As January’s laundry mini-challenge comes to an end, my husband and I sat down to talk about what it would mean to change our laundry habits. Phil Grove’s comment about “too many clothes” was part of that discussion.

Clothes and Societal Pressure

We are FORTUNATE that we live in an old bungalow and therefore don’t have a lot of closet space. We weed through our clothes once or twice a year because space is at a premium. We store winter coats elsewhere, but everything else has got to fit in one closet (we each have one).

That said, we know that we have more clothes than the typical resident of this planet. So how can we be more mindful about the clothes we buy (and in Leslie’s case, the fabrics they are made of in order to minimize dry cleaning)? How much peer pressure is there, really, to wear a different outfit to work every day?

Leslie followed a couple of young ladies who wanted to test / challenge that peer pressure. Check out their year-long clothing challenges:

• Alex Martin wore the same brown dress every day.
• Sheena at The Uniform Project made duplicates of her black dress so she didn’t wear the same one, but her dresses all looked the same. (Click on each day on the calendar to see how she got a new look for the same dress.)

Honestly, we don’t feel that there is much pressure from the outside. We don’t find it problematic to wear the same pants or skirt two or more times in a workweek, switching out shirts, socks and underwear. (Of course, we’re married and old (lol). Maybe if we were young and single and looking for love we’d feel differently :).) We don’t wash clothes after every wearing, however we acknowledge that clothes washing needs differ by body chemistry – one of us needs to do more washing than the other.

So, is this an area for growth? We think we are doing okay here but we could do better … with less.