The Fashionable Man's Guide to Storing Clothes

Countless books and articles exist to tell you all about men's fashion and how to wear the clothes you have in your closet. Very few, however, discuss how to properly fix that same closet of yours. Aside from just wearing your clothes, a big part of good style is knowing how to care for your stuff, and that includes how you fix things in your closet. It might not sound like much, but improper storage can result in much more than a messy closet.

Hang It All
There's an age-old debate between hanging and folding the same items of clothing, and the answer for most men relies on a number of factors. There's practicality, convenience and accustomed practice, to name a few. For some items, though, the requirement to hang them up in your closet isn't something to be debated or negotiated; it simply has to be.

Suits and other formal sets fall into this hang-at-all-costs category for the simple reason that wrinkles and creases never go well with formal men's fashion. A hanger may not protect your most formal three-piece suit from 100% of wrinkles that it could get from a stay in the closet, but it (plus a garment bag) do the job fairly well. As much as possible, use a wood or velvet hanger that has some shape to the shoulders to support the jacket.

Pants and neckties should receive similar treatment because they should be as straight as if they were newly pressed when you put them. A simple hanger is best for any pair of pants instead of those clip or pincer types that create scrunches along the length. On the other hand, neckties have specialized hangers that let you hang multiple pieces in a small area. Regardless of the design, the point of the hanger is to let everything hang straight.

Returning to the Fold
And then there are those items that you usually find folded up and stored in the closets. Though you could hang many of these up on a hanger as well, the result is either small or even detrimental to your style pieces.

Observe how many men's boutiques prefer to keep their polo and tee shirts folded in piles on and around their displays. This is because these style pieces tend to keep their shape better when they're folded up and not left to sag down. It's especially true if you have a lot of the soft, cotton variety that tends to sag down after a while. Keeping such pieces folded up is the surest way to have those branches raise those prices.

Knits present a similar similar problem in that the fabric is inherently heavy. If you leave your knit fashion pieces hanging and subject to the force of gravity, chances are good that the heavier fabrics at the hem will pull down on the rest of the garden. The most likely result is that the whole piece itself gets all stretched and disproportionate after a couple of months. That's not exactly good style maintenance, regardless of your standards.

Small items like underwear, socks, handkerchiefs and pocket squares are ideally to be folded before storing in your closet. It's not really a question of them getting wrinkled as it is them taking up as little space as necessary. So long as you keep these small items in a space away from other pieces you're likely to dig through, they're going to be fairly safe from damage and wrinkling. Hanging them up will take much too much space.

One question that's yet to have a definitive answer is whether to hang or fold shirts. The first instinct is to hang them; after all, these are style pieces on which wrinkles don't look good. When you think about it, though, the difference between hanging and folding is marginal, and even traditional shirt makers like Charvet sell their wares folded.

As with laundry instructions and shoe care, there's a right way to do a lot of things in men's fashion, and there's a right way to do storage. Shirts might be a gray area in your closet, but it pays to think how you'll put every other item of clothing in there

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