A compartmentalized dresser drawer helps bring order to chaos
Saturday, February 6, 2010
With your garments beautifully organized, let’s make all your accessories equally . . . well . . . accessible.
Start at the bottom, giving your footwear collection the same critical review as your garments, eliminating every worn out, outdated or uncomfortable pair.
If space is limited, consider under-bed storage for evening shoes and out-of-season ones. Pick a firm plastic unit that slides easily; pushing a soft fabric piece (like Shoes Under TM) back under the bed is a lot like herding cats.
Lots of options exist for organizing your every-day shoe collection. Jane keeps hers in boxes on upper closet shelves, with top- and side-view photos taped to each box. (How do you spell overachiever?) Sue keeps hers on narrow wall shelves, with matching shoe trees supporting the shape of each pair. Edna is happy with open shoe boxes, clearly visible on her closet floor. Standard over-door racks or pocket organizers work fine too. In each case, the shoes are arranged by color and level of dressiness or heel height.
Boots are a special sub-category. I love to secure each pair to the clips of a skirt hanger and suspend them from a closet rod. That keeps them tidy and prevents damage from fold-over at the ankle. Use paper strips to prevent the clips from marring fine leather.
Handbags stand upright on a closet shelf, supported with vertical file organizers from the office supply store. I found good options at Office Max under $20.
Cup hooks on the back of a door allows jewelry to be organized and accessible.
It’s tough to find the right jewelry in the morning if it’s all tangled up in an old-fashioned jewelry box.
Create a row of cup hooks (under $2 per package at the hardware store) for necklaces . . . organized in rainbow color order, of course. Mount cup hooks on a door frame, the back of a door, inside an armoire or wherever else you like. (Cup hooks are also great for belts, and for storing the spaghetti-strap camisoles many clients use as layering pieces.)
Ginny skipped the cup hooks and created a clever arrangement with shoes on a wire shelf and necklaces hanging below, hooked over the individual wires.
Earrings stay neatly in matched pairs stored in open-top egg cartons in a shallow dresser drawer. Divided plastic box designed for daily medication doses are also good earring options - especially handy for travel.
Attaching pins to a length of wide, firm ribbon keeps them easy to find and prevents damage. You can thumbtack the ribbon to the inside frame of your closet door.
Large shawls and pashminas hang easily from clip-style skirt hangers. Smaller scarves can hang that way too if you have rod space. Personally having an above-average scarf collection and below-average closet space, I attached tiny scarf clips to a heavy-duty tubular hanger to hold all my scarves . . . in rainbow order, no surprise.
Whether you store socks, hosiery and lingerie in drawers or on closet shelves, you can keep them organized in pretty boxes. Find ready-made ones at craft stores, or make your own by applying gift wrap or wallpaper to extra shoe boxes. It’s as easy as wrapping a package, and coordinating them to your decor is another “invisible indulgence.”
Or think outside the boxes and store pretty “unmentionables” in the pockets of a door-mounted shoe organizer.
If you have other wardrobe storage dilemmas or creative solutions to share, I’d love to hear about them at NancyNRice@hotmail.com
Nancy Nix Rice has been an image and wardrobe consultant in private practice for 20 years. Her book, “Looking Good” (which also comes in video version), is used in the image consultant training program at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. She also has authored “The NEW Professional Image - From Business Casual to the Boardroom.”
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