One Girl Wears the Same Dress for a Year

If you haven't yet gotten sucked into the endlessly addicting site that is "The Uniform Project," let us clue you in: Sheena Matheiken started the site as a way to raise money for the Akanksha Foundation, which helps educate slum children in India. How, you might ask? Well, by choosing to wear the exact same little black dress every day for an entire year, and providing a daily photo blog of the results.

First, a few caveats. Those of us who are interested in these kinds of weird fashion stunts are aware that this same stunt has been pulled before—by one Alex Martin, who wore the same little brown dress for 365 days to "confront consumerism."

But, now that we've acknowledged that Matheiken might be using old material, we all can admit she's probably embracing the ideals of fashion a lot more than Martin. While Martin wore the same (we'll say it) drab brown button-down dress every day, styled with a neverending slew of cardigans and the occasional layered tee, Matheiken's dress (designed by her friend Eliza Starbuck) is ridiculously versatile—it's got buttons, deep pleats, a great shape, etc.

All that said, what makes the site so endlessly engaging is Matheiken's truly brilliant sense of layering and reinvention. Every day, her outfit really and truly looks different. One day, she's wearing the dress as a jacket, the next it's a "sweet little French schoolgirl" type of mini. She wears other dresses underneath the dang thing. She bought a doily on eBay and wore it as a collar!! And, what's even more appealing, she's clearly set up some kind of little photo-studio-white-backdrop in her apartment, giving the whole project a strangely self-obsessed, Susie Bubble type of vibe.

But the question remains: Could the average person complete this project without a photo blog and the world watching? We, for certain, could not.

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