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Hi everyone! It’s been a few. I thought I’d return to the blog-living with a post on the dress challenge I wrote about in January. This is a challenge by the clothing company Wool&. You wear one of their merino wool dresses for 100 straight days (about 8 hours per day), take a photo each day, and if you make it to Day 100 and send them the photo proof, they’ll give you a $100 credit to use in their store. I started the challenge on January 5 and finished Day 80 yesterday. At this point I’m fairly certain I’ll make it to Day 100 and, more importantly, I should be able to remember to take photos on the remaining days. That’s been the biggest challenge so far.

This is obviously a promotional effort by Wool&, and there are apparently advertisements all over Instagram and Facebook. The challenge idea began in 2012 when the founder of the parent company, Wool + Prince, wore one of his men’s shirts for 100 days. When they first created the women’s version they offered 13 women a free dress if their wore one of their dresses for 100 days. Thousands of completed challenges later the compensation is $100, which doesn’t buy you a whole dress but gets you almost 75 percent of the way there (and you can use it for other things as well). Equally obviously, this is not something most people do for the money. $1/day is not going to keep anyone in the same dress for over three months, not if they could afford to buy the dress in the first place. But a surprising number of women have completed the challenge.

I wrote before about my motivations in starting. It was the beginning of the year, I wanted to do something to change up my wardrobe decision-making, and while I like dresses, I’ve been wearing trousers far more than skirts, let alone dresses. I’m not on social media and I use an ad blocker, so it wasn’t the siren song of ads or conversations. No, I went looking to do this to myself.

Unlike many of the women who participate, I didn’t join the very active Facebook group or hashtag my daily wears on Instagram. I didn’t even blog the experience here after my initial post. I told about three people I was doing it (apart from you, my faithful readers). I did read a LOT of posts by women doing the challenge, and I scrolled the Facebook and Twitter hashtags (Instagram locks you out if you’re not logged in). I picked up some ideas about how to vary the look. This proved harder to do when I was in California, because I hadn’t brought many clothes with me. But I wasn’t going many places and my meetings were all on Zoom, so I just put the dress on every day and added layers as the weather required.