What Wikipedia Can’t Tell You About Too Many White Shirts

If you’re like me you have a few white tops, or nearly white, everyone looks good in white and it’s a safe bet. Clean, fresh and casual, smart or professional. However, can you have too many!?!

Ruthless was helping Jenni Knight-mare sort through her wardrobe. Jenni literally has hundreds of clothes and every item has meaning to her, but due to the volume, she had no idea just what exactly she had, as most things were buried underneath piles of other clothes! It was time to do an audit and get Ruthless! Out everything came, all over the bed and all over the floor, she has about 20 times more clothes than me, but she looks sensational in everything so I get why she likes shopping, but seriously its out of control in there! This may surprise you but her husband is allowed 10% of the wardrobe space, but to fit everything back in I had to cleverly rearrange a few things so he wouldn’t notice I reduced his space down to 7%. She has a huge chest of draws and 3 draws of active wear, although I can see she works out a lot but really there is too much lycra in this house. There were plenty of times where I wanted to excuse myself, run and never come back, but I pushed through. Each time I held up an item she said “that looks really good with jeans” or “I wear that, its really comfortable in summer.” …You get the picture; she was not keen on letting go. As the sorting was starting to come together and when she went to the loo, I managed to chuck quite a lot in a black plastic bag, she’ll thank me for it one day! One of the biggest discoveries was the number of white shirts she had? Long sleeve, short sleeve, jersey and dressy there were around 30 variations of slightly off white running to a cream colour. To my eye, many were so similar; in fact some were identical just different sizes?

As we were being ruthless she got better at letting go as the day wore on, then she proudly said “put that on my daughters pile, that colour doesn’t suit me”??? Guess what, it was a white shirt.

I asked her to “please explain” and I think that’s when the penny dropped, you can never have enough white shirts in Jenni’s mind, so we made room for them and that’s her choice.

The real issue here is not the amount of white shirts you have, but state and space you keep your clothes in. If you can’t see what you have, you’re unlikely to wear it, or you’ll go out and buy something, only to discover you already have three just like it, even from the same shop!

Book me to organise your wardrobe health check and bring back the joy of opening your closet.