The first cracks started to appear from the beginning: even on the first day, I was questioning whether the dress I was wearing was not a bit sniffy, and as time wore on I was definitely wearing clothes that previously would have not passed the sniff test (luckily the cardigan I had chosen for the challenge was wool...which saved me from more sniff failures), but the point is that if you are not fully comfortable with the idea that your clothes are clean enough, you aren´t fully comfortable, and the idea is to explore the idea that you have too much, not to restrict yourself so you feel like you don´t have enough.
I first broke the challenge 10 days in, officially I was allowed one coat (since it was winter) so I chose the more formal of my two (not so excessive), but 10 days in the weather turned colder and I was getting the start of a cold and planning to spend most of the day outside...so the second coat had to come out. Technically I could have put it down as specialist clothing required for work...but I am only thinking of that now, so it doesn't really count!
Speaking of specialist clothing for work, that was another issue I had with this challenge, you were allowed not include clothes you needed for work, to me this is nonsense, as it opens up the door for all kinds of exceptions. I would much prefer as I did with the challenge in August (30 items for 30 days) include everything I needed from wellies and waterproofs to volunteer in the National Park to dress and heels for ladies day. I had a work event (I have my finger in many pies) that involved dressing quite formally coming up within the 6 weeks, but as work clothes were exempt I didn't have to consider this when picking out my pieces, but if these clothes were counted as part of a number of garments I would have got more wear out of them by dressing individual pieces up or down, instead of keeping them totally separate.
After 3 weeks, and obviously some events in my personal life, I decided to wear black for a while, but the change of clothes was motivated more from the restriction of the challenge I had set myself, being perfectly capable of mourning in whatever colour clothes. If I had picked out say 25 garments all in, to cover the expected events of the 6 weeks, whatever I had picked out for the work event would have been suitable for the funeral and job interview which weren't planned.
Another effect of the restriction is that it caused me to fall off my no shopping wagon. While I didn't go crazy, I feel like I would have been able to hold out had it not been for the restrictiveness.
And finally just to jump up and down on the idea that the challenge had really been broken, I went away on a Sun holiday for the last few days...taking with me just one of the items from the original six.
The point of this long account of how I got on is really just that I don't feel this kind of challenge is beneficial on a journey to a sustainable wardrobe. Firstly, the idea of testing out a smaller wardrobe is so you can see that you don't need as much stuff and help keep you on track to cutting down, but if you feel like you don't have enough the opposite effect will happen. Secondly, we should be looking at making our wardrobes more versatile, from our work wear to our workout wear we should be thinking of other ways to wear them, so a wardrobe challenge that includes everything in a set number of pieces makes more sense in this context.
While I still think wardrobe challenges are a good idea (every once in a while) to keep you on track, picking one that is less restrictive and all inclusive is a better idea.