Quality isn’t just what we put into something, if it was then Saudi princes and Russian oligarchs would be our arbiters of style. In fact, quality is as much about the the process of refinement, the deliberate choices made about what to keep in and what to leave out and this extends to our wardrobes. I always like to think about it in terms of travel, if I had to take only a duffle bag with me of my best items what would I leave out, and why? You can extend the scenario: a slightly larger bag, what makes the cut now? I had already taken this approach to my wardrobe and it was fairly compact but it was the chance purchase of Marie Kondo’s slim volume on organisation “The Life Changing Magic of Tidying” (US link) that really drove me to scale back. The titles a bit much and I’m not one for self help normally but a striking aspect of the book was how it deconstructed even a hardened hoarders arguments.