the SIOL Collective
welcome to the musings and things we love from Six Items or Less. we're all for a more mindful approach to clothing, creative solutions in all forms, fascinating people and living life with our eyes a little bit more open.
if you're looking for the experiment itself (wear six and only six items of clothing for a month), click on over to the Six Items or Less experiment site
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new year, new beginnings
We’re really excited to announce the relaunch of Six Items or Less this January.
What started as an off the cuff idea between two friends swiftly grew into a global movement that was talked about all over the world and inspired others to do their own “Sixer” experiments.
Just in time for the New Year and all the resolutions that come with it, we’re back and ready to start the first of many cycles for 2011. With almost 2000 people proactively expressing interest in joining us, we’ve built more advanced community functionality into the new Six Items or Less site. Also, the new site has a daily mood tracker that allows us to understand and quantify the emotional journey that a Sixer goes through.
We’re launching the new site and opening up registration January 3rd. The cycle will run from January 10th through February 9th.
We hope to see more inspiring journeys like those that we saw during the first cycle of the experiment. This experiment challenges and changes people. It forces them to look at one of their most personal consumption areas and interrogate what clothing means to them and why they buy and wear the things that they do.
More often than not, Sixers walk away with a an evolved relationship with “stuff”, not just clothes. Here’s what some of our original Sixers had to say six months after doing the experiment:
“I’ve gotten more clear about how I’m impacted by the material things in my environment, and feel more deliberate in my decision making around what I wear and what I have around me.”
“I’m less stressed about ‘finding the right outfit’ for a certain event. What really matters is attending and being present in the moment.”
“I triple check and think much harder about each item I want and choose to buy. I know it’s possible to live happily with less.”
The new site will launch January 3rd at sixitemorless.com
To keep up to date on all things Six Items check out our Facebook page or on Twitter @sixitemsorless. We also have a sister site at the SIOLcollective.com where we jabber about all things clothing, environmental, thoughtful and anything else that strikes our fancy.
heidi & the SIOL team
this is the Hackemer family last christmas. besides the annual “give the dogs dog food shaped into christmas trees on christmas morning routine and sing silent night with them” I’d say we’re pretty normal.
we’re a larger family > four kids, three of which are married and have kids. when we’re all together there’s almost 20 of us and, as you can imagine, the holidays can be madness.
my sister elli was the first one to pop a kid out and his first christmas 18 years ago was the classic aunts, uncles and grandparents showering gifts on the little prince. it was a bit ridiculous to be honest. so the next year my parents made a new christmas rule: we’d draw names and everyone would buy only one present for one other person and we wouldn’t spend gobs of money on that present.
i really appreciate the fact that they did that. the pressure around the holidays is minimal and when we’re together, we’re together. we’re not stressing about presents or rushing around last minute trying to check off everyone on our list. and we make it even easier by emailing out a wish list ahead of time so again, minimal stress.
you know what? no one really misses the presents. and we usually have a really good time together. it feels like the focus is in the right place.
what do you do around the holidays to keep it simple?
#Give5 Things Away? Awesome.
Our good friend John Winsor recently started thinking about all the stuff he has. Of course, we could relate.
SIOL spurred from the very notion of examining our “stuff”—and how they shape our everyday identities and our relationships with them. How stuff can be controlling or all-consuming. It’s easy to get heavy over these things, but the positive is that we can experiment with changing.
So John thought, what if we thought less about what we consumed, and more about what we could give away? And what if we could give away 5 things a month—a t-shirt, a mug, a book? Sweet idea, sir.
He deployed a new hashtag on Twitter to track the actions: #Give5, and asked for folks to join him in hopes of fostering some thoughtfulness and dialogue on, you know, stuff.
We must admit that we feel the love surrounding it already, and implore you all to check it out.
Read John’s inspiring original post on #Give5 here.
SIOL Shout-out: HOLSTEE!
every now and then we come across brands and orgs that are doing this whole sustainability thing pretty well—we’re crazy inspired by so many things, and it motivates us to be better with our own thinking and experimentation. truth is, we crush hard.
and we kinda have this new crush on holstee. they are a new york-based company with the simple mission of designing with a conscience. that means designing everything from clothing to electronics to stuff for the home. it also means curating a selection of goods that do the same.
and, oh yeah, they also invest 10% of profits directly in micro-entrepreurs in emerging markets around the world. noble and quite neat.
cheers and a special SIOL shout-out to these lads. peep their awesome manifesto above.
ah the classic, the coveted Hermes Birkin and Kelly bags - fashionista’s swoon at the mere sight of one of these $7,500+ pieces.
we have a healthy respect for those bags here at SIOL. we love the craftsmanship, care and tradition that go into each bag. we wish that those standards were applied to more items, so that people don’t have to fork out the price of a small car to get things in their home that are made with care and high standards. we’re heartened by sites like etsy that bring that approach with a more realistic price point.
give this post a read. some highlights that we love:
“The craftsman will train for several years before they are allowed to make a bag.”
“The Hermès craftsman use the same tools that they did 150 years ago.”
“Like a thimble to a seamstress, each craftsman has his own set of tools, which are extremely personal and mould and conform to the owner’s hands and movements.”
“A craftsman takes about 3 to 4 days to assemble a bag, and each bag is worked on by one person alone. Essentially, the bag ends up being a part of the person who created it.”
And thanks to @thaz7 for the finding and sharing this link.
happy thanksgiving & peace out
in the spirit of keeping it all in balance, we bid you adieu for this holiday weekend. we’ll see you again monday.
have a safe, wonderful, calm, full, amazing weekend Sixers.
xx
sustainable skivvies=lamps for haiti
underwear is mad personal. we know, we know. and we’re not about to get into that discussion.
however, here at SIOL, we believe that initiatives that dually explore sustainability and social good are uber-awesome.
case in point: PACT. the san francisco-based underwear company specializes creating garments that are legitimately sustainable in every aspect of creation—from manufacturing, to organic materials, to dying. PACT then donates 10% of every sale to nonprofit organizations that work to support the sustainable world. it’s quite a smart business model, if we may say so.
one of PACT’s recent collections provided an even greater solution towards energy equality. designed by yves behar, the sustainable skivvies are in aid of lighting hope for haiti, a campaign created by citizen effect and earthspark international to distribute solar-powered lamps to displaced families in port-au-prince. for each PACT underwear purchase, the company then donates a solar LED lantern to a woman in a housing camp in haiti.
quality goods for a quality cause? yes, please.
“…I have had to be coordinated with the considerable variation in power.”
it’s always so weird and wonderful to see how very worldly six items or less actually is. what started as a personal project between friends quickly grew to be a truly global experiment.
throughout the journey, SIOL has been written about in too many language to count, and it’s always a humbling experience to translate these articles and glean their meanings. recently, the project received a write-up in a japanese publication that described the sixer’s feeling above—“a considerable variation in power.”
the average American tosses 67.9 pounds of clothing a year. collectively, Americans discard two quadrillion pounds (that’s a two with fifteen zeros) of used clothing and textiles into landfills each year.
holy. crap. is anyone else’s teeth hurting, stomach churning and mind exploding from those little tidbits?
if we’re honest, crushing statistics like that can be really discouraging. so it’s really encouraging to come across an project like styleta. styleta appears to be a clever fashion/charity project drummed up by some clever ones a Harvard (a clever idea coming from Harvard? so shocking)
the gist is this: people donate their gently used designer duds, the site sells them and the money goes towards charities that help women. perfect circle of win win win.
go styleta go!
giving thanks
thanksgiving is one of our favorite holidays - everything to love (food, coming together, reflection) and very little of the things that tend to stress us out and divide us (religion and finding the perfect presents come to mind in that category). we gotta say, it’s a pretty rockin’ holiday.
in the spirit of the big TG, there’s a few things that we’d like to give thanks for in the Sixer world…
1) we am so thankful for new friends. we’ve met amazing people and have been truly touched by the enthusiasm of the community (and it’s supporters) and the honesty that so many people bring to the table when they interact with us. it’s inspiring and humbling.
2) we are so thankful for everything that we’re learning - this little experiment has exposed us to so many people and ideas that we would have never been exposed to otherwise.
3) we’re really thankful that we have something here that we’re passionate about. Make no mistake, Six Items takes a lot of time (time on top of pretty crazy full-time jobs), but we can’t complain because we feel so passionately about the idea and what this idea may ultimately, if we’re lucky, have the power to do - give people a place to discuss, challenge people, maybe even make things a little better for the world in the long run (and that, if we could ever get there, would be awesome).
have an amazing holiday.
heidi & team at Six Items
