Five Easy Ways to Organize Your Clothes

4:00 PM, March 19 2013

By Natalie Matthews, Digital Fashion Writer

Closet organizers have always kind of confused me. I feel like the people who need them the most—the shoe addicts, the cocktail dress junkies, me—are exactly the people who don't want to spend money on anything other than clothes. Why buy a box to put t-shirts in when I can just buy another t-shirt? Annnnnd scene.

But then I rounded the corner on my third year in an apartment with a closet the size of an oven, and I slowly began to rethink this whole lifestyle choice—if for no other reason than I can never freaking find anything.

So about those knick-knacks and gadgets: I might need to invest in some. I'm not aiming for a Dewey Decimal System-style operation or anything, but yes, it'd be nice if I didn't have to hunt for my new skirt for 20 minutes, only to give up and leave the house wearing something else.

So here are the five things I'll be doing—and the three things I'll be buying—to get everything in order (which, in turn, just means I can buy more clothes).

My bed and armchair make a perfectly decent war zone to lay out outfits. But things pile up, and then I never want to put them back, which infallibly unravels even the most freshly organized closet.

Screwing in this one little valet hook to a bit of wall space or back of my door would fix everything. Everything. It'd all be less cluttered if I just had a specific place to lay out outifts or hang dry cleaning so that I can see what's there and remember to put it back in the right place. (And as a bonus, it folds up flat, so I won't walk into it when I'm not using it. Not that I would do that.)