At the beginning of this year, I designated two new categories for the items in my closet, “wardrobe all-stars” and “wardrobe benchwarmers.”  Since I have been tracking how often I wear everything I own since the start of 2011, I had accumulated a lot of data about my clothing and shoes.  I learned that like most people, I wear some items a lot and other pieces rarely, if at all.  I decided to categorize all pieces that were worn at least eight times in a given year as “all-stars” and anything that I didn’t wear at all or only wore once as “benchwarmers.”

My Sad Statistics for 2011 and 2012

Sadly, I learned that in 2012, I only had 39 “all-stars” (26 garments and 13 pairs of shoes), which constituted roughly 12% of my wardrobe.  In contrast, I had 146 “benchwarmers” (125 garments and 21 pairs of shoes), a full 45% of what was in my closet!  That’s right; close to half of what I owned was only worn once at best last year.  Clearly, something had to change!  So I created what I termed “The Wardrobe Benchwarmer Project” in order to address the large proportion of my wardrobe that wasn’t seeing the light of day.

My January closet – the binder clips all designate “wardrobe benchwarmers.”

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