Tech Tools For Wardrobe Management

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In our increasingly busy lives of multitasking and extended work hours, binge-watching Netflix and juggling social media accounts, it can be difficult to keep track of and remember our favorite clothing combinations. Fortunately, the same technology that addles our brains can help us manage our wardrobes.

“What counts is not the quantity of canvases that have been created, but the organization of the brain, the order established in the mind” – Henri Matisse

Though Matisse was talking about painting, his words are relevant to the gentleman’s wardrobe, not in the sense of organizing one’s closet space—though that’s important too—but in keeping a mental account of the wearable combinations in one’s collection, the “canvases” comprised of a certain pocket square that pairs particularly well with a particular tie that coordinates beautifully with a specific sport coat; these are the colors that paint your canvas.

An organized closet
A clean and neat wardrobe.

Why You Need Wardrobe Management

windowpane sportcoat with knit tie and Ivory Silk-Wool Pocket Square with Hunting Motifs - Fort Belvedere
It’s not easy to recall great combinations like this windowpane sportcoat with a knit tie and a hunting motif pocket square.
Knit Tie in Solid Rust Orange Silk - Fort Belvedere

Fort Belvedere

Knit Tie in Solid Rust Orange Silk

Ivory Silk-Wool Pocket Square with Hunting Motifs

Fort Belvedere

Ivory Silk-Wool Pocket Square with Hunting Motifs

1. Keeping Track of a Growing Wardrobe

The wearable combinations in an essentials or capsule wardrobe when you first start out buying tailored menswear are easy to track: you have a navy suit and a gray suit, a burgundy striped tie and a blue grenadine, a blue shirt and a white. There are limited possibilities, satisfactory for the moment and easy enough to remember. However, once you become enthralled with the possibilities of men’s style and establish a collection of a fifty ties, shirts and sports coats, the quantity of “canvases” matters, making it difficult to maintain “the organization of the brain.” Nothing is more frustrating than putting together a great combination only to struggle to recall it later. So, you need some way of noting how your orange and brown mottled knit tie paired beautifully with a sky blue Donegal sports coat, brown flannel trousers, and royal blue paisley pocket square.

Light Brown & Blue Socks with Suede Shoes in Brown
Shoes represent a large part of your wardrobe investment
Dark green shoelaces worn on a dark leather shoe

Fort Belvedere

Dark Green Shoelaces Round Luxury Waxed Cotton Dress Shoe Laces

Shadow Stripe Ribbed Socks Light Brown and Blue Fil d'Ecosse Cotton

Fort Belvedere

Shadow Stripe Ribbed Socks Light Brown and Blue Fil d'Ecosse Cotton

2. Pride and Protecting Your Investment

When you become a collector, you inevitably develop an impulse to catalog what you have in your collection, whether it be stamps, coins, fine art, or clothing. There’s a sense of pride and satisfaction in knowing what you have, and this knowledge can help you anticipate what you want in the future while avoiding duplicate purchases. Of course, documenting your investment in hand-rolled ties, quality MTM shirts, and bespoke suits makes good financial sense to protect yourself in case your house burns down and you need to put in an insurance claim. Why not do it in a way that also assists in maintaining your style?

Sven Raphael Schneider in a fall outfit consisting of fedora, vintage brown Caraceni suit, vest, winchester shirt, collar bar and spectators.
Sven Raphael Schneider in a fedora, vintage brown Caraceni suit, vest, a Winchester shirt, a collar bar and spectators

3. Time Savings

As another practical consideration, having a record of your clothes combinations helps when you’re pressed for time, rushing to dress for work in the morning, and need to pick out articles of clothing. While “slow dressing”–carefully considering your combinations, laying out clothing the night before–in the manner of Bruno Cucinelli  may be the ideal for the gentleman or dandy, realistically, it’s worth having a cheat sheet, crib notes, or a chart to consult to remind you whether you’ve tried something before and, most importantly, whether it worked out. You can quickly find a particular piece and see what to wear with it.

Collage of an outfit combination
Save time by cataloguing your wardrobe for quick reference

4. Enjoyment

I, personally, am a list maker, and I love exploring combinations and permutations, so recording my wardrobe is a pure pleasure. I like to think about things and tinker. You may enjoy doing something similar like pairing different wines with particular dishes or planning different sightseeing routes when visiting a new city. The principle is the same when charting your outfits: it’s a stimulating mental activity with a touch of hedonism that yields concrete benefits.

Something like "Making a list of wardrobe combinations is similar to pairing wines with different dishes.
Something like “Making a list of wardrobe combinations is similar to pairing wines with different dishes.

Tech Tool #1: Excel

As with many things today, technology provides the most user-friendly wardrobe management tools. Of course, you could just write your wardrobe groupings on a piece of paper or type them into a document, but the ideal no-frills tool for this is a simple Excel spreadsheet.

Most everyone uses Excel on some level, and the tech knowledge needed for a wardrobe management workbook is minimal. After building my wardrobe over several years, I created two sheets, one for warm weather combinations and another for cold weather. For column headings, I used Jacket, Shirt, Trousers, Tie, Waistcoat, Pocket Square, Shoes, and Belt, in that order. I keep my socks fairly basic, so I don’t have a column for them, but if you have a strong sock game, you could add one. I treat jackets as the foundation for the rest of my clothes, so I have them, alphabetized, in my first column. Then, I can choose an odd jacket for the day and see all the possible shirt, trouser, and tie combinations I own that work well with it, based on my experience.

Excel

An advantage of Excel is that the list is easily searchable. You don’t even need to start with the choice of jacket. You can just as easily prioritize your search by tie or anything else. If you’re wondering about the possibilities of your blue gingham shirt on a summer day, you type that in the search box and can see everything that you’ve worn and liked with this shirt. It’s also quite easy to add a row when you acquire new clothes and remove one as you rotate out things that have worn out or that you no longer like. Autofill makes quick work of data entry.

Tech Tool #2: Web Diagrams

As a university professor who teaches writing, I have often used web diagrams, variously known as bubble charts, mind maps, or web diagrams, to teach brainstorming and help students keep track of ideas for essays they were planning to write. The free online app Text2Mindmap is a great way to do the same with your wardrobe combinations. You enter the individual items in a column and the app generates a multicolored chart with branches showing individual outfits that can be saved as a .pdf or .jpg.

Web diagram

The mind map can be saved by setting up a free account on the site and changes can be made easily. The resulting chart is more complex to trace, but those who prefer the visual element of a diagram to the plain text of an Excel spreadsheet will find a mind map appealing.

Tech Tool #3: Closet Apps

Closet phone apps
Some apps enables you to document and manage your wardrobe

Those who favor an even more visual experience, coupled with smartphone access, will find free Apple and Android apps designed to enable you to document and manage your wardrobe. Many of these concentrate on women’s fashion, on the assumption, wrong or right, that most men don’t care about personal style; however, some, like Your Closet and Men Closet, incorporate menswear. These generally feature the ability to create lookbooks or collages based on photographs of individual items.

The apps enable links to shopping and images of clothes, but these usually come from mainstream fast-fashion brands and large department stores, basically what’s available on Shopstyle. Tailored clothes are in short supply; the ateliers and smaller shops favored by aficionados of classic menswear are not to be found. So, the usefulness of these apps lies mainly in photo-documenting your items. You’ll need to photograph your own clothes, use the one-click background remover, and upload your images, which can be a time-consuming process. Once you do this, you can categorize them (by color or season, for example), create combinations and save them, with good-looking results. Often there is a calendar feature that enables you to plan when to wear a particular outfit or record when you wore it last. If you’re dedicated to spending a weekend photographing and uploading your wardrobe, these features can be appealing. Even if you aren’t into sharing images of yourself on Instagram or Styleforum, having photographs of your outfits is the most effective memory aid, while “visual reinforcements are reminders of how the results are worth the effort,” as Parisian Gentleman observes.

Wardrobe Management of the (Near) Future: Smart Closets and the Amazon Echo Look

Smart closet
Search some outfit ideas through the internet

With wardrobe management so closely tied to technology, it’s inevitable that we’ll see continued innovations in this area. One trend in personalized style advice as sophisticated algorithms assess the outfits we upload and offer suggestions based on weather, things we like, and the feedback of stylists. Following the success of their Echo, Amazon developed the Echo Look, which does many of the smart home tasks provided by their virtual assistant Alexa though with the addition of a full-length camera. Similar to closet apps, the Echo Look allows you to create a lookbook based on your wardrobe though not by individual items. A difference is Amazon’s touted Style Check function, which lets you compare two outfits in terms of which is better and to check the overall style of your choices. It does so by a proprietary method that includes the knowledge of “professional stylists.” Reports online suggest the Style Check to be fairly accurate, with well-fitting clothes usually getting the nod. There may be glitches, but for those who are new to dressing well, this function may be a useful tool to build knowledge and confidence. As a piece of hardware, the Echo Look is not free, priced at $199.99 at the time of this article.

Echo Looks

Still in the beta stage is something called Tailor, a system that includes electronic “TailorTags,” tiny sensors you actually embedded in your clothes that are supposedly impervious to washing and drying. These sensors detect what you own and wear, offering suggestions based on your preferences and weather conditions, all “without requiring any user input” though photographing your wardrobe still seems necessary at the start. Essentially, it’s a closet app with automation. It’s not available yet but provides an interesting glimpse of where wardrobe management may be headed in the near future.

Tailor: The smart closet

Conclusion

In our technologically driven world, it’s not surprising to find that a range of tech tools exist to help manage your wardrobe. These vary in terms of how simple or sophisticated they are, but there is ample choice depending on how visual you want your system to be and how much time you want to invest in the project. All of them offer something useful, and there are many good reasons to choose one. Do you know of or use another system of wardrobe management? Share it in the Comments section below.

Reader Comments

  1. Hello Sven,

    That is a wonderful article which I appreciate both as a happily retired Internet entrepreneur and someone who likes stylish gentlemen like you. Stylish, not styled is my motto.

    Best wishes from Amsterdam. Look forward welcoming you again at Royal Industrieele Groote Club for a kopstootje and a bitterbal.

    Jonne

    1. Bitterbal (bitter Ballen?) are yummy with croquettes. But what do you mean by headbutt? Is it a cocktail?

      1. Kopstootje is like an ice-cold schnapps that you drink before your ice-cold glass of Heineken. It goes wonderful with herring as well. The Dutch schnapps actually is called Jenever, the ancestor of gin.

    2. Thanks Jonne! Haven’t made any plans to come to Amsterdam yet, but I will let you know if I come again.

  2. Indeed, a problem that causes to nearly everybody who hasn’t a Lean Wardrobe. Till my closet grow to more than 50 suits, 30 coats, 60 jackets and hundreds of other items, three facts are clear: i am a collector, there is to much to choose and i need a databank. While Excel ( or numbers ) is fine for calculations, but hard to bind in pictures, make links or detailed descriptions.
    So i build my own databank with Bento years ago. So i have an nice interface, can capture all relevant details and measurements, add pics and link the items which each other, With intelligent search, i can compile different looks, know when last wear which suit aso. After the shutdown of Bento, i switched to TapForms, which is not as comfortable but ok. I am sure, there are similar programs for Windows as well.

    1. Very interesting, Andy. It seems that Bento captured the best of both worlds–images and data. It’s always unfortunate when a beloved program gets discontinued!

  3. Some apps i have on my iphone that are wardrobe related, though some need to be updated.
    1. cool guy
    2.mr porter
    3. valet
    4.neckties 3D
    5. suit yourself
    6. tie-a-tie

  4. Very motivating and inspiring article on wardrobe coordination and management. It’s a modern, technological way to organize and create your hard earned satorial pieces even when away from your closet. Anyone can play dress up and just put on dress clothes, but not everyone is well dressed! It’s the details of an outfit that makes a Man Well Dressed! Living & Dressing well, is the best revenge!
    Think’s again for the excellent article Dr. Christopher Lee and Thank’s for posting on Gentleman’s Gazzete Mr. Sven R. Schneider.
    Best Regards,
    From Chicago, IL.

    Angelo Rosario.

  5. Oh God… tech tools for wardrobe management! Do we really need this?

    What is wrong with you guys? Just choose a suit, choose a shirt, choose a tie and shoes and put them on… how difficult is that?

    Did our Nazi-loving Duke use “tech tools” to put his outfits together in the good old days? No, Eddie had an instinct about what to wear. He didn’t consult “Excel” before combining 17 different patterns in one outfit. Nor should you.

    1. First of all, i don’t think that the Duke had handled this in a different way if he was not a Nazi-lover. And even he had his scrapbook with samples of the clothes, stored in his different domiciles. And he goes for bespoke with all his suits, shirts, jackets and coats, most of it with lots of patterns. When Standing in front of a hanger with dozens of ties, it is comfortable and helpful when i can take a look to make sure that the tie fits for my suits or preserve to purchase a tie similar to one i still have.
      So, it can be fixed that even Eddie did not only trust his memory and experience, but also had a backup.

      1. I imagine he also had a servant to dress him and look after his clothes. He really was a rotter.

        1. Yeah, but one with taste and a good eye, who was able to influcence mens wardrobe till today. Let’s say, the Darth Vader of mens wardrobe.

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