Project 333

Project 333 is a wardrobe challenge with a rule short enough to remember: dress with 33 items or fewer for three months. Courtney Carver, who writes about simple living on her site Be More with Less, first wrote about it in 2010, and in 2020 she published a book of the same name. Thousands of people have tried it since, which makes it the best-known capsule experiment there is.

It works because it is temporary and strict. Three months is short enough to commit to and long enough to change habits. Thirty-three is small enough to force real choices and large enough for an ordinary life.

The rules and the exceptions

In Carver’s version, the 33 items include clothing, accessories, jewelry, outerwear and shoes. Five things are left out of the count:

• a wedding ring or other sentimental jewelry you never take off
• underwear
• sleepwear
• clothes you lounge in at home
• workout clothes, as long as they are only worn to work out

You choose your 33, pack everything else into a box, seal it with tape and put it out of sight. Then you live with your choices for three months.

There is one more rule that people tend to miss. Carver writes that the challenge is not meant to be a project in suffering. If something does not fit or is in poor condition, replace it. The count stays at 33. She also makes clear that people adapt the rules to their own lives, and that this is allowed.

A few edge cases come up often. A handbag counts. So do sunglasses, a belt and a watch you wear every day. A coat counts even if you only wear it outdoors. Our own suggestion for a required work uniform is to treat it like workout clothes, worn for one purpose only and left out of the count.

How to pick 33 from a full closet

Choosing from a closet of 150 pieces can feel impossible, so make it a sequence.

1. Start with the pieces that eat the count. Choose shoes and outer layers first: three to five pairs of shoes and two or three coats or jackets. In winter these alone can take ten slots, and it is better to know that early.
2. Choose the bottoms next. Four to seven pairs of trousers, jeans or skirts, in colors that work with your shoes.
3. Fill in tops and knits. With what is left, usually ten to fifteen slots, pick the tops and sweaters that go with the most bottoms.
4. Finish with accessories. Two to four scarves, belts, bags or pieces of jewelry, if any slots remain.
5. Check the count, and check the forecast. Thirty-three, and enough layers for the coldest and warmest weeks of the season you are in.

Choose from what you wore last season, not from what you wish you wore. The challenge is about the life you have.

What the first two weeks feel like

The first few days usually feel easy, even a little exciting. Mornings are faster, and the closet looks calm.

Somewhere in the first or second week, a real gap tends to show up. It rains and you have no shoes for it, or an event arrives that none of your 33 can handle. This is the moment people either quit or learn something. Our suggestion: if the gap is real, swap one item out and one item in from the box, so the count stays at 33. If the gap turns out to be boredom, wait it out. Boredom usually fades by the third week, once you start combining pieces you never thought to put together.

You will also notice who comments. Carver writes that people generally do not notice you are wearing the same 33 items, and that has a basis in research: we consistently overestimate how much others pay attention to what we wear. Our guide to dressing in repeats covers the evidence.

What people learn

When the three months end, you open the box. That moment is the real result of the challenge. Most people find several things in it they forgot they owned, and a few they missed every week.

Three lessons come up again and again:

• Most of a closet is idle. In WRAP’s large 2012 survey of UK households, around 30 percent of the clothing in an average wardrobe had not been worn for at least a year. A sealed box makes that number personal.
• Your style is narrower than your closet. The 33 you chose, and the ones you actually wore, describe it better than anything you own.
• A few pieces do most of the work. Some of your 33 will be worn twice a week. Those are the pieces worth replacing carefully when they wear out.

How it connects to the Diderot chain

The Diderot effect needs a mismatch to get started: a new thing arrives and the old things around it suddenly look wrong. Project 333 interrupts that in three ways.

First, the box takes the comparison set out of view. With most of your clothes taped away, there is less around a new purchase to look shabby beside it. Second, the count turns every purchase into a swap, which is one in, one out built into the rules. Third, three months of living with 33 pieces gives you a standard to judge new things against. When something does not fit with the 33, it stands out as the odd one, not the old one.

It is not a no-buy challenge, and it does not have to be. If you want to stop buying clothes entirely for a while, our no-buy year covers that. Project 333 is gentler. It changes what you buy by changing what you can see.

After the three months

Unpack the box slowly. Bring back what you missed, and let go of anything you did not reach for once in three months, especially the pieces you kept because of what they cost. Then pick the next 33 for the coming season, using what you learned. Many people keep going for a year, and by the fourth round the choosing takes minutes.

If you want a more general version without a fixed count, our capsule wardrobe guide explains how to set your own size.