OK, so here’s the thing: I am apparently old because I spent last Tuesday night watching teens on TikTok dump their entire closets on their floors and then outfit-piece around like stress-eating goldendoodles with a credit card. And tbh, I tried it too. And my cat hissed at me.
And my Theory blazers will never forgive me. Let’s rewind. The trend, which TikTok appropriately dubbed the “outfit pile method,” has all of a sudden become ubiquitous on college campuses.
Just scroll through #outfitpile on TikTok and you’ll see student after student from USC to NYU pulling every article of clothing out of their dorm closets and dresser drawers, dropping them all in a pile on their floor, and magically constructing semi-coordinated outfits out of the mess they’ve made. I fell down the hole last Tuesday at around 11 PM cursing myself for not spending that time preparing to give quarterly projections to clients the next day.
Instead, I was watching one Gen-Z queen after another throw their entire closets on the floor (forgive me, Cardi B) and putting outfits together I never would have dreamed of in my own dreams.
This kid from Northwestern had whipped every item of clothing out of her closet and held up, as if by magic, a fully constructed outfit consisting of a slip dress over some wide-leg jeans, a cardigan that belonged to her grandma, and cute boots.
Me? If I had to construct an outfit consisting of all black clothing, I’d be stressed just deciding which black blazer matched with which black trousers.
Like I said: It gave me life. It also initially horrified me. I’m the daughter of a woman who would harangue me about throwing my neatly pressed shirts on the ground until they wrinkled.
My own closet is colour-coordinated and meticulously organised by “work” and “weekend” clothing because lord knows adults with their shit together don’t dress themselves on a whim. Anyway, watching humans toss their clothing onto the floor with reckless abandon felt rude to me on a primal level. We’ve been trained for decades by shows like What Not to Wear to purge our closets of items we don’t wear eight times a year.
Fast fashion has made us feel badly about wearing the same clothing too many times. Advice columnists have told us that tossing our clothing on the floor is “lazy” and will encourage us to make bad outfit choices. Our rooms are our kingdoms, and picking clothes normally involves picking through neatly folded piles, not throwing them on the ground like a preschooler plays with their blocks.
But after I got over my initial horror, I noticed something about these TikTokers’ outfits: They were cute. They weren’t matching cute, if that makes sense. They were interesting.
They were wearing clothes I would’ve never paired together because, well, I’ve been trained my whole life not to do that! So I called up Sarah Dumais, a psychology lecturer at Boston University who specializes in consumer psychology. “This idea of throwing every item you own on the floor and mixing and matching in a creative way? We’ve been trained for the last however many years to have capsule wardrobes and wear as little as possible,” she explained. “So I think this is people doing fashion fingerpainting.” Hmm.
She actually made sense. It wasn’t until I started my career and became a “real adult” that I even learned how to dress for the office. Since then, I’ve spent nearly a decade thinking about clothing as something purely functional.
Will this blouse hold up during a day of client meetings and after-work drinks? Can I wear these jeans twice before my admin notices? Every piece of clothing I own has been carefully curated, but mostly based on whether or not they’d help me succeed at work.
There wasn’t much room for play. And so, for science, I decided I had to try it. Saturday morning came and I stood in front of my closet dreadfully.
Pun intended. Like I was about to crack open a safe and reveal a quadruple murderer’s stolen jewels hidden inside my shins studs. But I took a deep breath and started pulling.
That blouse I spent way too much money on at Equipment? Cheque. That vintage Levi’s jacket I thrifted and adore?
Cheque. Cashmere jumper I only wear on Sundays? Cheque.
The midi skirt that always makes me feel artsy? Cheque. Shoes I forgot I owned because they’re shoved so far to the back of my closet?
DOUBLE CHEQUE. Laying the pieces out in a pile on my bedroom floor felt naughty. Watching myself dump out half my closet made me feel like I was caught sneaking peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon straight into my mouth.
It was wrong, but good wrong. My inner-control-freak was spiraling but I chuckled and thought, Why the hell not? Rolling around on the ground in my clothing wasn’t nearly as glamorous as TikTok made it out to be.
Sure, teenagers can bounce around like clumsy ballerinas ripping through their clothes, but I fell over trousers. A lot. My cat thought this was the funniest thing and spent the next 45 minutes stalking my ankles while I tried to build my outfit, occasionally shredding clothing as she literally jumped down my shirt.
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And before I knew it, Duchess had torn off a chunk of my favourite tank top and run away with it like her life depended on it. Adulting. But here’s the thing: Once I stopped separating trousers from tops, jackets from coats, special occasion from workout gear, everything just sort of became clothing.
It was clothes-versus-clothes in my mind, as opposed to themental divisions I typically use to dress myself. I threw together pieces I would’ve never, in a million years, considered wearing together. Who wears vintage band tees with good silk midi skirts?
Girlfiner. Oversized blazers with sundresses? Wait…yeah, that kind of works if I’m running errands and feeling messy!
Suddenly, my brain went from “Oh, I have a blazer, what do I wear with my blazer?” To “Oh, I have a blazer. And these trousers. And this silk top.
And trainers. And jewellery. LET’S DO THIS.” By building a wardrobe-inspired junkyard out of my clothes, I’d essentially thrown myself off of whatever fashion cruise ship I’d inadvertently boarded years ago.
I stopped thinking about what I “should” wear and started thinking about what I felt like wearing. Kind of like when you take a new street route home and suddenly notice a tiny coffee shop in your neighbourhood you didn’t realise was there for the past decade. To see if others felt similarly, I asked five friends to participate in the outfit pile experiment.
Half of them hated it. My consultant friend Jake spent 20 minutes “messing around” and ended up wearing the same wrinkled button-down and khakis he wears to work every day. But my other friend Marcus, who lives with me and is basically a wardrobe weirdo, created “the best outfit of the year” combining a vintage women’s blazer he’d thrifted (but was too scared to wear) with items he already loved.
Even Lisa,* who works in financial services and only owns black, white, and beige clothing because “why buy more when these will match anything?” surprised herself by throwing on a neon pink scarf she received as a gift but forgot she owned in her pile. These days, TikTokers have taken the challenge one step further: themed outfit piles, couples doing each other’s outfit piles, people creating entire games centred around the challenge. It’s truly developed a cult-like following at this point, which I’m strangely kind of proud to have helped proliferate.
Sure, it’ll die out in a few months when the next big trend comes along. But seriously, where else can you actively watch a language being created in real time and understand every word of it? Honestly, I think the obsession with making cute outfits out of clothing piles is the rebound effect from years of people being told there’s a “right” way to get dressed.
Algorithms showing us what to buy. Influencers shame-teaching us the “basics” we need for our capsule wardrobes. Marie Kondo shaming us into closets of 12 items of clothing or less.
Maybe we’re just bored of having someone tell us how to dress ourselves. And honestly? Why not have fun with it?
Yeah, there’s privilege involved in the ability to throw all your clothes on the floor. Not everyone has that many clothes to make an actual “pile,” let alone the space to spread out and get funky in their bedroom. But maybe questioning the “norms” of how we get dressed is a good thing.
Especially when it forces you to actually try things in your closet you’ve been ignoring for months. Look, I’m not abandoning my well-constructed closets for a pile of clothing every time I get dressed. Nope.
Not me. I dust off the king-sized clothes avalanche in my bedroom and rifle through it like everyone else.
But when I’m feeling uninspired, I’ll grab eight random pieces I know I haven’t worn in a while from my closet and dump them on my bed.
Force myself to be creative.
Pile-lite, if you will. It also made me realise I was organising my closet all wrong.
Segregating my clothing by too many qualifiers was actually preventing me from coming up with fun outfits. That silk blouse shouldn’t be hanging next to that casual Kenzo tee, my brain said. But when they were both in a pile on my bedroom floor, I suddenly wanted to pair them together and actually do it.
Will the great outfit pile trend of ’23 change the way we get dressed forever? No. It’s not practical for most people to bounce around their homes groaning like gymnasts every time they need to get dressed.
And, god forbid, anything delicates. You’ll rip your favourite silk blouse and then have to explain wrinkle holes to your dry cleaner. But as an exercise in breaking out of your own dressing routine?
Maybe let your clothes autumn where they may…literally. *Name has been changed.
