‘I QUIT BUYING CLOTHES FOR A YEAR (AND WHAT IT TAUGHT ME)’
By Emma Edwards
While buying lots of clothes for nights out as a uni student isn’t exactly a unique experience, for me it was an underlying self-erasure that motivated so many of my clothing purchases.
Because I felt so deeply, completely, truly less than other people, buying a new outfit simply became a cycle of normalcy. That created a cycle. Feel crap. Buy clothes. Feel better. Feel crap again. Repeat.
Now that sounds pretty bleak, but really, the quietness of it all, the way it was just so deeply embedded in the way I saw myself, meant it just went unnoticed. It was my normal and the normal of so many others, too.
And because we weren’t talking a Carrie Bradshaw-style Manolo Blahnik addiction at $400 a pop, it became even easier to ignore. The amounts I was spending were, in isolation, so small that I didn’t really consider the impact it would have on my finances, despite the fact my attempts to save were often trampled on by my latest insecurity and the new outfit I’d prescribed as a solution.
Behaviour patterns on your bank balance
The effect of emotionally driven behavioural patterns on your bank balance is seldom discussed in depth in the personal finance world. In fact, that was a big reason I wrote my first book, because breaking out of those behavioural traps was what finally helped me turn my finances around.
My relationship with clothing was linked to my relationship with money but was also its own beast. I did a lot of work on my spending habits, but this co-dependency with clothes really lingered.
I’d gotten so much better from a financial sense but, ultimately, clothes were still my Achilles heel. While I wasn’t spending money I didn’t have anymore, nor chucking things on a credit card to deal with later, I was still always a victim to a great item of clothing. That connection between my relationship with myself and using clothes to remedy that was still there, lurking beneath my otherwise well-developed financial confidence.
Look the part, be the part?
At the end of 2022, I went all in on my side hustle as a freelance writer and content creator, and I hoped that leaving a job I was struggling with would help improve my sense of self-image.
This change in career path and work normalcy sparked a change in identity and a craving to be successful that lent itself perfectly to my attempts to buy my identity. The job I’d left before going into self-employment full-time was a pretty toxic environment, and my confidence was left shattered for quite some time.
That, combined with the identity shift of being newly self-employed and making this big bet on myself, plus the vulnerability that comes with going out on your own and not ‘quantum leaping’ to exponential success, created a breeding ground for my clothes-buying compulsions to reactivate.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard someone say, ‘Once I quit my job and went all in, I was making three times my salary within the first year’. Yeah, didn’t happen to me, gang. Still waiting for that magical day. I’ll keep you posted.
I’d see other businesswomen in matching pink suits or minimalist beige outfits and equate that to their success. If I looked the part, I’d be the part, right? I developed this belief that if I could dress the part, cosplay as the confident, knowledgeable, expert businesswoman, that would be the difference between adding up whether I’d made enough to cover my expenses that month and thriving in self-employment.
Enter: the idea for an experiment
Safe to say I’d had enough of the hold clothes had over me. I was sick of always buying clothes and never having anything I felt good in. I knew I was too reliant on the dopamine of having an online order delivered, and I wanted to do something radical to change it.
And so, in October of 2022, I started to seriously entertain taking a year off buying clothes. I’m not entirely sure where I got the idea or how it first entered my mind as a possibility, but the more I thought about it, the more I was sold.
The Wardrobe Project changed me forever
Regardless of the ups and downs, I know one thing for certain: The Wardrobe Project changed me forever. Wow, could I be more dramatic?! It’s not lost on me that it’s kinda wild to sit here and say that I didn’t buy clothes for a year and it changed me forever, but I’m being 100 per cent genuine when I say this. It truly speaks to the power of clothes, and the impacts of mass production, overconsumption culture and ever-evolving image standards for women.
For so many years I struggled with my self-image, with my body and with the way I looked. I grew up dieting, struggled with disordered eating, often felt like an outsider in social settings and, honestly, never really felt attractive. I’d struggled with my finances, identified with being ‘bad with money’ and been stuck on the hamster wheel of spending and credit card debt before I knew better.
Clothes were present in both of these challenges, acting as an emotional crutch, an outlet when I needed to feel something or absolve myself of emotional discomfort. Spending brought relief, and clothes did, too. I was able to overcome a lot of the financial challenges through working on my money beliefs and habits — you can read about that in my first book, Good With Money.
But the clothes stuff required its own inner work to break. I might not have been in financial debt anymore, but I remained in debt to myself. I owed myself respect and love and care and acceptance, and the Project taught me that.
Withdrawing from the wardrobe treadmill meant actually meeting myself and confronting who I’d been trying to be, and why I’d been trying to dress up as a different person. Having no choice but to see myself, and to get comfortable with who I was outside of newness, allowed me to gradually neutralise the way I felt about myself, and start to find the joy in being creative with myself and my style, without relying on bolstering my confidence with the dopamine of buying.
I could see so clearly how much the dopamine hit of a new outfit had had a hold over me, and just how damaging the behavioural aspect of fast fashion and social media trends have become on our buying habits.
The ever-moving goal posts for women keep us in a trap of buying to be somebody, without ever stopping to look in the mirror at who we already are. And that’s opened me up to a whole new approach to clothing, style and consumption on every level.
Edited extract from The Wardrobe Project: A year of buying less and liking yourself more by Emma Edwards (Wiley, $34.95).
THE WOMAN BEHIND THE WORDS
Financial behaviour specialist Emma Edwards, founder of The Broke Generation, shares her radical experiment: a whole year without buying a single item of clothing. No new outfits, no second-hand finds, not even rentals. What began as a no-buy challenge soon became a powerful lesson in self-worth, resilience, and the surprising freedom of living with less.
MUSE PAPER
ISSUE 09