A wardrobe is a tall piece of furniture, like a cabinet with doors, used for storing clothes. Before built-in closets became common in houses, people hung their coats, dresses, and suits inside a wardrobe. Many wardrobes have a rod for hanging clothes on one side and shelves or drawers on the other. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lucy discovers the magical land of Narnia by stepping through the back of an old wardrobe in a spare room.

The word also means all the clothes a person owns. When someone says “I need to update my wardrobe,” they mean they want to buy new clothes or replace old ones. Actors and performers have a wardrobe department that provides and manages all the costumes for a show. A wardrobe malfunction is when something goes wrong with someone's clothing, like a zipper breaking or a button popping off at an inconvenient moment.

In British English, people often use wardrobe the way Americans say closet, so a British child might say “I hung my coat in the wardrobe,” where an American child would say “I hung my coat in the closet.”