Recommended Reading: Shoppers on a 'Diet'

One of my favorite types of fashion stories is the kind where they take 10 or 12 items and create 50 (or more) different outfits with them--Lucky does this at least once a year, as does Shopbop. I always feel incredibly inspired to purge my closet after reading these articles, in the pursuit of creating a more perfect, streamlined wardrobe. So I was intrigued by this article in the Times' Thursday Styles section; it highlights two different websites, one that challenges participants to wear only six items of clothing or less for a month and another that encourages readers not to buy new clothes for an entire year. The latter website, while admirable in its intention, made me cringe for reasons that should be obvious to readers of a blog called Cheryl Shops, but I was fascinated by the former...at first. Again, it's a noble concept, but it's really not practical. For example, if you exercise, your workout clothes count as part of your six items (underwear and accessories, thankfully, are freebies). Think of the amount of laundry one ends up doing during this experiment. Still, I think there is a lesson to be learned, albeit on a far less extreme level, and that's the same one that appeals to me in those 10-pieces, 100 outfits articles: Buy less clothing, wear it in more ways. Yes, readers, it's that simple.