I am currently in the process of doing something that shocks my friends when I mention it: I am tidying my apartment using the methods outlined in the book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo.
The reason this shocks people who know me is because I am notoriously Maximalist. My aesthetic is the opposite of “Millennial Gray”– it’s neo-Victorian and eclectic, full of details, textures, antiques, collectibles, and colors. My wardobe is full of costumes I’ve made, things people have given me for free, things I’ve “ground scored” for free while walking around New York (people there tend to discard things more rapidly than they do in the Midwest due to smaller living spaces, so there’s spontaneous “free stores” that pop up everywhere). The main source of strife I’ve had with past roommates is the sheer amount of stuff I have. My family has issues with mild hoarding that are obvious results of the Great Depression leaving a lingering impact on multiple generations. It took me eight months to unpack after the 5th time I moved all my stuff in less than two years… I thought. Once I started the KonMari process, I realized there were bags in my closet that hadn’t even been unpacked since 2021, let alone unpacked after the last move!
In general, people who are really into crafty hobbies and anything involving costumes have a reputation for NOT being minimalists. This normally isn’t necessarily to buying too many things, either. It’s very often due to finding things for free, having materials left from various past jobs and gigs, having other people offer you free things, etc. For example, I have three different 18th century style gowns and never paid for any of them. One is left from an opera I worked on in 2014, one is from a theater that closed and gave everything away for free in 2019, and another one was from Rose Mansion when that closed very suddenly in the summer of 2020. They didn’t even have time to sell their stock and just gave it all away.
Marie Kondo describes the more normal version of this as the “younger sister” situation where someone is used to having hand-me-downs. Due to the size I was in the 2000s and 2010s and the unique style I have, I was always the first person people thought of to give old clothing and costumes to. I once had someone gift me a hat from the Edwardian era “just because.”
In the Netflix series about people doing this tidying process, they typically show a fairly sizable pile of clothes on the bed. My situation was completely different. It filled the entire room when I gathered EVERYTHING into one pile, including things I was storing in living room closets and mending piles.
What was left at the end was no less interesting, varied, and useful for every possible life situation than what I started with. Really, the issue wasn’t about getting rid of things that don’t get worn regularly (yes, I kept all the historical costumes and odd things). It was about finding a completely different way to store and organize things.
The first thing I noticed while putting back the things I was keeping was that many pieces were struggling hard against gravity. I’m not talking about normal, 21st century dresses here. I’m talking about historical reproductions that were made with anywhere from 8 yards of fabric to 20 yards of fabric. Some of them are heavy fabrics, too, like velvet, raw silk, and heavy satins. Marie Kondo says to fold as much as possible instead of hanging it, but obviously these things were never going to fit in a drawer. It was a joke to even consider that idea! But trying to fight gravity to keep them on hangers was so irritating that I felt like people who lived in past centuries would not have put up with that for the things they wore every day.
I did a bit of digging online, and it turns out that period sources from the 1880s also recommended folding most clothes instead of hanging them. The only difference is, they didn’t use the same kinds of storage materials people use now.
Estelle Woods Wilcox’s Practical Housekeeping (1883), for instance, explains that clothes must be taken care of so that they will last longer, and not be “crowded into a closet” or “tossed in a drawer”. “Handsome dresses that are not often worn” – someone’s best black silk, maybe, or their one evening dress – should be folded up very carefully, so that the ruffles and flounces didn’t crease in the wrong places, and stored on or in something instead of being hung; every so often, she suggested, the skirt could be hung upside down from loops added inside the hem, in order to smooth out any wrinkles.
So I decided to buy an antique trunk off of Facebook marketplace, and the family selling it was happy to see their family heirloom go to someone who was excited to have it and talking about historical fashion all through the pickup process. This trunk is so old it probably came here on a covered wagon.
It ended up making my closet look like I go to Hogwarts:
(That hat is a great example of what I’m talking about with my wardrobe certainly not being boring after this process).
I loved this vibe so much that I decided to lean into it even more:
I have a map that looks like something from a fantasy world but is actually one of Cards Against Humanity’s “Eight Sensible Gifts for Hanukkah” promotion from 2015.
All 150,000 people who took part in this promotion almost a decade ago got to be King for a few minutes. My three minutes began on May 17th, 2016 at 12:48am.
This kind of outcome is exactly why Maximalists should try reading “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up”! I think there’s a lot of anxiety that the book pushes extreme minimalism, which people in the West tend to associate with dull, corporate “Millennial Gray” decorating trends, but the outcome for people who value creativity, whimsy, and humor is the exact opposite of that!
The book also talks a lot about using the process of de-stashing and organizing everything to figure out what your priorities, desires, and values are. It’s about confronting your past self in order to have the future you dream of. That sounds like something very serious, but it also has a lot of moments like re-discovering jokes from ten years ago and laughing at them again!