The Right Way to Roll up and Store Your Belts

Don't lose your head trying to keep your pants up.

The Right Way to Roll up and Store Your Belts

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A collection of colorful belts

Credit: Egorov Igor / Shutterstock.com


Slowly but surely, I'm going to revolutionize your closet. From shoes to bags, there are so many accessories to collect and flaunt, but they really do take up a ton of space, so finding solutions for storing every kind of adornment should be a priority for anyone living a fashion forward lifestyle.

But even if you're not, and you don't have a closet overflowing with purses and footwear, you almost certainly have a small (or not so small) collection of belts. Here's a good way to organize it.

How to roll your belts for storage so they won't come undone

Until I saw the following technique floating around TikTok, I was storing my belts by hanging them over the handle on my closet door. This is wrong. They were always falling off, dragged down by the weight of the buckle on one end—and the weight of said buckle can actually stretch and damage more delicate belts over time. You could get some hooks and hang all your belts up somewhere by the buckle, but that takes up wall space. Instead,you should be rolling your belts to help them maintain their shape.

But it's hard to keep belts rolled up, right? They just keep coming undone, right? Not if you try this method that's been trending on social media:

Using the buckle for stability, you thread the belt backward through it and pull it almost all the way through, creating a small hole. Then, start rolling up the belt from the other side, and stuff the resulting spiral into the hole you made. I tried this method out and found it to be easy to execute and effective at keeping my belts all wound up in an easy-to-stack shape. But why stop there?

Belts hanging and belts folded up

Before (bad) vs. after (good) Credit: Lindsey Ellefson

How to store all your belts

You can tuck your newly-miniaturized belts in a stack on a shelf, in a drawer, or in a box—I recommend a small one that will help keep them organized and secure, like this one:

But I prefer another method I recently encountered, because I think there's value in making it easy to see all your options when you're picking out what to wear. So instead, stack your belts on a paper towel holder, like this one:

The little arm that's supposed to secure the paper towels to the roll will hold the belts in place and keep them rolled up, and stacking them this way will give you a better sense of what you've got, and save you from digging through a box looking for that one specific belt.

Lindsey Ellefson

Lindsey Ellefson

Features Editor

Lindsey Ellefson is Lifehacker’s Features Editor. She currently covers study and productivity hacks, as well as household and digital decluttering, and oversees the freelancers on the sex and relationships beat. She spent most of her pre-Lifehacker career covering media and politics for outlets like Us Weekly, CNN, The Daily Dot, Mashable, Glamour, and InStyle. In recent years, her freelancing has focused on drug use and the overdose crisis, with pieces appearing in Vanity Fair, WIRED, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, and more. Her story for BuzzFeed News won the 2022 American Journalism Online award for Best Debunking of Fake News.

In addition to her journalism, Lindsey is a student at the NYU School of Global Public Health, where she is working toward her Master of Public Health and conducting research on media bias in reporting on substance use with the Opioid Policy Institute’s Reporting on Addiction initiative. She is also a Schwinn-certified spin class teacher. She won a 2023 Dunkin’ Donuts contest that earned her a year of free coffee. Lindsey lives in New York, NY.

Read Lindsey's full bio