style personality, color palette, and clothing detailsThe Curated Closet -- solidified my rules, set my outfit formula, and established an on-going "curating" approach

This is easily my favorite style guide. The title describes it perfextly. It's a book for curating your closet. It's not just for people who want to nail their capsule wardrobes. It has closet cleaning, shopping tips, how to find your own style, questionnaires, maintenance tips... It's pretty packed without being too specific to one type of lifestyle. I'd done a bit of work on my own, but this definitely helped me identify some categories for improvement and will come in handy. I love sewing because I can make clothes fit my body and my life regardless of what's in stores,, but I definitely clutter my wardrobe and pattern collection up every so often. I also found the pictures and formatting to be aesthetically pleasing. Quick tips and questions were in appropriately places and reframed and summed up the main text. Not a one felt like a redundant self-congratulatory blurb. I will say the fabric section keeps things very simple. Not too much about all the types. Just a few. Additionally, while fast fashion is called out, the environmental aspects of fashion are largely left out. I'm okay with that only because I think fast fashion is called out softly enough to not scare people away from making better choices. I think some environmental discussions can bring up guilt and this book is not here for that. The focus is on quality and I can definitely get behind that. Not to mention reminders of repairing and mending! Love that!In sum, if you're down to curate your wardrobe and keep it up, this is exactly the place to start. You'll get where you want to be with a little time and effort.

I've been doing capsule wardrobes and working on editing my closet for the last two years. Here's what I love about The Curated Closet, and why I think it's better than the other wardrobe overhaul methods I've tried:First of all, none of it is cookie-cutter; it's about what works for YOU. It starts with a look at your current outfits (as opposed to pieces in your wardrobe). She asks you to take pictures of your outfits for two weeks and then looks at your FAVORITE outfits, that you felt the best in, and helps you analyze them to figure out WHY you love them and then build your whole wardrobe around those elements. This is different from every other challenge I've looked at, which have you look at all the clothes you WORE and build your wardrobe around the pieces you wore, which is NOT the same as building it around your favorite outfits. For me, I had a lot of favorite pieces, mixed with filler pieces that I only felt "meh" about, and consequently only felt okay about the outfits, even though they had some of my favorite pieces. No more "meh"!!!Walking away from this book I am purging a good chunk of my wardrobe (again; I'm down to less than 40 items now) but now have a clear set of guidelines for building it back up. I have a color palette, a couple of go-to outfit formulas, and a very specific but concise shopping list, of what I want to add, in order of priority. I finally feel like I've reached an end-goal and don't need to purge anymore! All that's left is to find the few pieces on my shopping list, and enjoy finally having my ideal wardrobe. Thank you for writing this book Anuschka Reeves, and thank you to Caroline at the Un-Fancy blog for recommending it!!