Sewing, Fashion, and Shopping

So I'm sewing Monkey1's first day of school dress, and suddenly I run into a bunch of interesting sewing blogs...

The Uniform Project.
I'm a year behind on this fashion statement. A young woman in NYC advertising decided "to wear the same dress for an entire year ... [and] to make it look unique every single day and do so without buying anything new." New meaning off the rack newly produced; items could be new to her from thrift ("vintage") shops or handmade or donated. A friend helped design and sew a little black dress that could be wore backwards or frontwards or open like a long jacket. And every day for a year she reinvented it. The dress turned out to be not so much a uniform as the starting canvas each day. Hats, scarves, collars, jewelery, belts, colorful stockings, overskirts, underskirts, vests, ponchos, capes, you name it, she worked with it. And she made it look cool. No, fashionable. No, above fashion. Chic.
The project was also a charity fundraiser for a school serving the slums in India. (The link: The Uniform Project ) The Uniform Project is now in its second year, proposing that each month someone new will try to reinvent their own little black dress uniform.

I wish I could do this, I thought as I read the blog and looked at the photos. But I'm got a huge problem, starting with my feet. How on earth could I pull something like this off for even a week with one pair of sneakers? I was horrified at my last shoe fitting to find myself back in mens sneakers. Thank goodness Monkey1 found some pink shoelaces for me, restoring a small sense of femininity to my wide wide feet.

The Little Brown Dress
This was several years ago. An artist and mother on the west coast decided to wear the same dress for a year "to reject the economic system that pushes over-consumption, and the bill of goods that has been sold, especially to women, about what makes a person good, attractive and interesting." She designed and sewed herself a brown denim dress, used stuff she had in her closet to layer during colder weather, and only $20 in a thrift store during her year-long challenge. She did not try to dress up the dress because she was confronting consumerism.

As I looked at some of her photos, I nearly choked. One picture showed her sitting beside an little inflatable pool with her son, and she looked just like my mom (minus 20 inches of hair) c.1976. There was just something about the brown button-up sleeveless jumper... (The link: The Little Brown Dress.)

This I would definitely not do, I thought. It is too much like a nun's habit, and I'm not a nun. And I'm trying not to look like my mom, though as the years go by, more and more pictures of me come back looking like her.

New Dress A Day
This one is current! In California a single 30-year-old decided "to be spending the entire year without doing an ounce of traditional clothing shopping... Each day for the entire year, I’m going to introduce a new piece into my existing wardrobe that I’ve found from these places [flea markets and garage sales]. On top of this, I’m giving myself a budget of $1 a day." This girl finds voluminous numbers (what else could you get for a dollar?) and cuts them down to size, into dresses or shirts. She does before and after shots, as well as some during cutting and sewing pictures. (The link: New Dress A Day.)

Her persistence is amazing. However, I do not have the time or inclination or space to add 365 items to my closet and bureau space.

However, I find all these confrontations with spending and clothing fascinating. As summer closes, at least as the "vacation" mentality of summer comes to an end and school looms ahead, preschool for the littlest Monkey and homeschool for the oldest Monkey, I find myself looking for a change too. Will it be a change from my rotation of REI hiking skirts and Tshirts? Or will it be something less outward, like the kinds of books I try reading?

That's not something I'll decide tonight. It's taken me three evenings just to write this post, and now I'll let my subconscious stew about fashion and consumerism. Or maybe I'll just have a dreamless sleep without a restless Monkey sticking her toes in my ear.