wool&’s 100-day dress challenge brings eco-waste of fashion to light

Heather Curlee Novak wears the blue dress that she's put on daily in a 100-day challenge while camping Thursday, March 24, 2022, at Indiana Dunes State Park in Chesterton with her daughters.

The quest: to wear the same gown for 100 times. The actuality: Heather Curlee Novak needed to give up just after a month. But her spouse nudged her to stick with what she’d started out.

The fact, she admitted, is that the keep-at-dwelling everyday living of a mom of two youngsters will get to be regimen and “buying a minor detail or two can be very enjoyable.”

But it provides up. When she counted, she was stunned to obtain that her daughters — Portia, 13, and Libby, 11 — possessed 80 stuffed animals. She recommends other family members depend their factors, much too. It may possibly take them on the exact same journey of examining soul and clothes and what’s really important in lifetime.

Novak, who’s 50, lived all of her daily life in South Bend until eventually shifting to Valparaiso 10 several years in the past. She and her partner adhere to author/radio host Dave Ramsey’s monetary principals and, she attested, “I was blowing by way of the price range most months.”

She also wanted an stylish and pleasurable gown, and armed with some birthday hard cash, she invested $138 in a thin, pure-wool gown that drapes from her shoulders just barely down to her knees. The business that helps make it, wool&, posed a 100-day challenge, and she recognized. Her experiment commenced in mid-December, and her final day was Monday.

As a result, she reported, “I observed extra about me.”

How did it go?

She fretted that people would detect that her range had vanished, but alas, she discovered, “People don’t spend notice to what we don as a great deal as we feel they are.”

She’d had a penchant for purchasing up the hottest modern dresses — they have been low cost — but now she gazes into her closet and realizes: “You acquire points you really don’t in fact like.”

Granted, she did a lot of items to decorate and dress up her look. She tucked the gown into jeans or overalls. She added scarves, sweaters, a crocheted poncho, leggings and various boots, and she has a couple of eyeglasses to swap. She tied on an apron to shield it in the kitchen.

But would her spouse and children and close friends — like her dad and others in South Bend she visits regular — dare to settle for a 100-day challenge?

“People admire it,” she quipped, “but they don’t want to do it.”

Shifting consumer culture

What Novak has performed — getting anything awesome and wearing it a long time — was “completely normal” a century ago, in accordance to Zach Schrank, a sociology professor at Indiana University South Bend who teaches a class on “Consumer Society and Modern society.”

“It wasn’t right until just lately that textiles became so low cost,” Schrank noticed. “You can pack your closet whole of clothes, and it wouldn’t effects your finances as a great deal as it would in the past.”

Folks also don these so-known as “fast fashion” dresses considerably a lot less than Us citizens did many years back. It feeds the culture’s force to conform, Schrank said.

And folks in the U.S. are among the “strange types globally,” he reported, in comparison with other nations around the world exactly where men and women simply cannot manage so lots of clothes or just never obtain as many.

When he does not know of anybody individually who’s doing a one-outfit obstacle, he’s listened to of other people today willfully becoming less difficult shoppers for an array of motives. Like staying aware of factories that use people today at lower wages and from time to time unsafe doing work situations.

“People are far more informed of what we do and how it is getting an effect,” he explained.

Easy living

Casey Mullaney does not have a sparse wardrobe, but she avoids buying herself manufacturer new garments — alternatively filling her taste for manner, like colours and patterns, by made use of garments.

As a resident volunteer at the Catholic Employee women’s dwelling on South Bend’s St. Joseph Street, in which she’s lived amid homeless grownups for 6 many years, she’s picked up donated clothing following the attendees have experienced their picks. The females swap and share products among the on their own. And she’s shopped at Goodwill. She also mends clothes and wears them for a longer time.

It suits with the Catholic Employee ethos of easy residing. But, the 31-yr-previous, who’s performing on her doctoral dissertation in theology at the University of Notre Dame, reported she’s also conscious of the squander of fast manner.

“Our consumption of garments is awful for the surroundings,” she claimed. “So significantly of it is thrown away or dumped on Third Globe nations around the world.”

People, she explained, may justify purchasing a great deal by imagining it can constantly be donated.

But, for the homeless she’s regarded, she said: “It’s superior that they have a handful of parts of perfectly-designed, extended-long lasting outfits.”

“A good deal of speedy fashion is created in a way that it does not last long,” she stated of her working experience mending. “It tends to make perception that folks really don’t keep on to it quite prolonged.”

Nevertheless, she has taken the kids of Catholic Employee company and long gone browsing for brand new outfits — a prospect for them to pick out their have issues and to steer clear of wanting impoverished in school.

Pandemic changed habits

Novak’s new practice was born, like so several some others, out of the pandemic. Her relatives spending budget had shrunk mainly because Novak experienced still left her work as director of connections for a United Methodist church when the pandemic started, making it possible for her to do e-finding out at property with her kids.

She provides talks and blogs about much better dwelling, component of her straightforward and conscious strategy to being human.

Another inspiration for her quest to simplify was her father, a beekeeping, biking, opera-heading man who has struggled with hoarding — even agreeing to go on the Tv set clearly show “Hoarders” on A&E 12 years back to enable him crystal clear out the piled-up plastic containers and other items. Additional not long ago, he’s hired a housekeeper to assistance, but Novak claimed points even now accumulate.

2010:South Bend beekeeper seems on ‘Hoarders,’ cleans up truckloads of items

Novak usually does not fuss about caring for her garments for the reason that they are so low-cost. This pure wool dress is different. It’s cozy and doesn’t stink. She has washed it about each individual other 7 days and let it air out right away. No need to spot wash it.

“I don’t have BO, which I’m floored by,” she quipped.

As a final result of her experiment, she said she’ll be donating additional of her apparel.

“If it doesn’t spark joy, I’m not carrying it,” she explained.

As a family, they by now do donate their surplus matters, although her youngsters really don’t like it. She clarifies to them, “Maybe an individual else will Appreciate it.”

Will she slice back on impulse shopping for?

“My husband laughs due to the fact I go back again and acquire items we’ve donated,” she reported. “There’s usually newer and nicer and superior.”

And however, she’s also passed up jeans in the keep, noting, “I remind myself that I really like the a single pair I have.”

As for putting on the exact same costume, she reported, “I’m keen to put on some thing else.”

E-mail South Bend Tribune reporter Joseph Dits at jdits@sbtinfo.com. Stick to him on Fb at SBTOutdoorAdventures.

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