Moving is extra stressful when you are a fashionista with a mountain of clothes and accessories

I recently moved. Unless you cling to your adult umbilical cord and live with mum and dad, it’s something you’ve likely endured. The process can be traumatic but also exciting, and a lot of work.

Essentially you’re unending your life, untethering from a familiar moor to a new and presumably nice dock. My new flat is great, but it doesn’t have any built-in closet or storage. I knew I would have to buy or create some wardrobe space but that fell in priority among more urgent things I needed to do in the immediate move.

Given the importance of fashion in my life, not to mention the amount of shoes and clothes I’ve amassed, this massive couture migration was my biggest stress.

First, there was the purge. There are simply not enough boxes in Hong Kong to hold my mountain of dresses, garments and apparel. As much as I dreaded it, I knew I had to part with some items. In the end, it was a painful series of Sophie’s choices to whittle Everest down to Kilimanjaro.

The actual packing was equally monumental. It’s no small task to carefully fold, bag and categorise everything. I should have hired an extra army of maids to help. The sweaty muscular movers gruffly threw my kitchen utensils into boxes all they wanted, but they were not permitted to lay one hand on anything from Milan or Paris.

I should have hired a proper wardrobe organiser. My stylist told me about this new kind of specialist who helps people declutter (throw away) and rearrange closets into functional storage. It’s sartorial logistics.

Alas, I thought I knew I my clothes better than anyone and paid the price in fashion duress. Especially difficult to move were the gowns. I wish that I had a few of those mobile clothes racks from fashion shows. I saw some at a recent private viewing, and actually envied the rack and forgot about the dresses.

Because the new place doesn’t have a ready closet, the first few days after the move were a frustrating mess of dressing dysfunction. The perfectionist in me wanted to find the ideal cabinet, with drawers exactly as I wanted them, to fit everything without wasting an inch of space, and to have enough sectional compartments so that I could separate everything according to season, occasion and whether it matched. Rome wasn’t built in a day and my dream walk-in closet will take even longer to achieve.

That means living out of cardboard boxes for a while longer, an existence I will never get used to. Every morning it is like searching for matching needles in a fashion haystack.