400+ Outfits from 39 Pieces

Capsule Wardrobe Math

Happy day, dear reader!

My apologies! I am running late today. Holiday decorating was on the agenda this weekend, and pushed my publishing back a few hours. Hope your week is off to a great start! If you are new here, Welcome! If you are returning, Welcome Back! If you are returning, you already know a lot about me, so now it’s time for me to find out a little about you. Ready to get personal?

How large is your wardrobe? And how large does it need to be? This is a question I ask myself each season. If you are reading this, you are no longer in the days of one outfit for Monday through Saturday, and a second for Sunday best. Many Americans (and some others) have enough clothing in their wardrobes to wear a different set of clothes every day for a year, and still have options left over. I realize that some people need LOTS of options, and others need fewer to be happy. That’s a personality thing! If you are an options person, great! But how much is necessary for lots of options?

At the beginning of December, I started my winter capsule wardrobe. If you want to know more about how I did that, here’s the post on my inspiration, and how I get from inspiration to clothes hanging in my closet. The other day, I realized that I’ve never really talked through the math. (If you are a math-phobe, hang in there, it’s not too scary!) Today we’re going to do a little of that math!

Let’s start with stand alone tops. These are tops that can be worn by themselves. They don’t need a layer over them or under them to make them work. I count 19.

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Now let’s grab some bottoms. I won’t leave the house without something covering my bottom half! I only chose 8, four jeans and four others. It’s winter, and I can wear them a few times before cleaning. As long as I am careful with my coffee…

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If I wear every top with every bottom, I have 19 tops X 8 bottoms = 152 outfits. Now some of these probably aren’t going to fit my preferred silhouettes, and color and value contrasts, but I certainly could leave the house in any of them and avoid arrest!

Now let’s add some toppers, or layers. You’ll notice that some of these were also shown as stand-alone tops, because I wear them as both. There are some other sweaters above that I could wear as toppers, but don’t… If I take just 100 of the 152 outfits above (discounting some that I might not like combined), and combine those 100 with only 4 of these toppers, now we have 100 top/bottoms X 4 toppers = 400 outfits. (If I combined them with two more, there would be 600!) Is that enough choices, yet?

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If not, I’ll throw some dresses in the mix. I know some women don’t wear dresses. If you want to know why I love a dress, take a detour over here, but if dresses aren’t your thing, just skip these additions. You still already have enough to avoid nakedness. (Or nakedidity as my boys used to say!)

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Some of these dresses aren’t  winter-friendly worn alone, but that’s easy enough to remedy by combining them with the toppers above. If for ease, I just choose the toppers that open down the front, that’s 6. Let’s see… 5 dresses X 6 toppers = 30 more outfits. Added to the 400 outfits we already have, now we are at 430. If that’s not versatile enough, I could easily wear 4 of these as tunics over trousers, so let’s do another quick multiplication… 4 dresses X (just) 5 trousers = 20 more options. 430 + 20 = 450. That is certainly lots of wearable options out of the 37 pieces pictured above! (I won’t even add in the dress as tunic + pants + toppers equation, or the dress as jumper over a top options!)

What about if I need something a little more special for a date, or holiday ‘do? I have that covered, too. Time for some special occasion pieces… I added the satin cami and a jumpsuit; the jacket, cardigan, and lace blouse you’ve already seen above. I’ll treat the jumpsuit like a dress, so that would be 1 jumpsuit X 6 toppers + 1 jumpsuit alone = 7 more outfits. The cami will always have a topper, and can be worn with a variety of bottoms. I’ll limit the toppers and bottoms to mix it with to artificially depress our options. Adding that cami gives us… 1 cami x 5 toppers X 5 bottoms = 25 more outfits. Adding 7 + 25 + 450 = 482 outfits.

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If that’s not dizzying enough, we haven’t even started adding accessories. Changing shoes, jewels, and scarves immediately triple, quadruple, quintuple… ARRRRRGH! My head is melting with all these choices! If I have easily more than 500 outfit choices with just 39 clothing pieces, what do you have in your closet?

Stylishly yours,