MARIE QUEEN OF CLEAN

This unassuming Japanese superstar has built a career out of being spick-and-span.

If you’re not familiar with Marie Kondo, she is the creator of the KonMari Method and the ‘Tidying Up Queen’. She has a show on Netflix, and four books on organising and decluttering. Her basic philosophy is to only keep items that “spark joy” for you, and her reality program involves helping people declutter their home – starting with clothes, then books, paper and KOMONO (miscellaneous stuff) before you tackle sentimental items. Kondo’s goal is to help people get rid of the excess stuff in their lives, hopefully leading to a less stressful life.

Whether or not you subscribe to the view that flinging out your old underwear and baked-on frying pans with abandon will bring you inner peace, charity shops are despairing at the deluge of broken goods and rubbish landing on their doorsteps. Lifeline Australia says that half its stores nationwide are not accepting donations because they are at capacity. According to War on Waste, the waste we generate in Australia is growing at twice the rate of our population. SCRgroup, a clothing reuse and recycling service, says of the 27kg of new clothing purchased every year per person, 23kg is thrown away. And in Kondo’s first book, The Life- Changing Magic of Tidying Up, she suggested we need to buy less – which would reduce the need to tidy up down the track. As Henry David Thoreau once said, “Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but religiously follows the new.” Best get back to that underwear drawer.