Life
Dressed For The Year
Matheiken has pledged to wear the same dress for a full year.
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Sheena Matheiken has been in the same black cotton dress for the past three months, and has another nine months to go. Matheiken has pledged to wear the same dress (she actually swaps between seven identical dresses), for a full year, reinventing it every day with accessories and accoutrements.
The Uniform Project (www.theuniformproject.com), which publishes photos of Matheiken’s daily reinvention of her dress, is raising money for Akanksha Foundation, an educational non profit organization for slum children in Mumbai. In the first three months, the website had tallied nearly $7,000 in donations. Commented the DailyCandy, a newsletter for the fashion set, “If wearing the same outfit three — okay, five — days in a row is wrong, we don’t want to be right.” Matheiken explains her inspiration for the project on her blog: “I was raised and schooled in India where uniforms were a mandate in most public schools. Despite the imposed conformity, kids always found a way to bend the rules and flaunt a little personality. Boys rolled up their sleeves, wore over-sized swatches, and hiked up their pants to show off their high-tops. Girls obsessed over bangles, bindis and bad hairdos. Peaking through the sea of uniforms were the idiosyncrasies of teen style and individual flare. I now want to put the same rules to test again, only this time I’m trading in the catholic school fervor for an eBay addiction and relocating the school walls to this wonderful place called the internet.”
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