There’s a specific video format I can’t watch anymore. A girl sits on her bedroom floor surrounded by plastic parcels. She opens them one by one. Forty, fifty pieces. “Okay so this one is SO cute, but it didn’t fit, but I’m keeping it anyway.” By the end the floor is a sea of polyester and plastic mailers, and she says “let me know which was your favourite!”
My favourite was none of it. My favourite would have been not doing this.
I’ll say what a lot of us are thinking: overconsumption is uncool. Not “problematic”, not “something to be mindful of”. Uncool. Tacky, even. And I think the sooner we say it like that, the sooner it changes.
First, the numbers (they’re bad)
The consulting firm McKinsey found that global clothing production roughly doubled between 2000 and 2014, and that the average person bought about 60 percent more clothing in 2014 than in 2000 while keeping each piece about half as long.
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s landmark report A New Textiles Economy found that the number of times a garment is worn before it’s thrown away fell by 36 percent in fifteen years. The same report gave us the image I can never shake: the equivalent of one rubbish truck of textiles is landfilled or burned every second. And less than one percent of the material used to make clothing is recycled into new clothing.
Every second. A whole truck. While you read this paragraph, about ten of them.
It’s not just us. It’s everyone in the chain.
I don’t want this to turn into another essay that blames a girl on her bedroom floor for the state of the planet. Overconsumption runs through the whole system, and the people at the bottom of it have the least power.
Corporations. The business model of fast and ultra-fast fashion depends on volume. New styles every day. Prices so low they make clothing feel disposable. A company that makes money by selling more will never voluntarily ask you to buy less.
Marketing and firms. Entire agencies exist to make you want things you didn’t know existed this morning. Flash sales, countdown timers, “only two left”, “you might also like”. Every one of these is designed to shorten the gap between wanting and buying until there’s no space left to think.
Influencers. Hauls, PR packages, “my monthly restock”, “everything I bought this week”. Creators get sent mountains of product and paid to show it off, and audiences learn that this is what a normal relationship with stuff looks like. It isn’t.
Luxury too. It’s easy to point at cheap fashion, but luxury houses overproduce as well. Some have been caught destroying unsold stock to protect their image, which is why France banned the destruction of unsold non-food goods. Expensive overconsumption is still overconsumption.
And then us. Yes, us. Me included. Each of us has the “I’ll just get it, it’s only…” moment. The difference is that we’re the only part of the chain that can actually stop without going out of business.
Why “uncool” works better than “unethical”
We’ve been told for years that overconsumption is bad for the planet, bad for garment workers, bad for our bank accounts. All true. And it barely changed anything, because guilt is a terrible motivator. Guilt makes you feel bad and then buy something to feel better.
Cool, on the other hand, moves people. Smoking didn’t fall out of fashion only because of health warnings. It fell out of fashion when it stopped looking glamorous. Fur didn’t decline because everyone read the statistics. It declined when wearing it started to look out of touch.
So let’s make the haul look out of touch. Let’s make the forty-parcel unboxing look like what it is: a little sad, a little desperate, deeply uninteresting. Let’s make knowing how to rewear something look like the most stylish thing a person can do.
What’s actually cool now
The coat you’ve had for nine years and still wear every winter. The repair you can see. The trousers you had tailored instead of replaced. The vintage piece with a story. Knowing exactly what’s in your wardrobe without needing an app. Owning thirty things you love instead of three hundred you tolerate. Being the friend people borrow from instead of the friend whose cupboard doesn’t close.
None of that is new. Our grandmothers did all of it. It just wasn’t called sustainable. It was called having nice things and looking after them.
Buy less. Buy better. Wear it to death.
I’m not asking anyone to stop shopping. I love clothes. I write about clothes for a living. I’m asking us to stop treating shopping as a hobby and start treating it as a decision.
Ask whether you’d still want it if nobody would ever see you in it. Ask how many times you’ll actually wear it, honestly. Ask where it goes when you’re done. And if the honest answer to any of those is uncomfortable, put the phone down. That small moment of not buying is the coolest thing you’ll do all week.
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