5 Effortless Steps To Create A Minimalist Wardrobe In College

Minimalist wardrobe in a minimalist closet.

Are you ready to create a minimalist wardrobe in college? Read more to learn how! 🙂

In College, there are multitudes of things to juggle. Schoolwork, studying, social life, personal time, remembering to connect with family, etc.

With all of these things to juggle in our life as students, it can be hard to find peace and have some time to destress from our environments. One of the best ways to decrease the stress in our lives as students is to declutter and create a minimalist Wardrobe.

In this post, we will go over 5 effortless steps that you can take to achieve this minimalist wardrobe to bring some organization and peace into your hectic life as a college student!

Table of Contents

What Is A Minimalist Wardrobe?

To me, a minimalist wardrobe is a wardrobe that consists of the essential clothing items that you need and enjoy. It’s really that simple! Another term for this that I have seen is a “capsule wardrobe”.

What is a Capsule Wardrobe?

A capsule wardrobe is a wardrobe that consists of around 30-40 pieces of clothing that can be mixed and matched. All of the clothing items typically follow a certain color scheme or style as well.

Usually, a capsule wardrobe follows a certain number of clothes, but I personally think that a specific number of clothing items is nice to shoot for, but isn’t the be all end all.

This is because you may need certain types of extra clothing for work and depending on where you live, you may need more layers (or less) than others.

Ultimately, your minimalist wardrobe doesn’t necessarily need to follow “guidelines”, but creating a capsule wardrobe is a nice way to organize your wardrobe and simplify it into a particular set amount of pieces.

Why A Minimalist Wardrobe In College?

Now, why would you want to develop this type of minimalist wardrobe while in college?

There are a variety of reasons to adopt this lifestyle as a young college student. One of my favorite reasons to point out is the fact that you are still YOUNG!

This means that:

You have fewer things tying you down (kids, family, full-time job, etc.)
You have the freedom to choose to live in a different state or country
Packing for travel and vacation will be easy with fewer clothes
This will help prevent you from accumulating too much clothing in the future

You will have more freedom during this time than you will later in life. Now is the time to downsize and explore if that’s what you’re into. This simple adjustment to your wardrobe can make your life so much easier.

Minimalist Wardrobe Benefits

Here are some of the major benefits of a minimalist wardrobe in college:

Easier laundry
Easy decision making in the morning
Less clutter in your closet
You’ll enjoy your wardrobe more
Opportunity to remake your wardrobe
Ease of travel (faster/easier to pack for trips)
Less mental burden from the clutter in your closet
Give away clothes that you don’t use that someone else can use
You will just feel better (trust me)

Even if you don’t make minimalism your complete lifestyle, understand that a minimalist wardrobe will no doubt improve your life!

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, which means I’ll receive a commission if you purchase through my links, at no extra cost to you. Please read full disclosure for more information.

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"5 Effortless Steps to Create a Minimalist Wardrobe in College"

1. Choose Your Minimalist Lifestyle

There are a variety of different minimalist lifestyles to choose from that will dictate your wardrobe. For example, the nomad minimalist lifestyle only allows a certain number of clothing items to fit that lifestyle.

Your minimalist lifestyle will dictate your version of a minimalist wardrobe or capsule wardrobe. This lifestyle will also dictate your mentality and will guide your decluttering process.

If by chance you do choose to take a gap year or have the means to travel for a while, check out these awesome packing cubes that make packing way wayyy easier!

One of the best ways to declutter your junk for a minimalist lifestyle is to replace old or unused items. Here are some of my favorite recommendations for a minimalist lifestyle. These are items that I have used and are great for replacing the old items that you may want to get rid of.

2. Start Decluttering Your Wardrobe

Here we go!

Layout all of your clothes together and go through each item. Separate your clothes into a few categories:

Keep
Give away
Sell
Maybe

Once you have your clothes separated, decide which clothes you’d like to add to your new wardrobe. For more tips on decluttering your wardrobe check out 5 Easy Steps To Declutter Your Clothes!

This will be by far the hardest part for you if you have tons of clothes. However, in a way, this may be the best part of creating a minimalist wardrobe. You’ll start to find excitement in going through your clothes and will find some joy designing a new style for yourself and buying new clothes to replace your old pieces.

3. Assess Your Current Style

We all know that as time changes, we change. With our own personal growth comes a new style that emerges. Carefully assess your current style and see if you’d like to make some changes.

Most of the clothes that I owned during my time at school are completely gone and I really enjoy my current style way more than before. Give it a try and see what “look” you’re going for!

Also, if you enjoy shopping, this is your chance to go find new pieces of clothing and recreate your entire wardrobe if you want to.

Remember that your capsule wardrobe style will also be determined by where you live.

If you live in a warm-weather place like Florida, then you will be able to make a wardrobe with fewer layers, and if you live in a place like Michigan then you’ll need to consider adding more layers for the cold weather.

If you need some more guidance with your capsule wardrobe, check out How to Revamp Your Closet with a Capsule Wardrobe!

4. Invest In New Clothes To Replace Old Unused Clothes

Now that you’ve decluttered most of your clothes and assessed your current style, it’s time to go and invest in new clothing pieces to complete your wardrobe. As stated above, this will be one of the best parts of creating a minimalist wardrobe. Your inner shopper will be satisfied haha.

Obviously, this part does involve spending money, and if your a broke college student this may be a little difficult. But just remember you can always plan out the clothes you’d like to buy and wait for an optimal time to spend.

Just remember that building your new capsule wardrobe is a process and will take you some time. Don’t be discouraged if you can’t complete your new wardrobe in one weekend. You’ll most likely continually adjust your wardrobe as time goes on…

This leads us to the final step…

5. Remember It’s A Process…

Don’t forget that you most likely have a lot of clothes to go through and that this will take you a considerable amount of time to declutter.

In addition, certain clothes will be harder to let go of. Some of the clothes you don’t wear may have some sentimental meaning or have good memories associated with them.

Plus it may have been one of your favorite clothing items in the past. These factors can make it difficult to downsize your wardrobe because you may be attached to certain clothing items.

This is okay! Just remember to focus on the benefits of minimalism and you’ll stick with the decluttering process!

Finally, when it comes to buying new clothes, be smart about your purchases and take your time. If you rush into buying new clothes, you may end up buying more clothes than you intended and might have to declutter all over again.

Summary

Hopefully, now you understand how to downsize your oversized wardrobe and create a minimalist wardrobe.

No doubt you will feel better and will not imagine living with a boatload of clothes anymore once your done downsizing.

Trust me, I literally can’t imagine living with an overstuffed closet ever again. Having fewer clothes is really an awesome you can do to improve your life!

Closing thoughts

This has made a huge impact on my life and I seriously am so glad that I made this adjustment to my wardrobe when I was in college.

I had a fairly large amount of clothes prior to my downsizing and much of it was clothes that my parents had bought for me.

Once I had a job and started working in college, I was finally able to buy my own clothes to match my style and I love my minimalist wardrobe and would never go back to all of the clutter and headache of too many clothes.

If you are on the fence about this change or about minimalism in general. Don’t fear. Just go for it!

Downsizing your wardrobe doesn’t necessarily make you a minimalist so don’t have any fear if you don’t like this lifestyle.

But just know your life will be significantly better if you create a minimalist wardrobe!

If you’re planning to downsize and create your dream minimalist wardrobe, use our free productivity planners to help you organize your decluttering process. These planner templates will keep your goals and projects as easy as possible!