Sometimes I let my hamper fill up to the brim before I lug it across my house and start a laundry marathon. Then there are the times I really want to wash just one pair of jeans, but I have no other laundry to do, so I set the load limit to extra small and run them through solo so they're clean and ready to wear in the morning. I've also had pants in the hamper for so long that I've convinced myself they're clean from their solitary confinement and put them on hoping nobody notices the wrinkles that formed while they were balled up in the confines of my fabric receptacle.
But what happens when you devote an entire work week to wearing the same pair of pants every day? Not only is it less laundry, but it also means spending less time planning your outfits. Instead of standing in my closet before bed, dreaming up some combination to don in the morning, I only glanced at my shirts and sweaters briefly before determining what to pull on the next day.
For my weeklong experiment, I decided to wear cropped navy blue ankle-length pants. For an entire week. Wearing the pants for five days in a row was a lesson in itself; eating lunch crouched over my desk was another. I've never taken a fork to my mouth so carefully so as not to spill on my precious pants that I had to rely on wearing for five days straight. I also became well-acquainted with my lint brush since I have a little dog who spends most of his waking hours in my lap.
Are you wondering if people noticed that I hadn't changed my pants all week? If they did, they didn't say anything. In fact, I got compliments on the neon-pink striped sweater I wore one day -- which I intentionally wore mid-week so as to distract from the pants just in case they started to look a little too familiar.
Come the end of the week, my hamper is significantly less full. Instead of having to wash five pairs of pants, there's just one lone pair ready to be laundered, exhausted after a long week's worth of wearing.
Check out the slideshow below to see how it all went down.
