Naperville, IL — Derek Poulen, 34, says he completed his minimalist journey last spring when he finally let go of everything that didn't serve him — everything, that is, except for the forty-seven garments he now maintains in a temperature-controlled second bedroom he refers to, without irony, as "the void."

The wardrobe, which Poulen describes as a "tightly edited capsule," spans what a casual observer might characterize as gray, and what Poulen characterizes as ash, slate, pewter, storm, bone shadow, cool greige, warm greige, greige with intentions, and "the one that's basically white but spiritually gray."

"The whole point is to eliminate decision fatigue," said Poulen, consulting a laminated flowchart he designed over a long weekend in February. "Now when I get dressed, I simply follow the chart."

The chart has eleven branches.

"Owning fewer things means each thing must be perfect. That's why I needed the heather-smoke crewneck and the heather-dusk crewneck. They are not the same."

According to Poulen, the project began three years ago after he read a book about owning fewer than one hundred possessions, then read six more books about owning fewer than one hundred possessions, then purchased tasteful minimalist shelving to display them.

The capsule itself has grown methodically. A certified silk-linen blend blazer in "French slate" was added last autumn to bridge what Poulen identified as a critical gap between his cool-weather and transitional-weather quadrants. Earlier this year, a textured gunmetal mock-neck addressed what he called "the Thursday problem."

Dr. Flannery Oast, Associate Chair of Aspirational Consumer Behavior at the Whitmore-Delacey Institute for Lifestyle Studies, said the phenomenon is well documented.

"The capsule wardrobe has become a consumption vehicle disguised as a consumption cure," Dr. Oast explained. "The minimalist aesthetic is very forgiving in this regard, because every new item looks, to the untrained eye, exactly like every other item the person already owns. The social accountability mechanism simply does not fire."

Poulen has organized his collection using a color-coded binder of paint-chip swatches sourced from three different hardware stores, cross-referenced against a spreadsheet that tracks cost-per-wear projections for each item. Currently, his most-worn piece — a heather-smoke ribbed tee — has achieved a cost-per-wear of $1.14. His least-worn piece, a raw-hem wide-leg trouser in "industrial dusk," stands at $218.

He describes this as "almost there."

Poulen maintains that he could, at any time, pare the collection down further. He has a shortlist of eight candidates for removal, which he revisits quarterly and from which no item has yet been removed.

"Minimalism isn't a destination," he said, refolding a charcoal merino the exact same way he had just folded it. "It's a practice."

He is currently researching a forty-eighth piece: a lightweight technical jacket in a color the brand describes as "absence."