My life changed after I read Marie Kondo, the maverick Japanese organising consultant who extolled the virtues of tidy living. For starters, I realised that there are weirder people in the world, and that there really is a method to the madness. But unlike Kondo, I found it difficult to pile up my clothes to examine whether each article gave me joy or not — it felt too time-consuming. So I did the next best thing.
On Instagram, I came across Mitali Parekh (@mitali.parekh) who had decided to #WearEverything in her closet. It was, of course, a social media challenge. She promised to post a picture of herself every day, in her OOTD (outfit of the day), with the resolution of not repeating clothes until she had worn everything in her wardrobe at least once. The idea was simple: to see what she could wear, and discard what she did not think she would. Currently, she is on day #109. I stopped my own experiment on day 50, while some others are simply not counting. But we all learned something, either about our wardrobes or about ourselves.
My association with the challenge was a source of both joy and worry: joy at discovering new ways with clothes, and being able to share it with my virtual community. How I wore a sari in winter for instance, or how I managed to wear tights and a sports bra with shoes and a kurta , so that all I needed to do was throw on a tee when I got home (no more excuses for not exercising). Worry, because it is addictive — I waited for the comments and the likes. It suddenly felt like I was 20 again, posing for approval. But the exercise also helped me realise that I had outgrown a few things: jeans, white sneakers, the LBD, fast fashion, synthetic fibres.
“It made me re-examine the way I look at my body”
Smriti Lamech, Education professional
Lamech, 40, defaulted to saris because they were just so easy to wear, but mostly because she had never exercised, and she felt like her body lacked tone. She took the Wear Everything challenge because “slowly I found I had lost the confidence of wearing Western clothes. Saris were the comfort zone”.
“I made a bamboo clothes rail some time ago, and when I knew I’d be doing the challenge, I simply hung out my clothes for 30 days,” she says. She pulled out Western wear she had not worn for years, determined to wear it all. In the process, she discovered that she did not much care for pants, salwars and churidars — “anything where I couldn’t feel my thighs rub against each other, in keeping with my Silk Smitha heritage,” she laughs.
“Clothes are a rebellion”
Mitali Parekh, Journalist
While writing a column that looked at street shopping in the city, Parekh, 38, bought a lot. “I was easily able to buy five things for ₹1,000 to ₹1,200,” she admits. But her impulsive and frequent purchases also fuelled her anxiety about engaging in the ecologically unfriendly pursuit of buying too much. She had also, she confesses, been told many times that women should not be spending too much time “prettying themselves up”. “The exercise was an attempt to untangle this big Gordian Knot in my life,” she explains, “expecially because I express myself through my clothes.”
In the end though, she did not discard more than three or four tops. But she does not keep clothes “for special occasions anymore”, except for a few saris and sparkly dresses. Her fitness and dog-training clothes (yes, she trains dogs) are minimal, while her shoes are usually Clarks. She has more than 120 outfits, with 43 pairs of shoes and about 12 bags. She is keeping them all.
“Anything I didn’t wear in the third attempt, I gave away”
Prerna Singh Butalia, Content creator
Butalia, 35, is often tempted to spend her day in pyjamas. “[The challenge] was one way of making sure I dress for the day,” she says. Her biggest takeaway from the process was the decluttering that followed. “There were clothes I’d take out, thinking I would wear them, and then not be in the mood. And I found it would happen again and again with those same clothes.” Those were the ones she discarded, along with old clothes that now hung loose on her.
The older stuff she bagged and dropped off at H&M. Some, she has repurposed — even if it is just as a liner for her daughter’s toy box. She has also got a sense of what she enjoys wearing (saris and dresses), and has segregated her blouses into daily-wear and party-wear.
“It changed the way I approached my day”
Susanna Myrtle Lazarus, Journalist
Lazarus, 28, admits that on a daily basis she valued sleep over “dressing up”, as a result of which “I would keep wearing the same four tops and the rest of my wardrobe was ignored”. As a first step towards putting in some effort, she got rid of everything that did not fit. Some pieces did not “fit her aesthetic, so I gave them to someone who would appreciate them”. Clothes for her also have an emotional connection, so Lazarus retained a few pieces (like the last skirt her grandmother stitched for her).
Before starting, she did not really believe that the challenge would make a difference in how she approached the day or how she was perceived, but it did, and she continues to put in that effort even after she ended it.
