To Give and Regret: On the Closet Purge

Illustration by Mike Thompson.

The closet purge is controversial—does minimalism make us healthier, more conscious people, or are we getting rid of things just to make space for more, “better” things?—but undeniably emotional. Have you ever gotten rid of something in the hopes of ascending to that higher spiritual plane, only to bitterly regret it when it came back in style, or you just longed for the comfort it brought, the coziness of a previous self? We’ve been there. Here, some of our editors and contributors reflect on beloved and lost items they wish they’d never said goodbye to.

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The Bottle of Charlie Red

I’ve never been overly sentimental about my clothes. Shocking, I know, given the path that I’ve chosen in life. Nevertheless, my wardrobe has been punctuated by moments of loss time and time again, forcing me to consider just what role dress has played in my emotional life. There was the collection of suits I inherited from my uncle when he passed away unexpectedly. There was the sneaky habit I developed as a teenager of purging my closet so my parents would be forced to take me shopping. There was even that one time when my mother accidentally (or so she says) donated my entire fall wardrobe to charity.

Little did I know then that I employed the KonMari method long before Marie Kondo ever entered our cultural lexicon. My uncle’s suits were eventually passed on to other members of my family when I outgrew them, a little kiss of gratitude being sent into the ether as I handed them off. The empty spaces that ritually appeared in my closet were ultimately replaced by garments that most certainly ‘sparked joy.’ And that mistakenly donated wardrobe? Aside from a single argyle sweater that now only exists in my high school yearbook as part of my “Best Dressed” superlative photo, I can’t recall a single article that I lost in that fiasco.

As easy as it may have been to part with those clothes, it was a bottle of perfume that brings up the most cherished memories and the most sorrowful loss from my wardrobe. I’ve always had an affinity for fragrances. As a child, I’d often sneak up to my mother’s vanity to explore the makeup, elixirs, and perfumes that resided there. At the tender age of eight, when I was allowed to choose my first scent, I decided on a tiny, unassuming bottle of that Revlon legend – Charlie. 

A budget-friendly scent that has had over 20 spin-offs since it was first launched in the early 1970s, that little flacon of Charlie Red was one of my most prized childhood possessions. I’d only apply it for the most special of occasions, often resorting to just smelling the cap at risk of using it all up. It was the first in a very long line of floral-forward fragrances that would quite literally permeate my wardrobe throughout my life. 

Six years ago, as I prepared for a big move, I stumbled upon the now long-empty bottle of Charlie, and decided it wasn’t worth holding onto. Just before I tossed it out, I took the cap off and gave it a whiff – more than fifteen years had passed, but it still contained traces of that sacred scent, the one I fell in love with as a young boy. And as I said goodbye to the physical object, I sent another loving kiss to the air, thanking the scent for all it had given me before I let it go.

By Anthony Palliparambil

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The Race Premium

Holly’s friend wearing an identical “Save the Theater” race premium t-shirt.

When I was 8 years old, I ran my first race. I ran with my mom’s best friend from college, Molly, in a 5K race to benefit a local theatre restoration project in Winchester, KY. There are three things that I remember from that experience. First, a 5K, or 3.1 miles, is much longer than it seems. I am still not sure why this is the gateway race for runners. It should be a shorter distance, frankly. Second, I paid the race entry fee with my own money. I was always a good saver and held on to my allowance and birthday money for occasions such as this one. The entry fee was a whopping $15, a fortune to an 8 year old. Third, and most importantly, in addition to the race entry, a t-shirt was included as the race premium. The shirt was bright turquoise with the sock and buskin on the front in white, and “Save The Theater” on the back in enormous block letters. I thought it was so cool, even if the smallest size still swallowed me whole. I proudly wore it tied in a knot at the waist after the race and as a nightshirt the rest of the time. I’m a little superstitious, and it’s apparently bad luck to wear the shirt before or during a race.

My family moved a number of times because of my dad’s job, and I lost the shirt somewhere along the way. It likely made its way to a donation bin as I went through my wardrobe every season to find things I could give away. That shirt didn’t matter to a teenager. I was busy playing other sports, chasing boys, and getting ready for college.

I began running seriously again in my early thirties, which means I hired a coach and had a training plan that I stuck to, more or less, as I prepared for races. Registering for these races meant I would get a premium, and that almost always means a t-shirt. The t-shirt is my favorite part of the race and far more important to me than the medal. While the medals are currently in a box under my bed, I wear the various t-shirts for workouts, training runs, and whenever I can get away with them, as wearing them reminds me not only of the hard work of the race, but the travel to new places and time spent running with friends and strangers alike.  

Running brings people together and a race treats everyone to the same conditions. I wish I still had the t-shirt from that first race. My memory of the race itself is limited, but the t-shirt is different. I remember Molly and I wearing the shirt later and feeling that it was so cool to match with a grown-up. 

By Holly Schiller

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The author wearing the handmade pullover.

The Handmade Pullover

I lost my handmade pullover, and it tore me apart. 

I’m well aware of the IKEA effect, in which consumers value objects more highly if they made (or even just assembled) them themselves. I’m actually fairly certain that I did feel so gutted about losing this sweater because I had made it myself. 

I chose a soft wine-red yarn from a local indy organic wool label, Rosy Green Wool. It was a test knit for a Japanese-American designer, who I’d met on the Internet. There’s nothing quite like making something together with other people who share your passion. The distance just melts away, and the making takes center stage.

The actual knitting took roughly six weeks, but it took me ages to understand and execute the cast-on correctly, follow the directions, make my increases and end up with the right stitch count. When I had finished it, I wore it with pride and extreme caution, taking care not to get it snagged on anything. If it did happen, I took the time and care to mend it. 

People say loved things last longer. I think they last longer because they are loved, and become loved because the longer they last, the more they become a part of your life. 

By Melanie Dunn-Fiedler

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The Jumbo Garbage Bag Full of Coats

For a couple of years as my teens bled into my twenties, I lived with my best friend in a tiny apartment on the ground floor of an old townhouse on a cobblestoned, pedestrian-only street in downtown Montreal. It had a mural on all four walls of the living room and was a party all the time. You just opened the front door and you were on a terrasse full of tourists and buskers and people eating on restaurant patios. And we had a party lifestyle to match, because we were young and fun and our responsibilities minimal to imaginary. But after two years there, it was coming to an end, and we were each moving in with other people further uptown.

The last few weeks in that place were crazy. We had always been terrible housekeepers, and the place was a mess, which we’d let get worse as soon as we knew we were leaving. There were pizza boxes and beer cans everywhere, dirty dishes, textbooks and notebooks, and other evidence that we were college students in between our fourth and fifth years of undergrad (I told you, young and fun!). 

We were packing up slowly, so there were a lot of random boxes full of books, loose cds, and detritus from the barbecues we were hosting on the front stoop. I, for one, was using jumbo black garbage bags to pack up sheets, blankets, and other soft stuff, so those were taking up space around the apartment, too. 

One night we filled a bunch more of those jumbo garbage bags with trash in an effort to clean up. We were about three days from moving day (the unofficial holiday celebrated in Montreal on July 1st when all the leases end and everybody moves house: technically this is a day off for Canada Day, but separatist Quebec isn’t crazy about acknowledging that—your Canadian culture/history lesson for the year!) and things were dire. We cranked up some Motown, cracked some beers, smoked a joint, and started filling up these huge bags. 

I didn’t have a digital camera in 2006, so I don’t have any pictures of the stuff I lost, but I did find this one of the street!

When we’d filled about eight bags and were feeling really pleased with ourselves, we started hauling them out to the corner. Garbage wasn’t collected on our street because trucks couldn’t drive on the cobblestones, so we had to walk our trash to the corner. We had no idea what day garbage was actually collected, and had recently gotten a fine for putting the trash out on the wrong day. Someone had dug through our trash to find something with our names and addresses on it to know where to send the ticket. To avoid this afterwards, we mostly just left our trash bags in a little dark passageway we shared with the ice cream shop next door until it got so full that one of their employees would cave and take it all out. Earlier this same summer we’d actually applied for jobs at that ice cream place and been shocked when we didn’t get hired!

I realize I’m not coming across great in this story, which is fair, and accurate.

Anyway, we took all this trash out to the corner and came back to a clean(ish) apartment, much better prepared to finish packing for the coming move. Probably smoked some more weed and went to bed.

The next morning, I got up for work (at my job where no one knew about my trash habits) and saw it was raining. ‘Crap,’ I thought. ‘I already packed my trenchco—‘ I turned to the hallway where I had been storing the jumbo bag of all my coats and jackets packed a few days before (because it was June and therefore what a smart first thing to pack!). The hallway was empty, of course. Same hallway we’d been so happy to come back to the night before, finally ridded of all those bags of literal garbage! Except that one of those bags had not been trash.

I ran to the corner, fully ready to tear through every bag like those weirdos who’d fined us, but the garbage truck had already come, because my weekday wake-up time was approximately 10:30am. In full panic, I looked up and called the number for the municipal trash collection office. Of course, the person there told me that no, there was no way to retrieve today’s trash and root around in it for my precious items. I remember thinking she sounded like she’d answered this question many times, which I was able to find funny even in the moment. “No, miss, there’s nothing you can do. I’m sorry, the garbage is all together now.” 

I called in to work and told them my apartment had been robbed and that I needed a few hours to deal with it before coming in. I told you, I recognize that I’m not the hero of this story, or even its sympathetic victim. But this felt at least true to my emotional reality. I cried a bunch, then got stoned again, to deal with my feelings. I wrote down everything I could think of that had been lost, as a ritual of mourning.

Things I still remember: a beige suede Members Only jacket with a red plaid lining; a black trenchcoat with a green palm-leaf print; another classic beige trench with a dope soft leather belt in a metallic copper; my brown tweed winter coat, that had only served one season, with its beautiful button-up funnel neck—damn, that coat was so nice; a vintage red wool blazer with white piping and my university’s crest on the pocket; a scarf my grandmother made that was the last handmade thing I had from her; my dad’s black wool Greek fisherman’s cap; and probably 30 other things. Literally every piece of cold-weather gear I had, with enormous value of every kind. It was a jumbo bag packed tight!

It’s been 13 years since this happened, and I promise I’ve changed into a responsible non-idiot. I can’t be sure whether this loss was the wake-up call that kick-started my transformation from oblivious fool to self-aware fool, but I do know I think about it all the time. There’s just something about those enormous, consequential mistakes you can’t blame on anyone else that forces you to face yourself. I can’t promise I never got stoned and did something goofy ever again, but every time I think of and wish I could wear one of those special lost things, I get a twinge of longing and shame that reminds me that I’m a real, honest-to-goodness grown-up, once and for all!

By Laura Snelgrove

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At the FIT commencement ceremony. As much as I loved those shoes, this is the only picture of them I have!

The Magenta Platforms

When I moved to New York City at 21, ready to start living my dream of studying at the Fashion Institute of Technology, I began to experiment more with fashion. Even though I knew that fashion design majors barely had a life, I was still greatly influenced by movies and TV shows (especially Friends), so of course, I decided that in order to start my new life in the city I had to bring basically my whole closet, including tons of platforms shoes. I soon realized that it was impossible to walk around New York carrying all my design and pattern-making supplies while wearing those shoes, so I had to switch to flats. Since I was not able to play around with my beloved shoes anymore, I began experimenting with outfit combinations that I had not been ready to try back home. 

As I settled into my new life, my style kept evolving, and even though I did not have the budget to go shopping every week, I became very aware of which pieces I was going to wear just a few times before I got bored of them, and which ones I really loved. The latter was the case with a pair of magenta platform pumps from Forever 21. I bought them a few months before graduating from FIT, and I remember thinking that they were the most perfect pair of shoes I had ever seen. Surprisingly, they were extremely comfortable too. I bought them without knowing when or where I would wear them, but a couple of months later, the perfect opportunity came up. I wore them with a fuchsia dress to the FIT commencement ceremony. I had never worn so much color in one outfit, and it made me feel ready to conquer the world. To me, these shoes represented everything I had already accomplished, and everything that was still to come. 

However, and to this day I have no idea why, about a year after that, I decided that those shoes were too childish for me. The thing is, even while I was giving them away, I knew I would regret it. And I did. I moved back home in 2014, and I regretted that decision every time those shoes would have been the perfect addition to an outfit. Even though they were just a pair of shoes, they were also a connection to my years living in New York. 

New York City will always be my second home, and the memory of those shoes will forever represent the excitement of my early twenties in the most amazing city, when I realized that, indeed, my life could be whatever I made it. 

By Sandra Mathey García-Rada