Money, Time and Energy: What Your Wardrobe Is Really Costing You
Updated: Sep 5
Why the biggest investment in discovering your authentic style isn't money, isn't time - and probably isn't what you think at all
At the start of every Visual Voice seminar I ask the room the same question, and I have been asking it for six years. What is stopping you from working out your own style?
The answers arrive fast and they are always the same two. One woman tells me she hasn't got the money for a new wardrobe. Another tells me she hasn't got the time to work it out.
Athens, London, New York, it makes no difference.
Both answers are wrong, and I say that gently, because I gave the same two answers myself for years.
You spend three currencies, and they are not worth the same
You spend money, you spend time, and you spend energy.
Most of us put money at the top, because we spend our working lives earning it and worrying about running out of it.
A few women have worked out that time matters more, on the reasonable grounds that you can always earn another euro and you will never get another Tuesday.
Energy is the one that decides what you can do with either of the other two, and it is the one nobody puts on the list.
Money is the cheapest thing on the list
Money comes back. You spent two hundred euros on a dress you have worn once, and it stings every time you open the wardrobe and see it hanging there with the tag still on. You will earn that two hundred back. It might take a month and it might take longer, but it is recoverable in a way the other two never are.
Which is why, when a woman tells me she cannot afford it, she is almost always telling me about something else. The money is the sentence she can say out loud.
Time costs more, because it does not come back
Oliver Burkeman opens Four Thousand Weeks with the arithmetic of an ordinary lifespan, and four thousand weeks is roughly the number. Nobody has yet found a way to earn more of them.
Marks and Spencer polled two thousand people for their Shwopping campaign and found the average woman spends around seventeen minutes a day deciding what to wear. Treat that as a retailer's survey rather than research, because that is what it is. Even so, seventeen minutes a day is more than four days a year spent standing in front of a wardrobe that is already full.
I don't need the survey, lovely. I have stood in enough bedrooms and watched it happen.
Energy is the one that actually runs out
Money buys you options and time gives you room, and neither is any use on the mornings when you have nothing left to give. You can have a free Saturday and money in the account and still not be able to face a fitting room.
Energy is what lets you use the other two. That is what makes it the expensive one. And unlike money, which you can earn, and time, which at least arrives at a predictable rate, energy is unpredictable. Some mornings you have it and some mornings you open your eyes and you already know.
What getting dressed takes out of you
The seventeen minutes is not the cost. The cost is what those seventeen minutes do to the four hours that follow them.
Standing in front of a wardrobe you no longer trust asks a great deal of you at once. You scan dozens of items, you try to recall what went with what the last time it worked, and you manage your own frustration when the third thing comes off and goes back on the rail. All the while you are listening to whatever your own voice has to say about your body.
Underneath all of it sits the question you probably would not say out loud, which is whether the woman in the mirror still matches the woman you have become. You have spent a morning on a decision you should never have had to make, and you have paid for it in the only currency that mattered.
Why most style advice leaves you where it found you
Magazines tell you to invest in quality pieces, as though the trouble were that your clothes are not expensive enough. Style guides show you this top with that skirt, on the assumption that you cannot see combinations. A personal shopper offers to update your look, which quietly suggests you have fallen behind on something.
None of them asks why you are tired before you have left the house. The reason is usually that you are wearing clothes which require you to be somebody slightly other than yourself, and holding that position costs you for the rest of the day.
Dressing for energy instead
This is where the Visual Voice® System came from. It asks what is actually yours, rather than what suits the season or what fits the budget. That is the only version of the question that hands energy back instead of taking more.
When a woman knows her own colours and her own lines, the morning stops being a decision. She reaches, she puts it on, she leaves the house. The money then looks after itself, because she stops buying things that drain her, and so does the time, because there is nothing left to deliberate over.
Nobody has ever told me they regretted getting that hour of their morning back.
Where to start
You cannot make more time and you have to earn money back. Energy is the one you can protect, and the quickest way I know to protect it is to stop guessing every morning.
I have written a free guide to the five wardrobe types. You read the five, you recognise yours, and you find out what your particular pattern has quietly been costing you.
About the Author
Magda Kazoli has spent twenty years in communication and six as a certified Image Consultant, working with women across 18 countries on their wardrobe and on the presence they carry into every room. She created the Visual Voice® System for the woman who senses that something has shifted. A new chapter. A career change. A quiet feeling that the woman in the mirror doesn't quite match the woman she's become. The wardrobe is full. Nothing feels right. That's the gap Magda works on.
Over 900 women across the UK, the US and Europe have gone through her Closet Confidence programme. Based in Athens, working internationally. Certified by House of Colour UK. Accredited member of FIPI, the Federation of Image Professionals International.
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