In the new book, The Wardrobe Project (Wiley $34.95), financial behaviour specialist Emma Edwards, founder of The Broke Generation, shares her radical experiment: a whole year without buying a single item of clothing. No new outfits, no second-hand finds, not even rentals. What began as a no-buy challenge soon became a powerful lesson in self-worth, resilience, and the surprising freedom of living with less. In the exclusive extract below, Emma shares what she learnt after quitting shopping for a full year:
‘Your parcel will be delivered today’ … the text message says. I immediately begin counting down the hours, jumping out of my seat at every rumble up my driveway. Maybe that’s the delivery bloke. Finally, a knock at the door. I skid on my socks to the front door and hold out my hands to receive the package from the postie. Slamming the door shut after one too many choruses of ‘thanks so much!’, I pace to my bedroom and start tearing the plastic open like a lion devouring prey. The fucking tape won’t tear. I get angry and stomp off to find the scissors.
I grab a kitchen knife instead. After hacking into the package, I lift out and unfurl a black dress. It’s crinkled from being packaged up, and it doesn’t look as nice as it did online. I slip the dress on, choosing to ignore the fact I’m wearing an ill-fitting bra and underwear that’s cutting me up like a Christmas ham.
Staring into the mirror, I tilt my head to one side and sigh. The dress looks nothing like I hoped it would, but I can’t work out if that’s because my hair is messy and I’m not sure whether I brushed my teeth today, or if it’s because one of my thighs alone probably weighs more than the model wearing it in the picture on the website. Or maybe the dress just isn’t that nice.
I hear three chimes coming from the other room. It’s my ten-minute calendar warning for my next meeting. I take the dress off, put it back in its packaging, contort myself back into my leggings and sit down at my desk. In my head is a weird mix of disappointment and justification that I can’t quite reconcile. I join my meeting and get on with my day, but it won’t be long before the next shiny thing catches my eye and promises me the world.
Welcome to my brain. You might relate to this story. You, too, might be one of those people who has at one point thought a new piece of clothing was the answer to all your problems — or to a bad day, a crisis of confidence or the societal pressures that magnify our manufactured flaws.
Clothes have had a power over me for as long as I can remember. They’d always be the thing I’d want to spend my money on, and a cute outfit would be the first thing to derail my budget, even once I’d got most of my financial ducks in a row — the one behaviour that
always tripped me up was wanting to buy a new outfit. Fashion is weird, right? On the one hand, we need to wear clothes for warmth, just like we need to eat food to survive, but our
relationship with these things is far from utilitarian. I’m certain a good burger can begin to mend a broken heart, and an online clothes order has dragged me through all manner of life’s stressors, but we don’t consume these things out of necessity.
A couple of years ago, I started to realise I was on a hamster wheel when it came to my wardrobe. I was always searching for the next thing, never quite satisfied with what I had, or the way my clothes made me feel. I was searching for something, and I was searching for
it on a rack. Curious as to why I could go from living my life perfectly normally one minute to punching in my credit card information with desire surging through my body the next, I started to really look at the way I was buying clothes and the feelings I had when I was buying them — and I didn’t like what I saw. I’ve struggled with my confidence and self-image in varying capacities my entire life, and I’d started to realise I used clothes as a
way to buffer those emotions. Hated what I saw in the mirror? I could buy something and feel better for a bit. Buying clothes felt like I was taking control, but really, I was fuelling the fire.
And this habit got expensive. I worked out I had spent thousands in one year on clothes — which might be fine if I felt good in what I was wearing, but I didn’t. I still lusted after outfits I saw on social media and longed for the day I finally looked the way I wanted to. So I decided to conduct an experiment — one whole year without buying clothes. It was my attempt to change my relationship with clothes, and myself, step off the wardrobe treadmill, and stop relying on new outfits to feel any semblance of confidence in the way I looked.
The Wardrobe Project contains everything I learned from interrogating my clothing consumption habits for a whole year, and what happened afterwards. Spoiler alert: I made it to the end, and I learned a heck of a lot along the way.
Make no mistake, you will not find me telling you to quit buying clothes altogether. I love a slappin’ outfit as much as the next girl. But I want to scrub your mind of all the ways you’ve
been conditioned to consume clothing — from emotional soothing and trying to be who you’ve been told to be, to retailer tactics, algorithmic advertising and our worsening addiction to dopamine. It’s more than okay to enjoy clothes, but to fully do so, we have to learn to separate style from spending. When we do, it benefits our finances, our confidence and the planet. It’s not wrong to want to look good or to find joy in clothing — it just
needs to be on your terms, not via a standard that’s been dictated to you by patriarchal capitalism that’s profiting off your insecurities. It’s about taking back your power, changing the way you see yourself and breaking the cycle of outsourcing your identity to consumption.
Edited extract from The Wardrobe Project: A year of buying less and liking yourself more by Emma Edwards (Wiley, $34.95), available now at all leading retailers.
