How to dress with just six pieces

Stick to a simple silhouette and a length that falls just above the knee. The key is for it to be casual enough for work, but dressy enough to wear in the evening with heels.
Photo by: JC Penney
Getty Images

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During this time of recession and “fast fashion” from stores like H&M and Forever21, many women in America are starting to evaluate their overstuffed closets. Trinny Woodall, the original co-host of “What Not to Wear,” and “Making Over America,” told Oprah.com that most women wear 20% of their wardrobe 80% of the time. In reaction to this excess and extreme consumerism, websites have been popping up that challenge women (and men if they’re interested) to follow “shopping diets.” All you really need, it seems, are six key pieces to form the basis of a reliable wardrobe.has profiled sites like SixItemsOrLess.com, an experiment where each participant may only wear the same six garments over the course of one month. TheGreatAmericanApparelDiet.com encourages pledges to not buy any new clothing for one year. Both sites have attracted over 100 enthusiastic men and women willing to participate. Humble beginnings, but they are paving the way for a greater understanding of our fashion culture as it moves forward. We all have and want more than we actually need, but why? Pressure to keep up appearances amongst peers, materialism channeled through pop culture, and retail therapy are all to blame. Recent decades fueled with credit cards also have us living far beyond our means. Yet somehow, with closets bursting with tees, jeans, dresses, skirts, pants, and jackets, we can never find anything to wear.

Rather than become the next subject of a “Hoarders” episode, we’ve come up with some helpful tips to help you purge your closets, shop more constructively, and properly access what you really should own. And for those interested in trying out the “Six Items or Less” experiment, we’ve selected six wardrobe staples that can easily get you through 30 days with the aid of accessories.