Could you wear only six items of clothing for one whole month?  That’s what the participants in the Six Items Or Less are trying to do.

The project kicked off on Monday, June 21st and participants are chronicling their experiences on the Six Items Or Less website.

Luckily for them, items like shoes and underwear are not limited and can be chosen and worn freely.  The main items, however, are limited to just six, having to be worn in all different kinds of weather, environments and occasions for the entire month.

This unique and community centered digital project is the brainchild of marketing innovators BBH Labs, who say that the project has no one intended meaning and is meant to be an experiment that provokes questions.  However, BBH Labs states that the participants who volunteered for the project seem to be motivated by anti-consumerism, the freedom found in lack of choice, creativity and masochism.

Moreover, from the looks of the participants’ reports, it seems as though Six Items Or Less is going to turn out to be an interesting social experiment exploring multiple themes and topics like fast fashion, identity, social appearances and innovation.  This experiment is reminiscent of The Uniform Project and the No New Clothes For One Year.

These kinds of projects are a reminder that accumulating more and more clothing is not necessarily a good thing and can actually stifle our creativity and sense of expression.  @uberblond writes about how fast fashion and clothes hording affected her:

in the end this closet-full of crap was a weight around my neck – a raft of bad decisions and pressure to always mix and match these bad decisions in delightful ways. it because about keeping it superficially interesting instead of being creative or expressive.

So while Six Items Or Less might not be for everyone, it certainly is a provocative statement about our relationships to fashion and clothing.