A Tour Through Susan Orlean’s Obsessively Organized Closet
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Last fall, I talked toSusan Orleanabout some of her favorite clothing designers forSecret Strategistand saw that she had a very compelling way of organizing her shoes. It turns out that she spends “a shocking amount of time thinking aboutcloset organization,” so I asked her about it. “It’s sort of a quality-of-life issue. You use your closet constantly, obviously every day, and it only makes sense to have it be functioning as best as it can,” she told me.
I am pretty militaristic about organization. I feel like things have to be orderly or they’re useless. Having your shoes in a pile in your closet — you may as well not have them. It’s a little like imagining a library without the Dewey Decimal System. It’s pure chaos. My general philosophy, then, is you must have a system. You just have to. And I don’t have a huge closet. In fact, I would say I have a relatively small closet, so I have to make the most of it. Partly how I do that is I do seasonal closet turns. I take my off-season clothes and I store them in my basement so that I’m not storing everything in my daily closet because I just don’t have room. That’s a good opportunity to go through your clothes and get rid of anything that you’re not using. I consign a lot of stuff. I donate tons of clothes. If anything hasn’t been worn in a couple of turns, it is marked for death. I just feel like if you haven’t worn something multiple seasons in a row, you’ve got to really grapple with why you still have it. Sometimes you keep things for impractical reasons, and that’s fine. But I think you need to always be curating and culling and cutting down what you’ve got.
Clothes are hung by color.
My current approach for hanging clothes, which has been working pretty well, is that I have things hanging by color. I think there are probably a lot of different ways to hang stuff, but that’s actually been helpful for me. It’s worked quite well because I can remember things by color better than I can by any other characteristic. If I conjure a certain piece of clothing that I want to wear, I always remember what color it is. That seems like such an obvious thing to remember. And it’s not like colorizing your books. It’s not just because it looks nice. It helps me find my stuff just a whole lot more quickly because of being able to think,Oh, I wanna wear that green shirt.I can zero in on it.
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I am a hanger obsessive. If you want to have a well-organized closet, you have to have all the same hangers, no matter what. And it’s not just out of being super-anal about it being aesthetically pleasing. You really need all the same hangers so they hang similarly. I, like most of the known population of Earth, was using thosevelvet hangersfor a long time, and they’re not very sturdy. They tend to break. I just sort of lost faith in them, so I switched to these German hangers by Mawa. They’re metal hangers with a plastic coating. They’re very, very thin, which is an advantage, since that means you’re using as little space as possible, and they’re very strong. And they’re sort of aesthetically pleasing. They’re very simple, and the rubberized coating means stuff doesn’t slide off. I did a lot of research. I wanted something strong, but I liked the look of it, too.
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Ikea makes clip hangers that I really liked. I say you always want thewoodenones, not the plastic ones, because they snap. I emphasize that you really want the wooden ones with a metal clip. They’re not gonna snap.
All shoes are photographed and put in Container Store boxes.
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Shoes always bedeviled me. I have a lot of shoes. I don’t think I’ve come close to some of the people I know who are real shoe maniacs, but I really found it hard to figure out how to organize them. People go, “Well, go get those little hanging pockets.” Well, yeah, if you own nine pairs of shoes, that’ll work for you, but if you have more than that, that doesn’t work. I need to be able to see things to remember what I’ve got and find the things that I want. There are certain shoes that you wear very infrequently because maybe they’re dressy. Everyday shoes are one thing, but the shoes you only wear for special dressing-up occasions — it’s really easy to forget you even have them.
I don’t know how I came up with this idea, but I began realizing that you can’t stack shoes as shoes.You need to containerize. This is where I took my inspiration from the global shipping industry, which was that containerization is the key to everything. I got these shoe boxes from the Container Store. Now I know some people keep the box that their shoes come in and stack those, but I think it works a lot better if you have consistency and put them all in the same box. I would buy these boxes by the dozen. I like them because they are a little smaller and sized for women’s-size shoes. I’ve explored many, and I would say these are definitely the good ones. They’re cheap, but they’re pretty indestructible. Occasionally, you’ll have a pair of big clodhopper Doc Martens and they’ll be too big but 90 percent of your shoes are going to work.
I stack the boxes four high. I have an upper shelf in my closet above my hanging rod, the way many people do, and so four boxes work perfectly. I wouldn’t recommend doing more than four because it gets to be hard if the shoe you want is the lowest level of the four, but I think four is about as high as you can stack them without it becoming cumbersome. I get up on a step stool, and with four, and if I am getting the lowest one, I will often take the top two off and put them down because I don’t want the box falling and becoming a pain in the neck. I think the thing about a system is you just have to go all in. You just have to say,This is my system.And you can’t get lazy and say,Oh, I got this new pair of Manolos and it comes in a nice box so I think I’ll put the box here.You have to just swear by it and really stick to the system; otherwise, it starts to fall apart. One of the advantages is when I’m putting all my off-season shoes down in the basement, they’re in their boxes and they are easy to transport.
Invest in a compact photo printer.
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This was my major breakthrough and why I will be remembered throughout history. The problem with shoes when they’re on their side in a shoe box is you can’t really see them that well. Even though the shoe boxes are kind of transparent, they’re not totally see-through, but that doesn’t even matter. If you have four different pairs of black high-heeled sandals, you can’t really tell the difference. You want to be able to see in an instant. Right around the time I was doing this boxing of my shoes, I got a little Canon photo printer that prints postcard-size photos. And I suddenly realized that the key to making this work was to print a photograph of the shoes so I could immediately see them. I didn’t want to be opening the boxes. I could see vividly the difference between the black high-heeled sandals from Tibi versus the black high-heeled sandals from Acne versus the black high-heeled sandals from Khaite. You want to be able to glance at this library of shoes and see exactly what they look like and grab them.
Printing them on this postcard printer was the best because the pictures were sized perfectly for the side of the box. You take a little picture of the shoe, hook up your printer, and print it. At a glance, I can look at my array of shoes and know exactly which pair I can identify. They are instantly searchable. It’s sort of the best organizing I’ve ever done of anything where it really, really works. It’s infinitely expandable. You get more shoes, you add more boxes.
When I first came up with the system, I had to really catch up, but now when I get a new pair, I do it right away. It is the best way to do it. Take the picture against a white background. Stick it in your bathtub if you you don’t have another white surface. I tape the picture onto the side of the box, boom. The other advantage is if you useIndyxor another wardrobe organizing system, then you have the picture for it as well.
“Anything appealing to a moth goes into a garment bag.”
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I have a cupboard in my basement. I have one chest of drawers for T-shirts and jeans and stuff like that. And then we have closets in our basement. As for moths, the only thing I can say is that I am constantly at war with moths. Anything appealing to a moth goes into a garment bag before it goes into the closet. This is a constant source of tragedy in my life because I’ve lost lots of clothes to moths. I don’t use mothballs or cedar balls because I find, first of all, the smell is pretty gross. And secondly, I just haven’t found them to be effective. What I do is we take our sweaters usually at the beginning or end of the season and put them in a Ziploc and put them in the chest freezer in our basement and freeze them for several days, which apparently really is one of the few things that kills moths. And I now keep my sweaters in garment bags even when they’re upstairs in my normal closet. I’ve lost so many sweaters, like so many. It’s just a constant. Moths are everywhere, and I just decided that I’m going to put my sweaters in garment bags even when they’re hanging in my regular closet. I don’t love it. It’s a pain. And it’s sort of hard to see the sweaters. It’s annoying, but after I lost yet another sweater, I kind of thought,There’s no way around this. I’ve just gotta keep things covered.I hang them except for heavier, bulkier sweaters that shouldn’t really be on hangers. Those I fold. But that’s tricky. As I said, I don’t have a big closet.
For the garment bag in my closet, I did not want a full length one because they’re way too long for a sweater and they just took up too much space. I searched and searched and, believe it or not, it’s not easy to find a short garment bag. I found some on Amazon. Having them be the short length really made a difference, and they zip almost all the way shut. They’re not transparent; they’re translucent. It’s not perfect, but they work.
Create a belts and accessories cabinet.
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The other thing I use in my closet that I actually really love is from the MoMA store. They have these little cabinets that are about hip high. They have five drawers that swing out, and they’re really great. I have three of them in my closet. And I think people probably use them often in offices and stuff. I found them to be really perfect for things like belts and accessories. The swinging-out drawer is kind of genius because you really can see the whole drawer. They’re multicolor; they’re very cute. They’re made of powder-coated steel, so they’re very sturdy. They’re great. I love them, because there are a lot of things that don’t quite go in a drawer, don’t quite go in a closet, and yet they have to go somewhere.
Catalogue your closet — like Cher Horowitz.
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Indyx involves some work because you’ve got to photograph stuff, but you can begin by just adding in anything you’re getting that’s new and then sort of work your way back through your wardrobe and it is actually worth doing. It saved me duplicating stuff that I already had but also helps me when I have a special occasion. I flip through it and I’m reminded of stuff that I might actually have in storage that would work. A lot of people feel that their wardrobes are really chaotic, that they buy chaotically; they never know what they have, and they buy the same thing twice. I think the reason there’s so many shopping and clothing Substacks and so forth is because there’s this sort of craziness of consumerism, and I think if you feel that you’ve got some order and control over your closet and your clothing, it’s a good feeling. It’s a better feeling. And almost no one I know has ever said the sentence “I have too many closets.” Nobody on the Earth has probably ever said that: “I have too much closet space.” We’re all kind of dealing with a somewhat limited amount of space, and so you really do have to be orderly about how you use it.
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