This is the last article of clothing I bought.
I wanted to start this blog on Easter, which would have been symbolic, in an ironic way. Perhaps in a predictive way.
I tend to procrastinate; I have lots of big ideas, but few of them actually make it into the air, and even fewer of them have actually flown. To quote Commander Lightyear, it’s more “falling with style.” Even my best ideas usually find themselves stifled between the pages of this notebook or that journal or soaked under a cold drink on one of the business reply envelopes a good friend taught me to see as free scrap paper. So I am just getting around to what really should have been done a week ago. Typical!
What I am doing here is part experiment, maybe part statement, all hopeful ambition, and may evolve (devolve?) into performance art.
What will it be like to go a whole year, 365 days starting now, without buying clothes for myself?
I don’t have a “problem” with shopping. I have less than $1500 in credit card debt, I own my home, my car is paid off, I have a chunk of money in a retirement account, and money in savings. In fact, I love clothes, if not always shopping itself, and I read fashion mags and know the season’s dos and don’ts.
So why do it? All I’m going to do is drive myself crazy, right? Maybe.
Do you know what happens to the clothes we middle classers cast off? First of all, only a small percent of the clothes we give away in this country are actually worn out. I’d guess that’s equally true in other developed countries with substantial middle classes. Those clothes make their way down through the ranks, out through the hind end of Goodwill and the Salvation Army and eventually into giant bales of aid sent to Africa. What it does there is depress the value of cotton, and render farming textile crops or weaving fabric exercises in humility and futility. It takes away the potential livelihoods of those people who would be traditionally occupied as dressmakers and shopkeepers. It allows land to go uncultivated in the most rapidly spreading patch of desert in the world.
On the other end of its production, it employs women in Asia at slave wages, and keeps children from school to do piecework for a pittance. Some clothing manufacturers foul the environment around them, (in addition to their workers) with dyes and solvents while they’re making our clothes out of plastic. These companies have moved to cities we don’t know how to pronounce in countries we know from National Geographic because there are few regulations, the labor is cheap and disorganized, and do they really need another reason?
So there’s that, but really, I just want to know if I can do it. Any woman who enjoys getting dressed would find it a struggle. I wonder how I’ll feel when I really want something different to wear. I wonder if I’ll have ideas about different things, or what I will do with the energy and time I currently spend reading about, looking at, and thinking about clothes. That’s what I want to write about. I wonder how creative I will get as I try to adapt to stay current, if that will carry over into other parts of my life. I wonder how out of style I will look and feel in a year, and what I might learn about myself.
I’ll post pictures everyday, so that there will be a record of what a whole year with no new clothes looks like.
Next: What are the rules?
