I Shop Less, Therefore My Closet Is More

Shift that shopping mindset

I Shop Less, Therefore My Closet is More

I used to be a serial thrifter. Anytime I felt bored I found myself at the nearest thrift store. This became a habit, a morally neutral one — not necessarily bad and not necessarily good. After all, I work in, study, and love fashion — so why not shop? I learned the hard way that there are in fact many reasons to not shop, or rather, many reasons to shop more intentionally.

In recent years, I became familiar with a new approach to shopping and fashion consumption, introduced to me by one of Ashley aka Best Dressed’s YouTube videos. The video was a closet cleanout with four criteria for keeping a garment.

1. “Do I wear it often?”

Okay, fair. Who should keep something if they don’t wear it often?

2. “Does it fit well?”

Also, very fair. But still some resistance — I swear, one day, I will alter those pants in my closet that fall off my hips in their current state. But let me keep them, I will alter them one day. Maybe.

3. “Comfortable fabric.”

It's hard to argue with this one, but I still fought to rationalize my blister-causing heels and their place in my closet.

4. “Does it make me feel like myself?”

Well, what does make me feel like myself? I feel like myself in the vintage Mod dress I bargained for on Depop. I also feel like myself in the cheetah print coat that was a hand-me-down, the one that makes me want to practice my Jersey accent. I feel like myself in a lot of my clothes, isn’t that the point of them? Well, I said a lot, not all, so there must be some that I don’t love. Looks like it’s time for a closet cleanout.

Garment by Lydia Morrow via Pinterest

And so I cleansed my closet. It felt good, as does any decluttering activity. One of Ashley’s take-aways from her YouTube video was that she wanted to shop less and more intentionally. I was incredibly resistant to this approach because I saw shopping as a “shop more, have more, love more” mindset, not “shop less, have less, love more.” I chased the indulgence and dopamine rush that came with a new purchase — a brand new garment that I had free reign over and could wear every which way till Tuesday. My kind of high.

I recently broke my “no buy” streak for a score on The Real Real. A delicious cream Dries Van Noten blouse and a versatile navy blue Jil Sander skirt. These are pieces I will cherish for as long as I have them, and I have realized that that is the feeling I want to chase — not a fast dopamine hit that fades as fast as it comes, but a long-lasting feeling of appreciation, care, and infatuation.

In the past, I would walk into a Goodwill with all guns blazing, ready to scour those racks picking up anything and everything that caught my eye. This led to a lot of regretful purchases and a lot of trips back to said Goodwill to re-donate. This cycle went against everything I stand for. Now, I don’t beat myself up for this because I believe shopping is a learned skill, not something we come out of the womb knowing how to do. Capitalism pushes us to consume, consume, and consume — no questions asked. Why are we so resistant to asking those questions, though? Perhaps because those questions would lead to answers we don’t like, answers that result in walking out of the store empty-handed.

“There are no limits to consumption… If it was that which is naively taken to be, absorption, a devouring, then we should achieve…satisfaction. But we know that this is not the case: we want to consume more and more…If consumption appears to be irrepressible, this is precisely because it is a total idealist practice which has no longer anything to do (beyond a certain point) with the satisfaction of needs…” (Baudrillard, 1988:24). (From an academic essay by Nimet Harmanci)

Defeat quickly seeps in when leaving a clothing store empty-handed. Shopping has become an all-or-nothing approach, leaving with nothing means you gained nothing. Perhaps clothing consumption is not that black and white, it exists within hues of grey.

Shopping is more than a monetary exchange for goods and services — it is also an experience. From taking piles of clothes into the dressing room, FaceTiming your sisters to get their opinions on the dress you’re unsure of, feeling fabric on your body, observing what you like and don’t like, chatting with sales associates and fellow customers, and gathering inspiration all around you, shopping is an intimate and personable experience.

Art by Barbara Kruger

The act of consumption, specifically fashion consumption, is nuanced and it is time we treat it as such. It’s an unrealistic expectation that you will like and keep everything you ever buy, and it’s unrealistic and dangerous to consume fashion with haste and no regard for the impacts of it. We are all making imperfect decisions against the backdrop of an imperfect world, and it is wrong to expect and demand perfection from fellow consumers. If we acknowledge the complexities that come with something such as shopping, then we can grow and evolve as consumers.

I now do my best to shop more intentionally and at a slower pace to ensure I truly love and adore the pieces I own, but there are times when I decide to pull the trigger on a purchase. There is no right or wrong, but there are ways to improve, for the betterment of oneself and the world around them.