Emma Chamberlain Decluttered Her Closet, Should You?

the pitfalls of personal style & Marie Kondo minimalism 🗑

Jan 05, 2025

Learn to curate a sustainable wardrobe that reflects your true style, and avoid the pitfalls of hasty decluttering.

I’m Emily Stochl, a vintage & secondhand fashion reporter🎤 and this is Pre-Loved, an indie media platform featuring secondhand fashion advice!

It’s the top of the year, and you’re done feeling stressed, rushed and overwhelmed getting dressed every morning. You look at your closet and everything lacks cohesion; you’re not satisfied with the individual pieces, or how they pair together.

And so — for perhaps the umpteenth time — you get out the trash bags and declutter your closet. Again.

That’s what YouTube star, Emma Chamberlain, did in a recent video, broadcast to her over 12 million subscribers. The video opens with a montage of Emma’s clothing hauls over the years — many of them thrifted — and then the inevitable closet decluttering that followed. Emma has years worth of YouTube video footage to remind her of these cyclic extremes, but who amongst us hasn’t been there?

As she said in one of the old clips: “now that I cleaned out my closet, I want to go shopping!”

Emma’s goal here is really admirable. She wants to develop a cohesive wardrobe that all goes together, which will make getting dressed easier and happier.

“Prior to this I didn’t have a sense of personal style. It’s impossible to have a sense of personal style when you have every single aesthetic in your closet, at your disposable, at all times.
How are you supposed to narrow down your vibe, when you have every vibe?”
-Emma Chamberlain on YouTube

Another relatable problem. As personal stylist,

Allison Bornstein

shared on Fashion People with Lauren Sherman, “the most common problem is too much inventory.”

In this effort, Emma got rid of anything she thought was “too loud, too statement, too trendy, too ill-fitting, or purely sentimental.” She tried to develop a singular style and color palette from what remained.

I want to give kudos to Emma for owning her consumption patterns were irresponsible. She said she felt “repulsed” by the cleanout process: “To be honest, I was a gluttonous pig, let’s not sugar coat it.”

Maybe you’ve recently watched the Netflix documentary, Buy Now, and were angered by the way Big Businesses manipulate shopping habits to drive overconsumption. Or dismayed to learn about the real-world impact excessive waste has, particularly community’s in the Global South like Ghana, Chile, Kenya, and many more.

Emma donated all the clothing she decluttered (though she did not say where). I’m sure many of us have done the same. Taking old clothes to a charity shop makes us feel like we’ve done something good with the clothes we don’t want anymore — it feels like absolution for overconsuming.

But in the U.S., only about 10-20% of what is donated to charity shops is actually resold there. That’s because of the high volume these charities receive, and the low quality of most of the goods.

an excerpt from “Gone Vintage: How To Build A Better Thrifting System,” a piece I wrote for *Atmos* in 2020.

Charity shops are first and foremost social services nonprofits, not clothing recyclers, though they do the lions share of clothing recirculation in the U.S. — a major flaw in the under-resourced, uncoordinated system at present.

Donated pieces make their way through the global secondhand supply chain, from charity shops, to bulk balers, to exporters, and travel the globe. In Accra, Ghana (the largest hub of secondhand clothing in the world), traders import a staggering 15 million garments a week. Accra’s population is only 300,000, meaning shoppers would have to purchase fifty new garments a week to meet this “demand.”

A note on supply and demand: The secondhand supply chain is a supply-driven industry. Retail brands will tell you new product is created to “serve demand,” but these brands sure spend a lot on marketing, which the OR Foundation cleverly calls “demand creation expense.” Nike alone spent $4.29 billion “creating demand” for their products last year.

Ultimately, about 40% of the product that arrives at the resale markets in Accra —Kantamanto Market — leave the market as waste.

“What leaves Kantamanto Market as waste does so largely because there is simply too much clothing, and not because people are not working hard to manage it. Any eye toward viable, long-term, solutions must be grounded in this fact.
By nearly any other measure, recirculating six million items of clothing every week is an astonishing feat, exceeding in four months the volume that multi-billion dollar platforms like ThredUp have recirculated in 10 years.”
The OR Foundation Waste Landscape Report, 2022

This New Years Day, Kantamanto Market suffered a devastating fire, impacting at least 10 of the 13 market sections with sustained catastrophic damage. According to the OR Foundation, “nearly nine acres, home to thousands of businesses, have burned to the ground.” You can donate to support their relief efforts here.

Though decluttering feels like an earnest attempt at “sustainability,” ridding your closet of clothes you no longer wear has the unintended result of making them someone else’s problem.

And — if we’re all honest with ourselves — the decluttering effort rarely sticks, a trap millennials who lived through Marie Kondo-minimalism know all too well. Without a clear sense of personal style, a capsule wardrobe and desire to “escape the trend cycle” can only take you so far.

Marie Kondo’s book, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, published in 2010, sparked a minimalism craze that lasted the majority of the decade. It got another boon in 2020 when it was adapted into a Netflix special — timed with synchronicity during the pandemic when the world was stuck at home. And decluttering those homes.

In the 2020s, thoughtful criticism of the “minimalism” trend emerged. Kyle Chayka writes for The Guardian:

“What the bloggers collectively called minimalism amounted to a kind of enlightened simplicity, a moral message combined with a particularly austere visual style…
…the trend wasn’t as subtle as its name suggested; minimalism was a brand to identify with as much as a way of coping with mess.”

During the pandemic, I covered stories of charity shops across the country that had closed their doors, not accepting donations in the spring of 2020. However, as everyone at home cleaned out their closets, donations began piling up outside Goodwill’s from California to Texas to Michigan.

This is dumping not donating. Charity shops had to pay for trash bags of used clothes to be cleaned from their parking lots, dipping into their resources to do even more waste management. These discarded items often went to landfill because of elemental damage.

In 2025, fashion theorist, Rian Phin, posits we’re in an era of fashion extremes, writing, “it’s not minimalism that’s in style— it’s extremes! The YouTubers are moving toward minimalism because it’s an extreme styling choice, the chaos on the runway is an extreme.”

Allison Bornstein’s comments corroborate: during the pandemic she saw people drastically paring down and back. Now, people feel they “over-edited” and want to figure out how to get their personality back. Culturally, politically, stylistically — no doubt, 2025 is a year of polarization.

Miu Miu’s Spring 2025 show referenced the book, *The Extreme Self*

The same week as Emma’s closet declutter, YouTuber Mina Le, published a video essay about cultivating a more simplistic personal style. Mina’s previous signature style featured very thin eyebrows, finger waves in her hair, and vintage-inspired makeup.

Though Mina still largely wears vintage and secondhand clothing, she speaks honestly about being jaded working in fashion in Manhattan, and how influencers, journalists and corporate fashion can shape a sense of personal style.

What results is largely a “sameness” — Mina’s take is not necessarily a negative critique of this, but an observation. Much like the Joan Didion packing list from The White Album, or Steve Jobs committing to a fashion uniform, sameness can — in fact — result in ease.

But, Mina argues, it’s one thing to adopt simplicity as a personal style choice — as she and many others have — and yet another to adopt sameness as a result of not knowing one’s own personal style. Curation only works if you keenly know why you’re doing it, and you’re clear-eyed about how it will help you get to your vision of personal style.

These are the personal style issues at the root of our decluttering. Until we get to that root, we’ll keep modulating through frantic acquisition and brutal culling.

Before you clean out your closet this time around, here are some things to try first:

Ask yourself, would better organizing help? Storage matters!
Take this time to re-engage with your closet through something like the 75 Hard Style Challenge.
Bring in professional help! A personal stylist can give helpful, impartial advice.
If possible, get things tailored to fit the way you’d like them to!
Emma’s own advice: “Don’t experiment through buying stuff, experiment through trying things on.”
Listen to Pre-Loved Podcast for personal style advice from my 250+ guests!

Thank you for reading! You can find me across the internet as @emilymstochl on Instagram, TikTok, and Threads! 💛 - Emily