The Curated Closet: A Simple System for Discovering Your Personal Style and Building Your Dream 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 mindset Looking Good Everyday -- provided the nuts and bolts The Power of Style -- prompted detail work on my style personality, color palette, and clothing details The Curated Closet -- solidified my rules, set my outfit formula, and established an on-going "curating" approach

This book is so much better than I imagined. It is very inspiring and goes in-depth about cultivating your own personal style, regardless of what you're into wearing. It gives, practical shopping tips and styling recommendations. This book is helpful even if you are only interested in a few topics. She even has a simple way of helping you decide which chapters will be the most helpful, based on why you bought the book. Most importantly, it got me excited enough to actually clean out my closet. I ended up getting rid of a ton of clothes months ago, and I haven't regretted selling/giving away even one piece. Additionally, I didn't know I needed an office capsule wardrobe (Chapter 12), but now that I have one, it has been a game changer. Great layout, loaded with information, straightforward and easy to read.

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!!

A delight to read & very, very helpful. I started paying attention to my style about 4 years ago... and it was a messy first couple of years. Two years ago, I fell in love with the capsule wardrobe concept. It completely transformed the way I shopped, thought about clothes and got dressed in the morning. Love it! I'm now transitioning into a wardrobe that is less structured and even more awesome -- and this book was so helpful and illuminating. The things that I especially loved include the styling challenges (it really opened my eyes about what I can do with my closet -- and what I was missing from an accessories standpoint), the tips on how to buy quality (it instantly made me a better shopper) and the detailed information on choosing a color pallet. I'm taking a step away from my historical color pallet this fall and this book made me feel more confident in those choices. Overall, a delightful read and a sane, resonant voice to guide you through dressing in a way that is more "you" and less everyone else. Downsides: the styles displayed in the book just didn't resonate with me (I love saturated color... and they seemed to be very summery) -- but it really wasn't an impact.

Kind of a "dumb" book that could Ave been 50 pages shorter

This is a super helpful step by step guide on how to create a wardrobe with a style that you like, that suits your lifestyle. I really liked that it had specific exercises and not just platitudes, for example, listing out the breakdown of the typical activities you do on a regular basis to figure out whether you should be focusing on buying or paring down workwear or activewear, etc. The advice is presented in a way that it can be easily personalized. There is lots of supplemental material (e.g. how to determine the quality of a garment, more details on color theory for outfit styling) on the author's website and honestly I think you could probably find most of the content of this book on the site through various blog posts. However it is presented in this book in an easily digestible linear sequence so if you're not hurting for money, it I think it's still worth the price. It's not going to do the work of the wardrobe overhaul for you, but if you're willing to put in the time, this book will make the process much clearer.

Kindle edition 3 stars, the content itself 5, so I split the difference! In the first chapter of this book there is a really cool little flow chart. At least I think that's what it is, because in the Kindle edition, which is what I bought, the flow chart is completely useless. It displays as page after page of 'back' & 'start over' responses next to arrows. The content is good. And I actually appreciate the fact that there aren't a lot of pictures in it that could become jaded and she is relying on the process to be timeless. I didn't mind the homework, because she's more interested in a personal solution than in a cookie-cutter you-are-this-personality-buy-these-pieces kind of approach. I own on a number of books in this genre and it's one I will probably always buy books in. I just enjoy it. And yet I still found value in this book .

Ainda estou na primeira etapa do livro, mas achei o "método" muito fácil de entender e interessante pois não se prende aos clichês de estilos do tipo "vc precisa ter no seu armário um vestidinho preto, camisa branca, etc". Por enquanto acho que valeu o investimento, mas é um processo, e o livro deve ser usado como um manual/guia/referência.

Beautiful

Questo manuale, seppur in lingua inglese, è davvero facile da leggere e trasmette dei concetti spiegati in modo chiaro e utile. La copertina è quasi vellutata e la grafica molto curata, per cui è proprio bello anche solo da sfogliare. L’ho trovato molto interessante e ho sfruttato molto le tecniche che descrive.

Great book! After discovering at my local library I decided to buy it to put into practice the exercises the author suggests. It's fun and easy to read, no cookie cutter formulas, just common sense, a pedagogical approach and the author's big knowledge of styling.

For someone who hates shopping as much as I do, this book was great. Really opened my eyes to the mistakes I've been making buying clothes - helped me to get rid of all those things I don't really like but was wearing anyway, and to know what to go and look for to fill the gaps. Honestly cannot recommend it enough.