Is the No New Clothes Challenge Worth It?

I’m not sure what to say.

“Oh Katie, what a cute shirt!  Where did you get it?”

“Oh thanks!  It’s from Ann Taylor Loft… umm… over two years ago.”

I keep thinking about how I should probably start buying more clothes again.  I don’t need new clothes.  So I stop and ask myself why I’m compelled to go buy some then.  And you know what I figure?  I think I should go buy more clothes because THAT’S WHAT PEOPLE DO.

“You can if you want, Katie,” Martin will say.

“But what do we need?”

“Nothing,” we’ll say in unison.

I had an hour to kill while Martin was meeting someone from The University of Colorado Boulder on our way to Germany a month ago.  So I did what any girl would do.  I went to the mall.  I went into a place – I think it was called Nordstrom Rack.  Is that right?  I was coming from Carhartts land and bracing for jetlag, so don’t get to tough on me.

I was floored by all of the women pushing grocery carts of clothes to the dressing room.  I mean, they just had clothes and clothes.  Where they buying them all?  According to author and activist Elisabeth Cline, we are.  She discovered that:

The average American woman purchases 60 pieces of brand new clothing every year.

She describes how the quality of our clothing has plummeted.  (Isn’t that just exactly what our grandmas keep complaining?)  We’re needing bigger closets.  We’re chasing trends.

We’re feeling inadequate.

Why have we let ourselves feel this way?  How do you suppose clothes shopping has become a hobby?

Elisabeth says:

The average American woman owned nine outfits in 1930.  Nine!

I would so love to read the book where she found this data - Service and Style: How the American Department Store Fashioned the Middle Class.

I recently stumbled on a clothing project from 2005.  A woman named Alex Martin decided to wear the same dress every day for a year.  She didn’t style it with hundreds of dollars of accessories or own several of the same dress.  She just kept wearing the same one – day in, day out.

“Did I look crazy?” she wrote in her online diary.  ”Most people in my professional circle didn’t even notice that I was always wearing the same dress day after day — my take on that is that we’re all too busy with our *own* appearance, family, work, etc. to keep a tally on everyone else’s wardrobe rotations!”

And then this anonymous woman above said, “In my 20s I was worried about what people thought of me.  In my 40s, I didn’t care what people thought of me.  In my 50s, I realized that they weren’t thinking of me all along!”

So today I have an interesting question for you.  How many pairs of clothes do you think you could happily live with?  Step away from what other people think.  Forget about what you worry that they must be thinking.  This question is just you.  How much clothing might be your happy point?

Where do you think you’d be content? 9 like in 1930?  900?  a number in between?