I tracked everything I wore in 2025. Was it worth it?

Since 2023, I’ve been using the Indyx mobile app to catalogue items in my wardrobe. Over the years I’ve tried quite a few different wardrobe cataloguing apps, but Indyx is the one that stuck, and for one big reason: it is the only wardrobe cataloguing app I’ve tried that doesn’t try to encourage you to buy more stuff at every opportunity. This is echoed in Indyx’s core principle, taken from their website home page:

The fashion industry has trained us to think that the only way to feel stylish is to buy something new. Indyx breaks that fast-fashion cycle by celebrating the closet you have and teaching you how to shop smarter for things you love and will actually wear.

Prior to 2025, I had only used Indyx to catalog my wardrobe and keep track of everything I owned. But I didn’t really understand how I utilised my wardrobe, and whether everything I had was serving me. And so, on 1st January 2025 I decided to start tracking every single item and outfit I wore for the entire year to see what secrets it would unfold.

My tracking goals

I love my clothes, and I love fashion as a vehicle for self-expression and exploration. But, since my teenage years I have had the tendency to impulse-buy individual items on a whim without any thought to how wearable those items are with the rest of my wardrobe. I also have a track record of impulsively reinventing myself through the vehicle of clothing over and over again, which manifests in selling most of my current wardrobe and purchasing new or second-hand things to replace them in a completely different style. I’ve experienced this cycle a number of times in my adult life. More sensible people will ensure that new purchases can be worn with existing items before they hand over their hard-earned money, but I was never really a sensible shopper. I wanted beautiful things, regardless, and I wanted them now.

With all that said, my goals with regards to tracking everything I wore in 2025 were an attempt to curb this cycle of behaviour, and address three main goals:

• I wanted to buy less

• I wanted to wear more of what I had

• I wanted to understand how I utilised my wardrobe

Adding items and oufits to the app

Adding items to the Indyx app is pretty straightforward. Either upload an image or take a photo of an item laying flat, and the app will remove the background to make it look as good as possible. I prefer to add official product images to the app, because they look better all lined up together, but where I couldn’t find a flat-lay official product image, I took a photo (I still don’t like how these look).

When you add an item, there are a bunch of other optional details you can fill in, such as whether the item was second hand, the date you acquired it, colours, tags, and the price you paid. When you add a price, Indyx calculates the “cost per wear” based on how many times you wore an item. When using the app for the first time in 2023 and cataloguing all items, I wasn’t often sure of the purchase dates, so I opted not to add any dates for any of the items, which is why the image below states that I wore these boots 44 times in 0 days. An improvement I would like to see here is for the acquired date to fall back to the date the item was created in the app.

All of this cataloguing is quite a lot of admin, and I the only thing I have found useful is how many times I wore each item. I never need to filter items by colour, for example, because most of my items are black.

All items are available to view on the main screen, where you can search and filter items or customise the view (which is behind an Insider subscription, for some reason). You can also create collections of items, which have been really useful when deciding what to pack without looking through your wardrobe for all the work travel I did in 2025.

You add outfits in a separate area of the app, and you can arrange and resize items to your liking on the canvas.

How tracking works

You can track items and/or outfits you wear by clicking on the calendar icon at the top right of the main screen, clicking on the day, and selecting items and outfits. You can also add a selfie of your outfit each day, but I didn’t decide it was useful for me; it was also a little annoying to have to skip the mandatory selfie screen each day. Given you may add a number of outfits or items per day, you can also choose a specific item or outfit to act as the cover image for the calendar view.

What I tracked

Given I work from home and sometimes don’t leave the house in a day, I added a base outfit first thing in the morning, without any accessories such as shoes or outerwear. I always wear a necklace, but I didn’t add jewellery to the outfits to avoid having to create a whole separate outfit if I decided to wear a different necklace with the same base outfit one day.

Alongside the base outfit, I added other single items such as shoes, coats and jewellery as I wore them on any particular day. Most days I would select an existing outfit or create a new outfit after I’d got dressed, and as I got ready to leave the house, I would make sure I added the coat, shoes, bag or any other accessory that I decided to wear. When I went out-out, such as for a special occasion or travel for a work trip, I tracked the full outfit including all accessories, shoes and outerwear. I’m not sure of this logic or why I chose to do it this way.

All of this admin was inconvenient at first, but it quickly became muscle memory to keep track of everything as I wore it. The only thing I didn’t keep track of were gym/yoga outfits, but I did keep track of when I got changed during the day, such as when I changed into more comfortable clothes such as hoodies and tracksuit bottoms in the evening after work.

What I learned

Honestly, the only new thing I learned was the total estimated cost of my wardrobe, which I had been ignoring for a very long time. Given this number accumulated over many years, however, I’m not even sure it’s that important.

Was it worth it?

We only have so much time in a day. If I added up all the time I spent clicking around in Indyx to catalogue clothing, finding a good official flat lay product image on The Internet and adding all the required meta information to each item, putting together outfits every morning that didn’t already exist, and cataloguing items each time I put on a jacket and shoes to leave the house or when I put my lounge clothes on after work, maybe I could have read a whole book, or, you know, just had a little bit more time to relax in a day.

Did I buy less?

Qualitatively, I feel like I curbed my impulsive buying somewhat. One of the main catalysts for this was that when I found something I liked, I could look through the app to see if I had something similar, and I usually did, so I didn’t buy the new thing. Also, at the end of December, I did my six-monthly wardrobe spring clean, where I take everything out, decide if items are still serving me, give the wardrobe a vacuum to get rid of the accumulated dust, and put it all back in again. Usually, my bi-annual clear outs involve a lot of selling and donating, but this time, I only wanted to get rid of one oversized sweatshirt (because it really wasn’t the right colour for me, and it was really very too big), which I actually just gave to my husband.

Quantitively, the data also shows good results in the area. Given I’ve been tracking the cost of each item in the app since 2023, the data shows in 2025, I spent 45% less than in 2024, and 20% less than in 2023. Whether this is a result of tracking in the app, a result of wanting to be more intentional in how I curate my wardrobe, or a bit of both, is unclear.

Did I wear more?

I didn’t realise this in 2025, but I actually feel like I have more flexibility in what I wear since I stopped tracking on 1st January 2026. Looking back, I feel like I wore less of my wardrobe over the year, or at least fewer combinations of items. If I was in a rush and I didn’t have the time to create a new outfit in the app, I would instead reach for an outfit that already existed in the app so I could assign it to the day in a couple of clicks, rather than wear what I actually wanted to wear. In hindsight, tracking everything constrained my creativity and expression a little.

Do I understand how I utilised my wardrobe?

As is seemingly tradition for many tech companies these days, Indyx provided a “wrapped” at the end of 2025, which consisted of a few slides of how you used your wardrobe. At the time of writing I cannot access my wrapped again, but all I can remember is that I wore around 2% of all possible 11k+ outfit combinations (I’m not sure how this is calculated but surely I don’t possess 11k+ sensible outfit combinations), and that my most worn item is my black belt, which I wore 118 times since I bought it in on sale in summer 2025, and it came in at 31p per wear.

With regards to usage tracking, which you only have access to with an Insider subscription (which is currently £60 a year), the data hasn’t proved that useful. This is mainly because it doesn’t provide any actionable insights, and I’m not sure that it can. The composition data is just data and I’m sure is pretty representative of any standard wardrobe.

The utilisation statistics are encouraging, though. Indyx describes (in the question mark tooltip) how utilisation is calculated: “Items that were logged to your calendar at least once in the defined period divided by the total number of items in your wardrobe. A higher % means that you’re actively wearing more of your wardrobe.” According to this data, I wore 90% of my wardrobe in 2025, which, despite not wearing things because I couldn’t be bothered to log them to the app, and feeling like I didn’t wear as much of my wardrobe, is actually pretty good going.

Final thoughts

I feel pretty accomplished in that I achieved my goal of tracking everything for a whole year, that I spent less on clothes in 2025, and that I wore 90% of my wardrobe during the year. Again, I’m not sure than the latter two achievements are entirely related to tracking everything in Indyx, but it probably was contributing a factor.

Would I do something like this again? Probably not. For the last 11 days, I’ve felt so free not having to track everything in the app, but I also can't help feeling like I’ve forgotten to do something throughout the day, given tracking items became such a big part of my daily routine in 2025.

All in all, I think I can say that I achieved my wardrobe-related goals of 2025. I bought less, I wore more (even though it didn’t feel like it), and I understood how I used my wardrobe, even if the data didn’t give me any actionable insights.