I've never formally purged. I've throw out stuff I decided I didn't like (as in, "What the f*** was I thinking???"). And after I lost weight, I donated a lot of outfits to a theater group.
Although until I was 26, I was so "housing challenged" that I wasn't able to acquire anything worthy of purging in the first place.
I have gotten so disgusted with myself that I've boxed everything up and hidden them away in the attic or basement or a storage locker. The longest stretch was 6 months. But I knew enough not to make it permanent.
Oh ... my "failure to purge" isn't limited to dresses. I suspect there's packrat DNA in my family tree. I keep books. Magazines. Electronics. My last four computers. A big box of floppy disks. At least I did discard my old card decks and 9 track mag tapes, though. Most of them, anyway.