Fast Fashion, Black Friday and "The True Cost"

I'm going to begin with my accountability this week, because last week's impulse dress purchase really annoyed me! Don't get me wrong, it's a gorgeous dress, and in many ways it was a 'sensible' purchase - secondhand, discounted, versatile - but one thing I have learned during the year and a half I've been doing this experiment is that the more rigidly I stick to my self-imposed rules, the more change and freedom I experience, mentally and emotionally.

Full disclosure, I did make two artist-supporting purchases this week, a considered decision I was financially comfortable to make (I did feel a big guilty twinge so had to go and re-read my own rules post to remind me that it was OK! Need to watch that guilt reflex - yes I want to stop overshopping, no I don't want to beat myself up about it or end up pathologically unable to buy myself things ever). I bought three hand-painted patches from a local lass to cover a hole in and generally spruce up a patterned vintage cardigan I bought in a charity shop last year, and an anti-capitalist mini-zine from another feminist artist (wow I'm so punk rock and stuff) for the princely sum of £1. So, not breaking my official rules, not breaking the bank, and actually mending my knackered cardigan. Everything cool here, accountability team?

This week, I was also lucky enough to get an advance review copy of Jill Chivers's book Shop Your Wardrobe. I read Jill's blog in its entirety during my early shopping ban attempt, and it kept me going - chatty in style, indomitable in spirit, and full of reflections and experiences in which I could recognise myself. I was hoping that her book would do the same for me this week, and perhaps help me get a grip on the monthly blips that are blighting my current attempts to stop shopping. I certainly enjoyed reading it - it was warm, and funny, and very reassuring. Even Jill had a ban break.

Perhaps a year without any shopping whatsoever is an unrealistic challenge. In many ways I worry about what I am giving up, and I often feel discomfort about what I might be missing out on. But I've had glimpses of a life without the urge to buy, buy, buy, and so I know that this constant wanting is just a product of my conditioning. I want to get to the other side of that, and see what it's like.

Fast Fashion's True Cost

During my first attempt at a shopping ban, I watched a documentary called The True Cost, which shows the damage caused to people and planet by Western society's addiction to cheap, fast fashion. (If you haven't watched it, I'd certainly recommend it.) In silence as the credits rolled, I felt the weight of all the clothes I had bought and never worn and given to charity shops, the impulse buys, the shopping sprees, the sale 'bargains', the piles of clothes on my bedroom floor, trampled and unappreciated.

For so many years I had bought unthinkingly, never stopping to consider where my clothes had come from, whose hands had cut the cloth and stitched the seams. I knew about sweatshops, of course, we all do - it's an uncomfortable truth we dance around and ignore as we pile clothes into our baskets in Zara and H&M. We are proud of our bargains. We think we are savvy shoppers. Meanwhile workers labour for a pittance in unsafe buildings and are gunned down in the streets protesting for fair pay.

My concerns about being the worst-dressed in my friend group, the problem of having too many clothes, seemed suddenly inutterably, pathetically first world and shallow. My shopping ban took on new meaning as I realised that my greed and wastefulness were contributing to this horrific state of affairs. In the face of Rana Plaza and the thousands of garment workers who died when the building collapsed, I sat mute, shocked and guilty. How could we be doing this to each other? In the name of fashion?! It was madness, that people were injured, dying, rivers poisoned, children enslaved, so that we in the West could continue to buy - and thoughtlessly dispose of - more cheap clothes and fleeting trends than we know what to do with. A truth we all live with and ignore, because it might be inconvenient. Because we might have to stop what we are doing. Because we might have to admit we don't really need another pair of pyjamas or jeans or cute summer dress or this season's colour handbag and actually we already have too much...

For a long time I had avoided looking at myself and my habits, at the impact of my actions. Now I had stopped avoiding the facts, I couldn't put my head back in the sand. It's too easy to gloss over where things come from, and although I'm only one person and I knew my shopping habits alone wouldn't change the world, I also knew I didn't want to be part of the problem and keep contributing during my lifetime to such a harmful industry.

My plan going forward - after the shopping ban - had been to try to save money by buying clothes more cheaply. Now I don't think I could buy a brand new £12.99 dress without wondering which individual, less fortunate than myself, is carrying the real cost. Yes, I need to save money, but perhaps the best way to do that is to just not buy so damn much and to start taking better care of what I already have. 

Black Friday

On a related note, tomorrow is of course Black Friday, when millions of people annually trample each other, break the internet, and actually kill each other to spaff billions of pounds on things they don't need, want, or have room for, largely because those who profit from it decreed it should be so.

Obviously I will not be spending money on Black Friday, but I do encourage my non-masochistic-shopping-ban-doing friends to join me in turning up our collective nose at this orgy of greed and consumerism. Fashion Revolution reminds us "it would take a major fashion CEO just four days to earn what a female garment worker makes in her lifetime". Please, let's stop encouraging this culture of exploitation. Together we can hit them where it hurts - in the wallet.