Why You Have a Closet Full of Clothes and Nothing to Wear

By Jennifer Butler, Color DNA Oracle. Over 40 years, 7,000+ clients, studied directly with Suzanne Caygill, originator of Four Seasons Color Harmony, and award-winning author of Dress Your Essence.

A morning at the mall

I don’t go to the mall anymore. Recently I had to, for makeup before a trip, and I paused inside the doors to look around. Hundreds of people. Nearly every one of them in black, grey or navy, most of it sweats. Maybe one in a thousand had on a color. It was very depressing for me.

Then, walking down the concourse, I noticed a group of young people turning around to look at me. I’m an older woman. They weren’t looking at my age. I was in color, a print I think, and in that building it made me the unusual thing.

Not long after, I woke at four in the morning with my wardrobe charts beside the bed and one question. As a supposedly conscious humanity, how could we be this far off? We have our home, our food, and how we clothe ourselves. The third one is where we keep losing ourselves.

Why you have a closet full of clothes and nothing to wear

What we are looking for in our closets isn’t clothing. It’s us.

When a woman tells me she has a closet full of clothes and nothing to wear, she is rarely short on clothes. She is short on herself. Each piece was bought to make her look and feel a certain way, and most were bought for an image of the professional, the good mother, or the woman she believed she ought to be, rather than for the woman standing at the mirror.

A closet full of clothes and nothing to wear is usually the result of what I call misidentification, which is choosing clothes without realizing it from an idealized image of who you think you should be, rather than from your own natural coloring and essence.

My own closet full of nothing to wear

I know that closet from the inside. After college I worked at Bloomingdale’s in New York, and I bought everything that was popular. I knew how to put a great outfit together. But I also owned a rack of things I never wore because they didn’t feel quite right. I had started out imitating my mother’s style and moved on to imitating the fashion world, and somewhere in between I lost my personal compass. In short, I was the woman with a closet full of nothing to wear.

Of course, none of this is a conscious decision. Nobody walks into a store intending to buy the wrong color, which is exactly why the pattern holds so long. It feels like taste. It feels like you.

So if you have stood in front of a full closet and felt that none of it is quite yours, trust that feeling. It is accurate. It is your essence noticing the gap before your mind has words for it.

Dressing like your mother without knowing it

When a new client comes to me, she usually arrives dressed as another member of her family.

When I was about six, I stood on the front lawn of our home in Hibbing, Minnesota, a house my mother had designed, and told her she was beautiful. “It’s what’s on the inside that counts,” she said. Years later, training with Suzanne Caygill, I understood why that moment never left me. The weathered pink brick was a deeper value of her skin. The sage green door was her eye color. And the pink azaleas were her romantic tone. She was standing inside her own palette, and I could see her.

In the seasonal system I learned from Suzanne, each of us carries the coloring of one season, Spring, Summer, Autumn or Winter, in the harmony of our hair, skin and eyes. My mother was a Spring. I am a Winter, her opposite. As the only daughter among five brothers, the peacekeeper, I wore her soft Spring pinks for years. I never said to myself, today I’m going to buy the wrong color. I walked into a store, saw a pink, thought this is wonderful, I love it, and put it on believing it was me. It wasn’t.

The mother wound

Underneath sits what I call the mother wound, and it is a real bind. Basic survival in a family means being like the mother or like the father. That is what keeps a child safe. Spiritually, we are here to individuate. If you are like her, that isn’t okay, because you want to be your own person. If you are not like her, that isn’t okay either, because she wants you to be like her. The child chooses safety, and the closet keeps the agreement long after the child has grown.

It also travels sideways. Growing up, I wore my friends’ colors and they wore mine. I can’t tell you how often I find a husband’s colors in his wife’s closet. At a soul level we know when we are not being ourselves, and it unsettles us.

Playing a part, or being in your life

Most of us build our wardrobes out of roles, and every role comes with borrowed colors.

For the young mom part, I put on a denim button-down shirt, because that was what every family photographer handed you. For dance, I showed up in my leotard and tights. And for business, the go-to was a black or navy suit, and nobody questioned it. At some point the question arrives on its own. Do I want to be playing a part in my life, or do I want to be in my life as who I am?

Still, the roles were never the mistake. I could have worn that denim shirt. It needed to be the right denim for me. I could have worn the suit. What I didn’t have yet was my colors, so every costume came with somebody else’s palette sewn in.

Why everyone wears black

Black is the clearest example, and it is what I saw on that mall floor. Most of us think of power dressing as a black suit and white shirt, a combination that truly belongs to Winter coloring. On most other women, black and white creates distance between her and the people she is speaking to. One client, Jana, came to me certain she was a Winter like me. She wore mostly black and white with silver, and she came across as confident but self-contained. In fact, she was a Spring. Her palette turned out to be deep teal, peacock blue, bright iris and ruby red, and the warmth she had kept private for years finally had somewhere to show.

I teach three levels of perception. At the image-based level, you look outside yourself and follow what is offered. At the strategy-based level, you dress for calculated effect and ask how to be the most powerful person in the room. Finally, at the essence-based level, you choose from your own inner light. If you are already successful and your presentation doesn’t match the level you operate at, you are very likely still wearing a strategy costume. It got you here. It is not who you are.

The inside and the outside are the same

My mother was right that what’s on the inside counts. She just wasn’t finished. Does the outside count? Yes, but not in the way we think. Spiritually, the inside and the outside are the same.

When we love ourselves, we know this. To know it, we have to give up a level of self-criticism, and that is the real price of admission, because the ego thrives on self-criticism. It thrives on I am not enough, or I’m too much, and either voice will happily choose your clothes for you.

Here is what I wrote at four in the morning. There is a yearning in each of us, and I love that word, yearning, from the soul and from the heart, to be ourselves. The soul is driven in that direction. When we look outside and listen to the languaging out there, we end up in the conversation that we are not enough. When we look within, from the soul, we are complete. The soul keeps telling us you are good exactly the way you are.

In fact, we have become so outer-referenced as a culture that the outside now has more say over our clothing, and over who we are allowed to be, than our own soul does.

Looking in the wrong direction

Before I trained with Suzanne, I’d had my colors done ten times by other people, with ten different results. When she identified me as a Winter, with jade green as my power color, it was my first experience of being truly seen.

So when you open your closet wanting to look good and feel good, and keep trying on different looks hoping one will finally validate you, the reason it isn’t working has nothing to do with taste. You are looking in the wrong direction, asking everyone else for an answer only you hold.

You can keep living with the misidentification, or you can take a stand for who you are. Enough is enough. Or, I am enough.

What to do next

Start today, before you buy or book anything.

1. First, pull out five pieces you never reach for, even though nothing is wrong with them. Don’t give them away yet. Ask of each one whose it is, and who you were being when you bought it. Often the answer is a specific person, and naming her is most of the work. This is the first step.
2. Next, look back at the colors you wore between about eight and eighteen. Notice whose palette that was. For many women it belongs to a mother, a father, a sibling, or the friend she most wanted to be like.
3. Stand by a window in daylight with no makeup and look at the harmony of your hair, your eyes and your skin. Don’t judge. Notice. That is the one reference point in this whole question that nobody handed you.
4. Then have your Color DNA identified by someone trained to see it. Self-assessment tends to return the palette you were trained into, because it still feels like home. Jana had typed herself as a Winter for years.

When you’re ready for the full work, my 10-week program is where we do it together, with live coaching from me.

A closet full of clothes and nothing to wear can change

A closet full of clothes and nothing to wear isn’t a sign that something is wrong with you. You chose each piece as the person you were taught to be, and you never noticed the substitution. That can be corrected for good. Your Color DNA comes from you, not a trend, and a check-in every five to ten years is a refinement, not a redo. The soul’s agreement is to live your purpose and be fully expressed as yourself. You can’t be fully expressed dressed as somebody else. Come and find out what your own colors are.

Frequently asked questions

Why do I have a closet full of clothes and nothing to wear?

Usually because you chose the clothes from an image of who you thought you should be, rather than from your own natural coloring and essence. Jennifer Butler calls this misidentification. The pieces may be beautiful and fit well, but they reflect a role, a trend or another person, so none of them feel like you when you put them on.

Is it common to dress like your mother without realizing it?

Very common. In more than 40 years of color work, Jennifer Butler has found that new clients usually arrive dressed as another member of their family, most often a parent. Resembling the family is how a child stays safe, and those color choices often continue into adulthood without ever being questioned.

Why does everyone wear black, and should I?

Black, grey and navy feel safe and are sold as the default, especially for professional settings. In Four Seasons Color Harmony, black and white truly belong to Winter coloring. On Spring, Summer and Autumn coloring, black tends to create distance between a woman and the people she is speaking with, and her own darkest neutral does the job better.

Can I find my true colors on my own?

You can learn a great deal by studying your hair, eyes and skin in daylight, without makeup. The difficulty is that self-assessment tends to return the palette you were raised in, because it feels familiar. Jennifer Butler had her own colors done ten times, with ten different results, before Suzanne Caygill identified her as a Winter.

Isn’t this vanity? Shouldn’t my results speak for themselves?

People read you before you speak, and that read either matches the level you operate at or undersells it. Working with your own beauty is a way of claiming your personal power and self-expression, which is closer to sacred than frivolous. It is also why practical outcomes like trust and being remembered tend to follow.