Overcoming first hand shopper’s guilt
For those of us worn out from the fight of secondhand shopping
On a recent OOTD TikTok post (yea I’m starting to do those now- I can’t believe it either), I mentioned that while I have majority secondhand clothing in my wardrobe right now, I am starting to get back into buying clothing first-hand….and I have such a guilty conscience about it.
As you’re well aware by now, a few years ago I made the decision to blow up my life and leave the fashion industry- the only professional industry I’d ever been a part of in my life. There were a lot of motivations for this leap of faith (and you can hear about them here if you’re on Spotify and here if you’re on Apple Music). But as far as motivations go, chief among them was the level of disgust I felt at how wasteful and empty things had begun to feel. What felt like an industry of creation and innovation took a turn for the worse and felt more like it was about consumption and novelty.
I used to be in charge of the ‘fashion month’ (that's New York, Milan and Paris fashion weeks in succession) calendar in a previous role, and increasingly more and more appointments were being added every season. Off- peak seasons like pre-fall (my favorite season for RTW actually) became almost as full as appointments for the regular fall/winter season. Famously, designers like Marc Jacobs and Alexander Wang made the decision to no longer show their collections during the time-slots of the Fashion Week calendar, preferring to show at their own pace and citing creative burnout. There was simply too much expectation to constantly show something new.
And because art imitates life, this increased output expectation is directly linked to the public’s insatiable need to be surprised. Add to that the late-stage capitalist beliefs of fashion conglomerates like LVMH which want to see constant year-over-year growth and you find yourself in a constant hamster wheel of production. And when novelty becomes the norm, you’ll soon find that nothing is actually exciting anymore. It’s just newness for the sake of newness.
And while I knew all of this was wasteful on an abstract level, the rise of some incredible journalistic work about the environmental damage of the fashion industry brought me face to face with the real world implications of this overproduction. I saw insane images like the Atacama Desert in Chile, which is a literal wasteland of unwanted clothes.
So as someone who believes in actionable items- as in things I have the power to change today instead of devoting all my immediate energy to a solution that requires buy-in from more people- I decided to stop buying clothes first-hand. For years. I learned a lot from this years-long social experiment. We have an unfathomable amount of clothing already in existence that no one wants. We don’t believe in mending and repairing anymore- I see things all the time that could be fixed with a simple DIY at the thrift store. We in the West think that the Global South would be all too happy to take our scraps and that allows a lot of us to be absolved of guilt we should rightfully have behind buying things we don’t really want in the hopes that it makes us feel something. And upon realizing that stuff doesn’t fill the void we literally double it and pass it to the next person in another country.
But I am so tired of the hidden costs of shopping secondhand- the cost of time, labor and energy. Sitting in 1 thrift store for hours combing through racks just to come away with 5 or 6 pieces if I’m lucky. My sense of style is refined enough at this stage of my life that I know exactly what I want. The thrift is a great place for wonder and discovery but frankly, I’ve discovered enough about myself to know what my style is. And sitting in a thrift store for half of my precious Saturday to come away with a couple items is no longer an efficient use of my time. I try to shop from resellers a good amount of the time now, but that is also still a process full of hidden costs. For example, constantly having to check back every so often to see if someone is finally selling a certain coveted item in my size.
The way I see it, buying clothing firsthand is not a new business model. The issue for me is not solely in being a paying customer, but in how often I feel the need to buy new things and how fast paced the production cycle is for the brands that I’m buying. Back in my 20s when I was consistently the same size, I had items from places like Zara and MANGO that were in my closet for years. And after it was time to part ways, I resold these items to someone else who wanted to give them a good home. When I look back on my life, I’ve always had a sustainable shopping cadence as a purchaser. There are too many people in the world who are chasing fulfillment in their stuff and it’s having a direct impact on our world. With all due respect…..I have never been one of those people. Couple that with the ultra fast fashion model of brands like SHEIN and the relentless need to scale businesses for conglomerates like LVMH and we have a world that is filled to the brim with stuff.
But I’ve decided that in the midst of all that stuff, I have the capability to keep practicing intentional shopping. I can buy things that serve multiple uses in my closet as I already do- one of my core tenets is to dedicate the majority of my wardrobe to items that can be worn 3 out of 4 seasons. I don’t have to buy 5 additional things just because there’s a sale happening that’s too good to be true when I only really wanted 2 things. I can constantly audit my wardrobe and make sure I take note of the things I bought that I hardly ever wear, so I don’t keep buying things reminiscent of that and feeling the need to keep shopping (believe me, not enough people do this). And of course if I find something I wanted on the secondhand market, I will prioritize buying it there (I’ve made a years-long decision now to buy leather and fur on the secondhand market exclusively for example). I’m not a bad person because I don’t want shopping to become an Olympic sport. I just have to practice mindfulness every step of the way.
TL:DR: I want to go back to shopping for things first hand even though I feel guilty about it
-xoxo Jenn
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