(no subject)

[darchildre]

So, my mom and I have been doing the wool& 100 day dress challenge (you buy a dress from wool&, wear it for 100 days straight*, and then you get a prize). We started on January 1st, so I'm currently on day 47.

I'm honestly really enjoying it - just like I love doing meal planning/cooking once a week and then never thinking about food again, I love basically not thinking about what to wear. Every day, I put on my dress, put a pair of loose linen pants on under it** and a cardigan/sweater and shawl over it and I'm done. And, as a bonus, I have a lot less laundry to do every week. It's great. I'm probably not going to dress like this every day after the challenge is over - I miss my nerdy tshirt collection - but it makes a nice basic uniform that I'm probably going to continue falling back on.

Early on, I had mentioned the challenge to my manager and one of my coworkers, because it came up in conversation, but I mostly haven't talked about it because why would I talk about my clothes? Said coworker has apparently been considering doing the same challenge, so this morning she was asking me some questions about my dress and how the whole thing has been going for me and my mom. Which is how the rest of my coworkers found out.

Y'know how, when you're socially anxious, you get told that people actually pay a lot less attention to you than you think? (And you assume that's a lie because, y'know, the anxiety.) Turns out, none of my coworkers (except the ones that I'd actually told) have noticed that I have worn the same dress every day for the past month and a half. So that's something to remember the next time I feel weird about my clothes.









*To answer the first question I get every time I've told anyone about this: yes, you can wash the dress.

**The dress has pockets but more pockets are always better.

Comments

[nostalgia]

I had not heard of this!

[darchildre]

I hadn't either, until my mom told me she was planning to do it - she hangs out on instagram a lot more than I do (ie, at all) and I think the challenge has a larger presence there. I tend to dress pretty simply in general, so it's working out pretty well for me so far.

[mecurtin]

Very interesting! My wool allergy disqualifies me from playing, but it's an interesting take on Slow Fashion. Which dress are you using?

How hard-wearing do you find the dress? Reading novels written in previous eras, I'm noticing how much time people (women & sailors) had to spend mending clothing, especially wool socks.

[darchildre]

This is the dress I'm wearing.

So far, I'm finding that it wears well. I don't do a huge amount of strenuous activity as a general rule, so I don't know how well it would stand up to, say, daily manual labor, but I know there are people doing the challenge who go running or hiking in theirs and don't seem to have problems. In my own experience, I've noticed the material softening a bit, but nothing that looks like I'd need to mend it any time soon. My tops tend to need mending first at the elbows, though, which fortunately isn't a problem with a short sleeved dress.

[out_there]

Turns out, none of my coworkers (except the ones that I'd actually told) have noticed that I have worn the same dress every day for the past month and a half.

I could absolutely believe that. I rarely notice what other people are wearing at work (like, dark slacks and work appropriate top is what I notice, but I wouldn't remember what that same person was wearing last week).

[darchildre]

Yeah, I don't tend to notice people's clothes unless they're really unusual, so it really isn't surprising that other people don't either. But one's brain does stupid things sometimes.

[sfred]

This sounds appealing to me. I basically wear the same pattern of shirt in different fabrics, with shorts, all summer, and if I'm working at the office I wear more or less the same trousers/t-shirt-shirt combination all winter too - but I think it's more usual for men to wear basically the same thing all the time.

[darchildre]

Exactly. One of my hesitations when I was first considering doing it was "Do I really want to wear the same thing every day?" but then I actually thought about how I dress and it's basically the same as I am now - linen pants, base layer (a tshirt or dress), and a cardigan or sweater on top. The only thing that's really changed for the challenge is that the base layer is the same every day.

Mostly, the challenge has made me think a little bit more about the patterns in how I dress, which has been really useful for me.

[brideoffrankenstein]

This sounds like a really cool challenge! I must say it sounds super tempting to have a really easy 'uniform' like that. The dress is beautiful by the way!

[darchildre]

I am always in favor of eliminating as many daily-life-maintenance decisions from my day as I can, so I'm really enjoying not having to ever think about my clothes. Even though it's really a very small thing, it feels like it frees up a lot of mental real estate for me.