The influencers have started to promise me that they know how to get me to stop shopping: I just have to enter every garment of clothing I own into an app, one by one. “I digitally cataloged my ENTIRE wardrobe,” they swear on videos, routinely pulling in hundreds of thousands of views.
The selling point of these apps (Indyx, Whering, ACloset, OpenWardrobe, and many more) is seductive; they promise to help users understand exactly what they already own so that they shop less. In theory, that means saving money — and slowing the steady damage the fashion industry is wrecking on our planet.
“Collectively, we are buying and then throwing away more than ever before,” Indyx warned on its website, before reciting dire statistics about how many clothes are produced now and how many of them end up in landfills. Luckily, it said, “We’re here to break the cycle.”
That idea appealed to me. I am not a fashionista, but I enjoy clothes enough to buy more than I really need, despite what I know about fashion’s impact on the planet. My intellectual understanding of climate change can’t always stop me from clicking “add to cart” when I see a dashing pair of wide-legged trousers, even though there’s a hard limit on the number of times a person can wear wide-legged trousers in one week.
Still, to make these apps work, you have to individually enter photos of everything you own now and everything you buy in the future, which sounds like a tedious, laborious process. (You can take the photos yourself or hunt down product pictures from the brand.) And because so many influencers are pushing this, it’s hard to tell how life-changing it really is and how much is just marketing speak and hype. So, I decided to test one of these apps — Indyx — for you. I also talked to wardrobe cataloging enthusiasts and experts on sustainable consumption to see what I could learn from them. I wanted to know: Could cataloging our wardrobes actually make us shop less? And, if it can, would it be worth the effort?
- Experts estimate the fashion industry accounts for between 2 to 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
- Wardrobe cataloging apps are presented as a strategy for buying fewer clothes, helping to minimize fashion’s impact on the planet.
- Some people find these apps to be a constructive way to redirect their shopping energy.
- But the initial setup process for the apps is highly labor intensive, and they require constant tending over time.
- Wardrobe apps may be right for you if you find yourself reflexively browsing clothes in your spare time, and you want to direct that impulse elsewhere.
- They may be wrong for you if the idea of photographing everything you own individually fills you with a powerful dread.
“There’s only one solution to the mess that we find ourselves in: buying less”
Wardrobe cataloging apps did not always advertise themselves as being good for the planet.
In 2023, the journalist Avery Trufelman investigated the nascent wardrobe cataloging app industry for her podcast series Articles of Interest. She found that a lot of the apps flopped. The issue was the business model, which was based on revenue generated from affiliate links. The idea was that people would click to purchase items they saw within the apps, and the company would take a cut of each sale. But when the apps were well designed, Trufelman reported, users felt less of a need to buy more clothes.
The current generation of wardrobe cataloging app developers has turned this from a bug into a feature. They now market their wares as the solution to overshopping, and they make their money by charging for either the app itself or for its extra content. (Indyx itself is free, but you have to pay a $75 yearly subscription for its enhanced features.)
What the marketing gets right is that the fast fashion problem is real. “Anywhere from two to 10 percent of our global greenhouse gas emissions are associated with fashion,” said Brie Berry, assistant professor of environment and sustainability at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania.
Fashion’s emissions are generated by the factories that manufacture clothing (the water and the fertilizers for growing cotton, the oil for developing synthetics) and the consumers who wear these garments (the slow shed of microplastics from yoga pants, the water and the energy consumed by washing and drying). When we get rid of old clothes, much of it ends up in landfills or incinerated. By some estimates, the fashion industry contributes more to climate change than the aviation industry.
“There’s only one solution to the mess that we find ourselves in: buying less,” said Katia Dayan Vladimirova, a researcher whose consulting firm Post Growth Fashion focuses on alternatives to growth in the fashion system.
To buy less, it helps most people to know what they already own, said Alyssa Beltempo, a slow-fashion content creator and educator. Beltempo makes videos guiding viewers through the process of “shopping their own closets” to help them buy less stuff, but she’s found in her work that a lot of people aren’t clear on the contents of those closets. Because of that confusion, they end up buying stuff they don’t need.
That’s where cataloging can be helpful, Beltempo said. “These apps reduce that hurdle of not seeing the clothes you have,” she said.
Personally, what I was looking for wasn’t enhanced clarity so much as a barrier. I wanted to erect a wall between my desire to own a new piece of clothing and the click of the buy button. A searchable, scannable lookbook of everything I owned, I thought, might well do the trick.
How to catalog every piece of clothing you own
Indyx has been hyping up its new AI feature, which transforms a picture of a garment hanging limply off a hanger into a neat flat lay photo. It sped the process up, but it was also buggy; it garbled text on the front of T-shirts, misread colors, and had a tendency to interpret loose threads as ornamental bows while leaving wrinkles (I am not an ironer) untouched.
I was also concerned that the process inserted AI, with its insatiable need for water and energy, into a project sold as a way of reducing my environmental impact. But the sustainability experts I spoke to were both skeptical that this sort of light AI use was such a big deal.
“Taking photos and then asking an app to think about how to arrange your clothing into outfits is probably one of the lighter uses of AI that I could imagine,” Berry said. Vladimirova agreed that using AI for this task is unlikely to be as bad for the planet as buying even one new garment. “But then, there is also no proven causality between using this app and reducing overconsumption,” she added as a caveat.
It’s possible to input your clothes into Indyx without using the AI feature, but the truth is: I don’t know that I could have made myself go through with the whole rigamarole without it. I ran out of free AI processing about 80 percent of the way through and, overwhelmed at the thought of having to do my own flat lays, paid $75 to buy more without hesitating.
All told, it took me about five hours and many old episodes of Top Chef to photograph my summer clothes, not including shoes, jewelry, or accessories. My time spent cataloging did not include the process of entering additional data about each garment (including its initial cost, its fiber composition, where I bought it), a herculean task that I have been tackling much more slowly than the initial entry process.
Doing the shoot properly would have taken longer. Angela Goodman, a 51-year-old marketer from Seattle with a background in product photography, says she ran her own cataloging session like a pro shoot, using art lights and folding and refolding each garment to lie perfectly. It took her 10 hours spread out over multiple weeks.
As an exercise, photographing every piece of clothing I owned was clarifying, although not significantly more clarifying than going through it Marie Kondo-style. It left me with a small donation pile of items I no longer wanted and a fretful awareness that I own too many white T-shirts. In theory, that’s the kind of insight a wardrobe cataloging app produces by the spade.
“I’m not shopping. I’m building.”
Vladimirova, the sustainability consultant, said that, even though she has a better idea than most of how destructive the fashion industry is, she struggles with over-shopping. She thinks a lot about why people buy so many clothes; her best guess is that it’s a way to self-soothe.
“A lot of consumption happens in the evening when we feel vulnerable and tired, and we’re trying to reward ourselves with this shot of dopamine,” she said. For some people, these apps can replace the dopamine hit that comes from scrolling through other people’s outfit photos with the dopamine hit of scrolling through your own clothes, neatly folded and filtered until they look like aspirational fashion inspo.
Part of the satisfaction here is the infographics. After you’ve given Indyx all your fashion data, the app crunches your numbers and tells users how much you’ve bought new versus secondhand, as well as the share of natural fibers as opposed to synthetics in your closet, so that you can track the environmental impact of your shopping habits. (Synthetics tend to have a higher carbon footprint than natural fibers.) It tells you what their cost per wear is on each item to help you track which expensive garment was worth the splurge and which was a waste of money. Users can also plan outfits. You can share your wardrobe with stylists who will plan the outfits for you (on Indyx, the service ranges from $25 a month to “the low hundreds”). It’s like playing paper dolls with your own wardrobe.
For Goodman, the former product photographer, all this data takes the place of recreational shopping. She describes getting a marketing email from one of her favorite brands about a sale. After a quick scroll through their offerings, she found that she felt no urge to buy.
“I was like, ‘I do not need more clothes. I’m going to go update my Indyx, because I’m a couple of weeks behind,’” she said. She started inputting the last few outfits she’d worn into one of the Indyx services that is supposed to allow users to track their patterns and see which clothes they actually wear and what they like in an outfit. “I’m playing with clothes,” she said. “But, like, I’m not shopping. I’m, you know, building.”
Over time, all this data is supposed to inform future shopping choices. “There is something very clear about seeing two pieces that you’ve owned for the same amount of time — one that you’ve worn 57 times and one that you’ve worn twice,” said Alexandra, a 29-year-old consultant in Northern Virginia who requested her last name be withheld. She thinks tracking her clothes has given her “a little bit less buyer’s remorse.”
Cataloging your wardrobe can’t prevent a compulsive need to buy, though.
“I don’t think it cured me of my undiagnosed shopping addiction,” Alexandra said. “You can very quickly go from ‘I’m cataloging what I have’ to ‘I’m seeing a bunch of gaps in my wardrobe that I should fill immediately.’”
“There just wasn’t incentive anymore”
The main question I had about these apps was whether, with such a labor-intensive process, there comes a time when the juice is no longer worth the squeeze.
Alexandra says that she gradually stopped using her wardrobe app last year, after she moved out of her own apartment and back into her family’s suburban house in the midst of a career transition.
“I was separated from a lot of my belongings for a very long time, and then, as I started to get things back, it didn’t feel worth the effort anymore,” she said. Who was she going to see in one of her curated outfits? “My job’s on a computer. When I leave the house, I go to the grocery store and the pharmacy and the bookstore,” she said. “There just wasn’t incentive anymore, compared to when I was closer to the city and doing things more regularly.”
Beltempo, the slow fashion content creator, said she doesn’t bother to add every new purchase to her own catalog.
“I really use it more for my packing,” she said. Before she travels, she makes a list of likely candidates for her suitcase and enters them into the app. “And then, I’ll play, and I’ll make outfits,” she says.
Vladimirova, the sustainable consumption researcher struggling with overshopping, gave the apps a spin. She tried three of them and found that she was only able to stick with each one for a matter of months. “In the beginning, when the novelty of the app is there, it’s very satisfying,” she said. “It records your outfits in vivid colors. It can crop out the ugly background and keep it very neat, create fancy capsules. They look so lovely.”
But over time, they all began to bore her. “And now, I forget to update when I buy something new — usually from secondhand sources — and it kind of lost its meaning for me,” she said. “But the premise is good!”
My own experience seems to be closest to Vladimirova’s. I keep having to remind myself to enter my outfits into Indyx. Every time I put on a piece of clothing, I think with dread, “Oh god, if I don’t look up how much I paid for this, I’ll never know my cost per wear and, then, what’s the point?” I keep giving my shoes guilty looks and thinking about how I should really photograph and catalog them — if I’m doing this right.
“It’s a project,” said Lauren Ludwig, a 41-year-old who has been using her wardrobe apps for the past three years. “But it’s a fun one for someone who enjoys clothing.”
Indyx and its brethren are slick, and their infographics are beautiful. For dedicated wardrobe hobbyists, they’re probably a great option. But for most people who just want to cut down on their clothes shopping, it’s hard to say that the $75 annual subscription is worth it. The free version will give you the same paper doll effect if you are willing to do your own flat lays, or you can recreate it by dragging phone camera pictures of your clothes onto a Google Slides deck.
If you find, as Vladimirova theorized, that you shop when you don’t feel good, you can try replacing that habit with a “dopamine menu” of small acts that bring you joy, like hugging a pet, doing a puzzle, or going for a walk. And if your closet is filled with brand new clothes you never wear, you’re racking up debt buying clothes, or you just have the nagging sense that your shopping has spiraled completely out of control, therapy is not a bad idea.
Personally, I found that Indyx could not give me what I really crave when I want to play with clothes: the understanding of the way fabric drapes against my body, the knowledge of its texture against my skin. There is no substitution for the slow analog process of walking into my closet, touching my clothes with my human hands, and learning with my five senses that what I have is already enough.
