Practical Princess Perfect Wardrobe - Declutter and re-jig your wardrobe to transform your life [Hardcover]

Elika Gibbs started her career in fashion by opening a designer dress hire, where she rents out expensive designer dresses/ball gowns and shoes to people who need them for a glitzy event. She mentions alot of her clients are "photographed a lot" so they can't wear things more than once. Somehow she ended up helping some of her clients from the shop re-organize their wardrobes at home, which became a lucrative side project. This book is intended to demonstrate how to organize and optimize your wardrobe, which is apparently supposed to "transform your life." There are three main sections: Wardrobe assessment; Organizing Your Wardrobe; and Going Shopping. Unfortunately, following the steps in the book is extremely unlikely to transform your life to be even remotely similar to those of the clients she generally serves, toward whom her approach is appropriate. Most of the advice is the same general stuff you find in the "how to clean out your closet" articles which perennially appear in women's fashion magazines. While there is the occasional bit of extra detail or divergent advice, it typically tends toward the impractical. As Elika's businesses might indicate, she seems very good at solving problems only encountered by the extremely rich or people with absolutely massive wardrobes (for example, her "Practical Princess" business offers secure storage for clent's ball gowns, seasonal items and other "archived" clothing).

I was most interested to see the suggestions for clothes organization and storage, but found very little new or helpful information. All of the suggestions require either large amounts of clothes storage space, or many shallow drawers. Gibbs helpfully informs readers that "It is surprising how cheaply and easily one can make a walk-in closet out of a small spare room and easily be able to convert it back" (45) and she appears to assume you will have the space to do so. Nearly all of the pictures illustrate closets as large as the average person's bedroom, displaying a range of extremely expensive clothing (one such closet-room has eight (!) Hermes Birkin bags in various colours in it). Like most people, I don't have any empty "extra" rooms to work with.

Practical Princess is a very attractive book, and there is some very useful information in it, although not as much as I'd hoped. I would say that at least half of the 125 pages are full page photos, and many more have pictures covering 1/4 to 1/2 the page. Even on the few pages which only contain text, there is a significant amount of empty white space, and the font is fairly large throughout. The tone is conversational and informal, and it is an easy, quick read. Regardless, unless you have no idea how to organize your wardrobe despite being a high income clotheshorse --- or you want some aspirational visuals in your quest to become one --- this book is probably not worth bothering with. It's pretty, but most of the content is easily found in books which offer far more content, for example any style book or storage book with a chapter on closet organization. Martha Stewart's Good Things for Organizing or Andy Paige's Style on a Shoestring are examples - although they are admitedly far less chic than Practical Princess. Alternately, a quick search for the word "closet" at Apartment Therapy yielded more useful info appropriate to my lifestyle in than this book has.

When I saw the preview of this I feared that it might be just some kind of homage to some of the people with whom Elika Gibbs worked. Happily I was proved wrong. I've yet to put the template for folding into practice but her tips are good in that she points out that a person's life might have changed but their wardrobe may not have kept pace. Re outfits, to be fair to the author, she makes no claims about styling people. Again, her book is about organising wardrobes but it could equally apply to other areas of the home. A recommended read - the photos are lovely too but they're not overpowering.

Offers really very practical advice as opposed to any kind of style advice. I suppose that it does what it says on the tin - it's essentially a practical guide on how to organise your wardrobe, rather than helping with how to put outfits together, what kind of clothes suit you best etc which I what I was really after!
What is great is how it advises on folding clothes using a template - have improvised and used a catalogue as the template and hey presto have beautifully folded sweaters and T shirts. Also, putting clothes together by clothing type to identify gaps in your wardrobe.
It has helped me to re-jig my wardrobe, but has it transformed my life? nope, I'm still just as stumped when faced with what do I wear today. xx