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Not Shopping For A Year Has Changed How I See Clothes Completely

  • Phoebe Parke

Here's everything I learned on the journey...

There’s a well-read New York Times ar­ti­cle by Amer­i­can au­thor Ann Patch­ett ti­tled ‘My Year of No Shop­ping’ in which she ex­plains the process of not buy­ing cloth­ing, elec­tron­ics or gifts for a whole year. She used beauty prod­ucts she found un­der her sink, gave books as pre­sents and only bought new es­sen­tials once she’d run out of what she had.
She made the de­ci­sion to stop shop­ping af­ter a meet­ing with a friend who was wear­ing a gor­geous coat, when asked about the coat the friend replied non­cha­lantly ‘I bought it at the end of my no-shop­ping year.’
Read the full article on Grazia here
I wish I could say I was half as dis­ci­plined as Patch­ett, or that my no-shop­ping in­spi­ra­tion was as glam­ourous as hers. I gave up buy­ing clothes, shoes and ac­ces­sories for a year, but still bought gifts, beauty prod­ucts and books.
It all started halfway through Jan­u­ary 2018 when I re­alised I had­n’t bought any clothes so far that year - and I had an am­bi­tious sav­ings goal to reach by 2019. Us­ing spend­ing tracker Money Dash­board which cat­e­gorises your pur­chases, I looked down the list of things I was spend­ing money on; food, ap­pear­ance, bills, en­ter­tain­ment, hol­i­days etc., and de­cided cloth­ing would be eas­i­est sub-cat­e­gory to elim­i­nate com­pletely.
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