Thirty Day Challenge

Let's get one thing out in the open right now. I am a clotheshorse. A huge clotheshorse.I love fashion; reading about it, window shopping, online shopping, shopping shopping. I get the thrill of the hunt, and love walking away with a trophy I can wear.That said, I need to take a long, hard look at my relationship with my closet. Not the organizing part of it, I have my pants, skirts, dresses, shirts, jackets, coats, and shoes in their places in the closet. I need to look at what I have and why I have it.A little more than a year ago, I stumbled across a little thing called The Uniform Project. It is brilliant. Take one little black dress, a woman's wardrobe basic, and mix and match with it for 365 days. There were hits, there were misses, there were sick days, but overall, the outfits wereinspiring, people started talking about it, and more people pondered how to have style without the high item count. While Sheena showed us that sticking to one dress is definitely possible,average people balked at the sparseness.Then, I started to see things about wardrobe basics pop up in the news and in the fashion rags. What are the basics? What are good ones? Bad ones? How do you mix and match them? With the evolution of fast fashion, the consuming public had grown accustomed to chasing and acquiring fads with little thought as to how they fit into a broader picture of their own personal style, and at a pace that quickly crowds out items that would (should?) be basics.Modifications on the 1 dress/365 day challenge started popping up, and they were, surprise surprise, based around wardrobe basics. There was the 1/7 (one dress for seven days), the 7/30 (seven items for thirty days), and most recently, the 30/30 (thirty items for thirty days). The thought of this fills me with some portion of joy, because, yes! I want to live with a lighter footprint. Yes! I want to practice the principles I value. Yes! This is a community coming together to practice what they preach, and to encourage each other as they do it. But then, there's the fear and dread, because, wait! This means I have to knuckle down and make some choices. Hold up! I have to commit to one small portion of what's available to me. Whoa! I am afraid that once this is done, and I've determined I can function on this small portion of mycloset, I'll have to bid adieu to the rest. Fear, I tell you. We're talking cold sweats, here.So. Following in the spirit of jumping headfirst into something that makes me squirm with terror, I'm going to take a shot at it so you see that it is possible. If it doesn't work, we all get a good laugh. But if this does work, maybe it will be inspiration. Maybe it will be something I can learn and draw strength from. Maybe you can, too.