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Big Girl in a Skinny World: How to Clean Out Your Closet

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Big Girl in a Skinny World: How to Clean Out Your Closet

Hi Ladies:

I hope you had a wonderful holiday season and an amazing new year. Can you believe it’s 2010? Every New Year comes with new beginnings and new resolutions. But I think it is easiest to move forward if you start with a clean slate.

My first order of business this year: cleaning out my closet. Literally. Over the past few years my closet has become a bit overcrowded. While at home in Miami over the holiday break I came to the realization that a size 12 had no business being in my closet, as I am currently wearing a size 18 or 20. I know I am not the first woman to do, this but I think it is especially common for plus-size girls like us to irrationally hang on to clothes we won’t soon be wearing. It is easy to become attached to certain items, especially when they are in the size you wish you were or used to be. Truth is, these pieces only take up space, make it difficult to navigate through your closet and can serve to make you extremely frustrated or discouraged.

My best advice is to dress the body you have now. Go through your entire closet and try everything on. Be honest with yourself about fit. If it doesn’t fit, give it away. You can do a great deal of good in 2010 by passing on the outfits that don’t fit you to a local church or charity. While you’re at it, organize your closet by color and silhouette; it will make getting dressed much easier. As for keeping items in a size much smaller than you are at the moment: keep only one or two garments that can serve as inspiration to get to your ultimate goal. Once you have sorted what you’ll keep and what you’ll toss, figure out what pieces need to be updated or replaced. After giving my closet the once over, I had filled 3 garbage bags with outfits and pieces that were decidedly too small. The flip side: I have a very organized closet and a good excuse to go shopping. So I propose to go out with the old and in with the new. Let me know how it goes!

-Ashley
Your BIG GIRL IN A SKINNY WORLD

Email Ashley here!
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Join the Marie Claire team as they jet set around the globe for New York, Milan, and Paris Fashion Weeks, where they'll dish on the latest fashion and beauty news, tips, trends, and dirt straight from the front row.

About the Authors
elana fishman

Elana

Elana Fishman is Marie Claire's credits editor and fashion news assistant. When she's not hunting down shopping info for bags and baubles, she's scouring flea markets for vintage designer goodies and catching up on the 25+ blogs she reads daily. She loves nothing more than tulip skirts, Arcade Fire, and Momofuku's cornflake-marshmallow cookies.

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Ashley

Ashley Falcon is a fashion stylist and Marie Claire's plus-size columnist. She's proof that fashionistas come in all shapes and sizes as she blogs about her favorite fashion finds, giving advice on dressing for your shape, and answering reader questions.

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kate schweitzer

Kate

Kate Schweitzer is the senior web editor of Marie Claire. She loves traveling (even back to her hometown of St. Louis, Missouri), eating candy, cheating at Scrabble, and watching TV — so much so that she is a writer for Chaos Theory and Handsome Town, two web comedy series from Emmy-winning PhoebeTV.

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Koryn

Koryn Kennedy is Marie Claire's associate web editor. She believes in limited use of both personal pronouns and self-tanner, is a coffee snob and a Brooklyn boutique aficionado. Having grown up in Europe, she's never "from around here." Her writing has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sun Sentinel, Esquire.com, Premiere.com, and other movie and culture blogs.

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