Tag: clothes

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On clothing and consumerism

This tweet resonated pretty hard with me today.

https://twitter.com/sesmith/status/1622296174777729026?s=20&t=Qg-VB8q-Qoj–W1k8G-H0w

I hadn’t ever thought of it in these exact words, but this is basically how I frame my decisions about what to buy.

The phrasing I’ve used in the past is: Yes, I can afford this; but I shouldn’t afford it. (I think I may have heard my parents say that once but I’m not positive.) This attitude has served me well as I transition to a lower household income than what I had before: I’m putting off a lot of household furniture purchases and so forth, because I don’t want to find myself in a position where I am spending money on credit card interest. (That does not spark joy.) Some interest is unavoidable; emergencies happen, mistakes happen, etc. But anything I can do to minimize that helps me feel more comfortable and secure in my life now.

And the positive ethical implications of lower overall consumption are just the icing on the cake.

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Ethical Clothes

A few recent threads on Twitter have caught my eye, about fast fashion and the ethics thereof.

It makes me think about how I went through a phase where I wanted to slowly transition to only wearing clothes made in America. That never happened, but it was instructive. I bought a couple pairs of $90 sweatpants from American Giant. I still wear them.

That last is part of what Cora Harrington has been saying for a while now: keep wearing your existing clothes. That’s it. Just…wear your clothes. The way you avoid paying slave labor wages is to buy less stuff. It’s not perfect, of course, but it’s the most immediately effective and impactful thing you can do.

I know it’s easy for me to say this. I’ve never cared too much for fashion, and my body size has stayed more or less consistent over the years. I can’t wear my jeans from middle school anymore, but I can wear my jeans from age 29 if I’m doing housework and don’t care if I need to undo the button because I ate too much fiber or something. I’m a straight sized person and yeah that’s one form of privilege. But at the same time, there are no easy answers. Sometimes the best answer is “you can’t have cute ethical cheap clothing because it doesn’t exist.” You can pick two.

But if you rewear clothes, the dollar cost averaging (or whatever you want to call it) of the Not Cheap things actually comes out pretty good.