Fashion and Mental Load: How I Declutter My Closet and My Head
Eugénie Trochu is a Who What Wear editor in residence known for her transformative work at Vogue France and her Substack newsletter, where she documents and shares new trends, her no-nonsense approach to fashion and style, plus other musings. She's also working on her upcoming first book that explores fashion as a space of memory, projection, and reinvention.
Getting dressed, when you're a woman, is never a neutral gesture.
It's an act of personal curation, a daily negotiation between aspiration and reality, between the archive and desire. Before the first espresso, we're already at war with the tyranny of choice: that infernal triad of visual overload, decision fatigue, and emotional weight.
Visual overload? My closet looks like the back room of an eccentric vintage dealer—organized chaos where a Harley-Davidson jacket bought at Clignancourt flea market hangs next to a Comme des Garçons dress that defies gravity (and common sense) and an Agnès B. sweater that's too small but too sentimentally charged to let go. Opening the door is like opening a catalog of parallel lives: the seductress in Saint Laurent satin by Hedi Slimane, the ingénue in vintage Chloé, the adventurer in a sun-yellow ACNE bomber. Each piece is a possible scenario, an identity on standby. The problem isn't a lack of options. It's their paradoxical surplus, like staring at a 10-page menu and ordering fries.
Agnès B.
Cashmere AB Sweater
CHLOÉ
Gathered V-Neck Long Dress
Harley-Davidson
Boone Fringed Leather Jacket
Decision fatigue creeps in insidiously. Before I've even pulled on a sock, 30% of my cognitive capital is gone. Too much? Not enough? Too fashion victim? Too burnout mom? The question is less aesthetic than strategic. How do you reconcile the desire to wear that Prada pencil skirt bought in a sale frenzy with the reality of sprinting between back-to-back meetings? I remember the day I wore a borrowed Dior white ensemble to a show (the leather jacket a little too snug) and ripped it inelegantly right down the back as I sat down. My greatest fear? Being out of sync and betraying my vibe, that mix of casual elegance and calculated audacity that feels like my signature. It's like the time I tried full '70s boho—fringe, psychedelic print, platforms—on a rainy Tuesday. Disaster. I looked like an alien who crash-landed in the Marais.
And then there's emotional weight. Our closets are sentimental crypts. They hold the Azzedine Alaïa dress bought for a date that never happened, the Ann Demeulemeester boots that witnessed both beginnings and endings, the vintage Chanel suit heavy with legacy. Each piece carries memories, hopes, disappointments. We keep them just in case—in case the occasion comes, in case we again become the person who once wore it, in case we have a daughter who might want to. But "just in case" is a lie, a ghost that clutters the mind as much as the space.
My revolution? A grand autumn purge. Less Marie Kondo, more Martin Margiela. A radical approach: keep only what truly speaks. Out with the pieces flattering a fantasy self that doesn't exist. In with personal icons, the ones that tell my story and anchor my present.
