With more time spent at home, I’ve had the chance to address a question readers often ask: How do I store my clothes?
The short answer is that it’s challenging, especially considering my penchant for taking good care of them.
Tailored pieces can’t be too cramped to avoid wrinkles, knits can’t be shoved onto shelves as it exacerbates pilling, and the only trousers that can be folded are jeans or heavy twill pants.
I’m fortunate to have plenty of clothes, so there’s always a struggle between wanting to see as much as possible and giving everything enough space.
My basic solution is the tall double closet in my bedroom, where tailored clothes, shirts, pants, and most knits reside. Then there’s a second smaller closet in our study for coats. Everything else is stored in the attic.
There, two hanging rods hold garment bags with tailored pieces (pictured below). Some are for seasonal storage, like linen suits not needed until summer rolls around. As the seasons change (albeit gradually—unlike New York, the seasons here shift slowly and inconsistently), these are brought downstairs.
However, some attic pieces are also for autumn-winter. So, every few weeks, I rotate some from the closet up to the attic and bring down new ones. It’s a gradual rotation.
Back to the closet, shirts are folded on shelves. It’s not ideal, as no matter how carefully folded, they wrinkle.
But as I always bike into the office (in my former job, almost daily—now, with a permanent WFH style, perhaps twice a week), they need to be folded for transport anyway.
I’ve never been too bothered by some wrinkles on shirts—most shirts look wrinkled after about half an hour. Plus, these days I’m dressing more casually with denim and Oxford shirts, which wrinkle less.
In an ideal world, all shirts would hang, if only for easier access. Pants would, too.
My odd trousers (not part of a suit) hang on the lower of the two rails in the closet with jackets, meaning I can’t see them or access them easily. I need to sift through various jackets to find charcoal flannels. (I did try having a separate rail just for trousers once. But the desire to display more tailoring eventually outweighed the inconvenience of hiding the pants.)
