Are Capsule Wardrobes Just for Thin People?
The neon-swimsuit-shaped hole in my heart. (Plus 10 things I wear a lot.)
About a week ago, an Athleta email showed up in my inbox. This is not remotely news because they arrive every hour of every day, of course. How do we know we’re even alive if we’re not “jumping into bold swim colors” at 7:55am? I usually delete without opening, but the subject of last Friday’s email was “9 travel-ready styles inside” and goddammit, I am traveling soon (family spring break trip), and want to feel travel-ready, so fine. So I opened and saw: The Travel Capsule. 9 pieces, 20 ways.
Please do not misinterpret this essay as an ad for Athleta. They are a not-size-inclusive-enough brand that I only mildly like (and not at all for leggings!). But there is a lot happening in this travel capsule gif and I want to talk about it. For starters: I did not realize that simply wearing a swimsuit, and also wearing a swimsuit with a cover-up counted as two separate outfits. Nor had I ever pondered how truly versatile a one-shoulder bra could be. It’s a bra! It’s a top! It’s… just those two things! Mostly though, studying this gif made me realize how extremely seductive I find the “capsule wardrobe” concept, despite having many questions about its feasibility. The most urgent of which is: Can capsule wardrobes work for fat bodies, or is this diet culture for your closet?
Let’s try to answer that today, first by attempting to define “capsule wardrobe.” I was fascinated to learn that this idea originated in the late 1930s, with a Vogue Magazine piece. Molly MacGilbert traces the rest of its history in this piece for Bust, and defines the capsule as “a small, curated collection of items.” She also points to Susie Faux, a British style authority/shop owner who popularized the capsule idea in the 1970s and defined it as: “[A] collection of a few essential items of clothing that don’t go out of fashion, such as skirts, trousers, and coats, which can then be augmented with seasonal pieces.”
Here we land on one of the first immediate flaws of a capsule wardrobe: Everything “goes out of fashion.” Sure, jeans have been perpetually in style for the past century—but not the same jeans. Just in the three decades or so that I’ve been wearing them, the dominant jean style has morphed from straight leg, to boot cut, to low-rise, to skinny, to high-rise, and back to straight leg but it’s not the same straight leg. See also other alleged forever wardrobe staples like white button-down shirts and black boots.
A common unifying belief of capsule wardrobe disciples is that you should own less. Buy fewer, but higher quality clothes so you can wear them longer. This both ignores the question of “fashion” and the very clear reality of bodies: They change. Our weight goes up and down. Our proportions shift with age, and body-altering experiences like pregnancy. This quite clearly cuts fat folks out of the capsule wardrobe conversation, but thin bodies change, too. Our preferences also evolve. I refuse to ever again wear the kind of heels I tortured myself with in my 20s. Had I bought “heirloom pieces” (in the early 2000s this meant Manolos or Louboutins and I never did but ohhh I wanted them), they would be sitting dusty in my closet now. What feels like a classic and essential staple in one season of life can become completely irrelevant, fast.
The capsule wardrobe discourse has acknowledged this in recent years, and shifted away from what we might call the WASP Model of wearing the same skirt suit for forty years, towards a sustainable fashion ethos. Now capsule wardrobes are what you do to resist the siren song of fast fashion and to lessen the carbon footprint of your closet. (Consider Lee Vosburgh who, I think, invented the 10x10 challenge, and has a minimalist gold jewelry capsule.) This hasn’t exactly liberated us from the “buy better clothes and wear them longer” premise so much as it has added a new moral imperative to it. But it does mean the list of staples has shifted from the kind of rigid Girl Boss femininity marketed by Faux, and later by Donna Karen and women’s magazines, towards something crunchier and comfier. Birkenstocks could be a capsule wardrobe staple now. Also lots of earth-toned linen.
Yet there is still plenty of rigidity. Social media challenges like 30 for 30, Project 333, 10x10, as well as endless articles on how to pare your closet down to “37 versatile items that you totally love to wear,” are the fashion equivalents of crash diets: Lots of rules. Lots of restriction. Guilt if you “cheat” by pulling something out of the banned section of your closet or, God forbid, shop. An arbitrary time period and the expectation that you’ll end the challenge with some profound new insight into your consumption patterns.
There is, not shockingly, not a ton of research on the efficacy of capsule wardrobes, but I did find one 2021 study on 10 people, which concluded that participants “felt less stressed, detached from fashion trends, have found joy in their fashion style, and enhanced their awareness of conscious consumption,” after a three-week capsule wardrobe experiment. But I am not convinced that this “I can survive with just four shirts” euphoria is sustainable in the long-term. It’s too rooted in virtue signaling, too conscious, still, of the cultural norms around clothing consumption to be fully detached from them.
Capsule Consumerism
Even as this new iteration of the capsule wardrobe sells us liberation through minimalism, it encourages us to consume in order to have the right kind of minimalism. “Capsule wardrobes are a scam perpetuated by Big Minimalism and Capitalism,” says Shanna Battle, a fashion writer who posts on TikTok as @meeandminnie. We can see this, quite clearly, in the Athleta ad. I can’t make a capsule wardrobe just like that out of my own closet, because I do not own a one-shoulder bra, or a sporty skirt and matching vest, and even if I did own some of those individual items, I didn’t happen to purchase them all in a coordinating color palette. The urge to start buying in order to fill what now feel like a major neon-swimsuit-shaped gap in my own closet is strong. Consumption is clearly the goal of this article, which tells me I need a “5 Piece French Wardrobe” (Obviously! Who doesn’t want to dress French!) and then includes a shop-able list of 33 items to help me achieve that goal. Why do I need 33 items to only wear five? I don’t know but I want them all even if I’m not sure what a “boyfriend blazer” or an “everyday ring” even is.
We can see the marketing too, in the way the term “capsule wardrobe” gets applied to situations beyond the rigorous social experiment scenarios. The Athleta ad is really just talking about… packing? But “put the amount of clothes you need for a week in one suitcase” does not need a fancy name—unless the goal is to convince me to buy a white dress that is doomed to be stained the first day I wear it, and also probably can only work as a layering piece because it looks too sheer to be worn over underwear alone? I do see the wisdom of a travel color scheme, and of trying to make sure that any bulky items, like shoes or coats, will be worn more than once, to save suitcase space. I’m just not sure we need to brand this.
Diet Culture, Encapsulated
In theory, the stealth marketing of capsule wardrobes could help offset the rigid expectations that your body must stay the same size forever. In reality, of course, most capsule closet content (both editorial and advertorial) centers thin, white bodies. This was baked into the capsule wardrobe’s Vogue Magazine origins, and in how Susie Faux popularized the capsule wardrobe concept in the 1970s. Samantha Schmidt, who blogs at Couturious about sewing and sustainable fashion, sent me a few pages from her copy of Faux’s 1988 book, Wardrobe: Develop Your Style and Confidence, and on the one hand, there is some maybe-revolutionary-for-it’s-time anti-diet sentiment:
If dieting “proves impossible, then accept yourself, like yourself, and resolve to capitalize on what already exists” is energy we can get behind. But I fear “capitalize on” is doing a lot of work in that sentence and indeed, on page 41:
So Faux’s goal isn’t to reject the stringent beauty ideals that tell us our “bust or bottom [...] has been such a problem,” but just to figure out how to camouflage these parts and distract viewers by playing up our most beauty standard-aligned features. This makes fashion all about “flattering” and reinforces every beauty ideal by trying to trick non-normative bodies into looking more normative through various illusions of color and proportion. Like diets, these tricks don’t work (people can still see that you’re fat). And they undermine our relationship with clothes in subtler ways. “Flattering” teaches us to think of fashion as a game our body either wins or loses every time we get dressed.
And when flattering meets the capsule wardrobe, it gets even more toxic because you now have so many fewer options for clothes that can make you feel good. If you are struggling to love your appearance, distilling those choices down to a few things you truly love and feel great in can be very liberating. But it can also set you up for moments of panic if the capsule you’ve curated is tied to a vision of the body you wish you had, not the body you actually have.
I want to be clear that this dissonance isn’t always weight-related and can happen to thin folks as well as fat folks. But another layer of this for fat folks is the fact that the bigger you get, the fewer clothing options you have, period. If you’re mid to superfat, the retail market has already curated your capsule for you. “As a fat person who can’t shop in many stores in person, I have too many fears,” one Instagram follower told me recently. “And too much of a scarcity mindset around having the clothes I need when I need them for a capsule wardrobe.” Yes. Maybe you don’t also need the pressure to winnow your closet down to under 30 items. Maybe you need to revel in as many options as you can afford to give yourself.
Reclaiming the Capsule?
So here’s the part where I admit, critiques aside, I still want that damn Athleta ad. Or not that, exactly (I do want bras with two straps), but some perfectly curated and color-coordinated version of my current closet, which periodically overflows with multiple seasons and sizes. I’m an expert and ruthless closet cleaner, but I’m also a stress shopper, so I manage to undo my own efforts every few months. And there is something so soothing about the potential for a capsule to rein in some of the chaos and reduce decision fatigue around what to wear. So it was heartening to poll Instagram followers and discover that yes! There are fat people (see: Dressing_Dawn & TheCurvyCapsule on Instagram) doing capsule wardrobes, at least periodically, and loving it. (I also appreciate the frank honesty of the follower who said, “I capsule wardrobe while traveling and it’s not amazing. It’s just okay.”)
In her TikTok on capsules, Shanna Battle explains the potential of reclaiming—or maybe just claiming, since the capsule has never been a weight-inclusive concept—the capsule this way: “I want us to divest ourselves from the Pinterest-worthy image of what it’s supposed to be like, and build one that is more in line with our personal style.” In other words, you don’t have to live in neutrals or check off some list of “essential” basics to achieve capsule status. You don’t even need a color scheme, if your brain is way more chill than mine. "In the span of two years, I went from begging brands to make minimalist capsule pieces in plus-sizes to choosing which checkerboard lounge set best fit my closet color story,” Marielle Elizabeth wrote for Vogue in 2021. “After years of monochromatic linen, it’s a welcome change.”
It’s a change that feels not unlike replacing dieting with permission to eat the full variety of whichever foods and flavors we most love. In thinking about how we could then, redefine “capsule wardrobe” on our own terms, I landed on this Dacy Gillespie of MindfulCloset puts it:
Let's agree that a perfect capsule wardrobe should not be a thing. You can have 33 or 37 or 54 items in it. You can wear the clothes in your capsule for a week or three months or until the weather changes or just until you get tired of that particular set of stuff. You can include shoes and accessories or not. You can have one capsule or multiple ones for different activities in your life. A capsule wardrobe is simply a small collection of clothing you actually wear that makes it easier for you to get dressed. You make it work for you.1
There is power in redefining clothes as something we do to make our life easier. There is power in deciding that we can stop living to please our clothes—whether that has meant trying to follow lots of restrictive rules about a capsule, or fighting to be smaller in order to feel like we’re allowed to wear certain things. There may be fewer one shoulder bras. (Or many more idk!) There may be a less coherent color story. But there will be us, getting dressed, on our own terms.
The It’s Not NOT a Capsule List
I mean, it’s truly not a capsule in the Athleta sense of the word. I can’t pair every single item here with every single other item. It’s not ruthlessly color-coordinated. And I absolutely do not think you should buy everything or even anything on this list. But if we’re reconsidering a capsule to be the items of clothing we reach for most because they make our life easier, here are the ten things I’m wearing on constant repeat right now. Some of them even go together!
(Note: I’m including sizes because that can be helpful intel in decoding how a brand fits plus size bodies. If those numbers are triggering to you, skip this!)