365 Days, 10 Items of Clothing, Several Lessons
Last year we posted about Matt Souveny’s 1 Year, 1 Outfit Project. As the name implies, Souveny, a Royal Air Force pilot and men’s fashion blogger, spent one year living with ten carefully curated clothing items. Well, the year and the experiment have passed, and we caught up with Souveny to see how it went:
DF: How did the experiment go?
MS: Better than I expected. I half thought my clothes would be in tatters by the end of the year, so seeing as though everything is still very wearable I was pleasantly surprised.
DF: What was the best part of the experiment?
MS: Getting to wear my grails on a daily basis. Most people save their nice clothes, but I got to wear all of my favourites everyday.
DF: What was the worst?
MS: Dealing with the weather, I was freezing in winter and wearing every layer I had and in summer I was doing laundry every couple days just to have a fresh shirt.
DF: What item in your wardrobe stood out as a must-have?
MS: Footwear always seems like the hardest thing to trim down in my mind so having a single pair of boots that I could wear hiking and then clean up and wear out to dinner was pretty essential. I also don’t think most pants would survive the daily abuse that I put my Outlier chinos through. I’m pretty grateful they held up.
DF: Did you find yourself wanting more clothing options?
MS: Absolutely. By the third month I was going pretty crazy wearing my uniform every single day, I powered through that though and then dressing just became automatic. By the time winter was over I was just happy to not have to put on all my layers every time I went outside
DF: Many of your items were pretty expensive. what would you say about that?
MS: Some of them are insanely expensive and I would never encourage anyone to spend beyond their disposable income for any of these things. I think this could certainly be accomplished on a smaller budget, I just figured that if I was going to wear the same things every day then they might as well be clothes that I loved and was excited to wear.
DF: Now that the experiment is over, what will be different?
MS: More clothes! I’m going to keep the same philosophy of buying better, buying less and getting rid of any excess, but I’m not going to restrict myself to a set limit. As it stands I have about 30 items in my closet right now and it is completely overwhelming.