Twenty pieces. That’s it. Twenty is the magic number that makes up what Annmarie O’Connor, author of The Happy Closet, calls a You-niform. The 20 items break down as follows: one coat, three jackets, five bottoms, five tops, one dress, five shoes. Close your eyes and picture it: a lean, calm, minimal wardrobe. An inch of bare rail between matching wooden hangers, just like in the fancy shops.
A pared-to-the-bone wardrobe is the chicest kind. A wardrobe formula attributed to Coco Chanel has a staccato, telegram quality, like a string of her famous pearls: “Black and white. Good shoes. Dresses. Polish. Simplicity. Well-fitting clothes.” I have a soft spot for Cher Horowitz’s closet in Clueless, so vast it requires a computerised inventory, but my heart belongs to Joan Didion, and the packing list she kept taped inside a cupboard “which enabled me to pack, without thinking, for any piece I was likely to do”, she wrote in 1979.
