A Wardrobe Without A Home

Packing For Life As a Nomad

I’m going nomad! Or, I guess the newer, trendier term for it would be “slow-mad” (i.e., moving slowly from place to place rather than hopping constantly). In a few days following this post, I’ll be on my way to Paris to ring in the new year before traveling onward through Europe. I’ve been emptying my apartment, cancelling all my exorbitantly expensive subscriptions—like Los Angeles rent and US health insurance— and planning to—and this will likely come as a surprise—leave the country for the first time ever, for the entirety of 2026. All that’s left is, of course, figuring out my wardrobe…

Or, it would be, if I hadn’t been taking care of it over the course of this entire year.

You see, I’ve been planning and plotting this major move since late 2024, and y’all have been along for the ride the whole time, from when I talked about how to start your wardrobe over and how to focus your wardrobe building; to when I encouraged you to keep an outfit/wardrobe journal (like I have for the past two years) in order to hone in on what you love to wear and what you actually need; to talking about how to determine where to spend your money as I budgeted for my new additions; and, finally, to when I first mentioned I’d be making a big move and how I was shopping to prepare.

Throughout this process, I have downsized my wardrobe from nearly 300 items to less than a quarter of that (not including my jewelry), planned over 80 outfits (and counting), and packed essentially my entire life into two suitcases. And now, I feel qualified to tell you how to do so, too.

This advice will be most useful for those who are also planning on leaving their home country semi-permanently to travel the world in the near future, but, you could also think of it as another way to approach refining your capsule wardrobe or, at the very least, packing for an extended trip.

I’m going to assume, if you’re reading this, that you’d like your style to be at the forefront, so, your first task is to figure out what that is. I taught you how to pull the capsule out of your existing wardrobe by finding what’s essentially your uniform—something I did and have been wearing non-stop for the past few months. From there, you can take your uniform—or your basic outfit formula—and distill it to its most basic form. What matters most to you? Is it your accessories? Lots of color? Do you just wanna wear fun pants everyday? Do you want to get away with wearing as little literal fabric as possible? What’s the primary outfit formula you’re building around? That’s your foundation. What’s the focal point? That’s the non-negotiable. With that framework in place, you can dig into what I consider the three main stress points for creating a wardrobe that’s meant to travel with you indefinitely: weather, the extras, and shoes.

Climate Challenges

When figuring out how on earth I was going to pack for a year of travel, my first step was figuring out where I’d want to go based on my (ideal) extremes. What temperatures and conditions am I actually comfortable with? How do I need to dress for less optimal conditions like rain? With this in mind, I was able to come up with ways to adapt my go-to formula in ways that still align with how I want to look and (most importantly) how I want to feel.