The quest: to wear the same dress for 100 days. The reality: Heather Curlee Novak wanted to give up after a month. But her husband nudged her to stick with what she’d started.
The truth, she admitted, is that the stay-at-home life of a mother of two children gets to be routine and “buying a little thing or two can be pretty fun.”
But it adds up. When she counted, she was shocked to find that her daughters — Portia, 13, and Livvy, 11 — possessed 80 stuffed animals. She recommends other families count their things, too. It may take them on the same journey of examining soul and clothes and what’s really important in life.
Novak, who’s 50, lived all of her life in South Bend until moving to Valparaiso 10 years ago. She and her husband follow author/radio host Dave Ramsey’s financial principals and, she attested, “I was blowing through the budget most months.”
She also wanted an elegant and fun dress, and armed with some birthday cash, she invested $138 in a thin, pure-wool dress that drapes from her shoulders just barely down to her knees. The company that makes it, wool&, posed a 100-day challenge, and she accepted. Her experiment began in mid-December, and her final day was Monday.
As a result, she said, “I noticed more about me.”
How did it go?
She fretted that people would notice that her variety had vanished, but alas, she discovered, “People don’t pay attention to what we wear as much as we think they are.”
She’d had a penchant for buying up the latest fashionable clothes — they were cheap — but now she gazes into her closet and realizes: “You buy things you don’t actually love.”
Granted, she did lots of things to accessorize and dress up her look. She tucked the dress into jeans or overalls. She added scarves, sweaters, a crocheted poncho, leggings and different boots, and she has a couple of eyeglasses to swap. She tied on an apron to protect it in the kitchen.
But would her family and friends — including her dad and others in South Bend she visits monthly — dare to accept a 100-day challenge?
“People admire it,” she quipped, “but they don’t want to do it.”
Shifting consumer culture
What Novak has done — buying something nice and wearing it a long time — was “completely normal” a century ago, according to Zach Schrank, a sociology professor at Indiana University South Bend who teaches a class on “Consumer Culture and Society.”
“It wasn’t until recently that textiles became so cheap,” Schrank observed. “You can pack your closet full of clothes, and it wouldn’t impact your budget as much as it would in the past.”
People also wear these so-called “fast fashion” clothes far less than Americans did decades ago. It feeds the culture’s push to conform, Schrank said.
And people in the U.S. are among the “strange ones globally,” he said, compared with other countries where people can’t afford so many clothes or simply don’t buy as many.
While he doesn’t know of anyone personally who’s doing a single-outfit challenge, he’s heard of other people willfully being simpler consumers for an array of reasons. Like being mindful of factories that employ people at low wages and sometimes unsafe working conditions.
“People are more aware of what we do and how it is having an impact,” he said.
Simple living
Casey Mullaney doesn’t have a sparse wardrobe, but she avoids buying herself brand new clothes — instead filling her taste for fashion, like colors and patterns, through used garments.
As a resident volunteer at the Catholic Worker women’s house on South Bend’s St. Joseph Street, where she’s lived among homeless adults for six years, she’s picked up donated clothes after the guests have had their picks. The women swap and share items among themselves. And she’s shopped at Goodwill. She also mends clothes and wears them longer.
It fits with the Catholic Worker ethos of simple living. But, the 31-year-old, who’s working on her doctoral dissertation in theology at the University of Notre Dame, said she’s also mindful of the waste of fast fashion.
“Our consumption of clothing is awful for the environment,” she said. “So much of it is thrown away or dumped on Third World countries.”
People, she said, may justify buying a lot by thinking it can always be donated.
But, for the homeless she’s known, she said: “It’s better that they have a few pieces of well-made, long-lasting clothes.”
“A lot of fast fashion is produced in a way that it doesn’t last long,” she said of her experience mending. “It makes sense that people don’t hold onto it very long.”
Still, she has taken the children of Catholic Worker guests and gone shopping for brand new clothing — a chance for them to choose their own things and to avoid looking impoverished in school.
Pandemic changed habits
Novak’s new habit was born, like so many others, out of the pandemic. Her family budget had shrunk because Novak had left her job as director of connections for a United Methodist church when the pandemic started, allowing her to do e-learning at home with her kids.
She gives talks and blogs about better living, part of her honest and mindful approach to being human.
Another inspiration for her quest to simplify was her father, a beekeeping, biking, opera-going man who has struggled with hoarding — even agreeing to go on the TV show “Hoarders” on A&E 12 years ago to help him clear out the piled-up plastic containers and other things. More recently, he’s hired a housekeeper to help, but Novak said things still accumulate.
Novak normally doesn’t fuss about caring for her clothes because they’re so cheap. This pure wool dress is different. It’s comfortable and doesn’t stink. She has washed it about every other week and let it air out overnight. No need to spot wash it.
“I don’t have BO, which I’m floored by,” she quipped.
As a result of her experiment, she said she’ll be donating more of her clothes.
“If it doesn’t spark joy, I’m not wearing it,” she said.
As a family, they already do donate their excess things, though her kids don’t like it. She explains to them, “Maybe someone else will LOVE it.”
Will she cut back on impulse buying?
“My husband laughs because I go back and buy things we’ve donated,” she said. “There’s always newer and nicer and better.”
And yet, she’s also passed up jeans in the store, noting, “I remind myself that I love the one pair I have.”
As for wearing the same dress, she said, “I’m eager to wear something else.”
Email South Bend Tribune reporter Joseph Dits at jdits@sbtinfo.com. Follow him on Facebook at SBTOutdoorAdventures.
