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Lessons from My Wardrobe
Like most women I like nice clothes and have spent my fair share of money keeping my wardrobe ( and my husbands!) stuffed and overflowing. I also LOVE shoes and a few months ago ruthlessly culled my shoe collection down to only 31 pairs!
It has been 5 months since I bought clothes or shoes.
After cleaning out my wardrobe and seeing how wasteful I had been I made the decision not to buy any clothes or shoes for a year. Why? A couple of reasons.
- I felt shocked and ashamed of my wastefulness
- I had more than enough clothes to wear in sizes ranging from 12-20!
- I wanted to explore what this wastefulness had been about really
- I needed to go without for a decent period, long enough to 'feel' it
- I like a challenge!
Lessons from My Wardrobe:
- I expected to feel deprived, but I don't
- I have more time as I don't go down the street to browse through the shops anymore
- It actually feels quite liberating knowing I don't have to think about buying anything until July 2008. It's easy now
- I rarely go to the shops now apart from a fortnightly grocery shop
- I repair and mend clothes now instead of tossing them
- I worry less about what I wear than I did before
- I only wear 4 pair of shoes on a regular basis
- I take better care of the clothes I have as I know they have to last
- I can be frugal and fashionable
- I used to clothes shop to cheer myself up. It didn't work.
- I had so many clothes I couldn't find and use what I already had so I bought more.
- I used to shop instead of face how I really felt inside
I don't think I had a compulsive spending problem or anything major. I just got into bad habits over the years of spending money on things that I didn't need, I just wanted them. Then it becomes easy to use spending to 'feel good' for a short time.
It has been a very interesting challenge and one I am glad I took. Thinking about waiting another 7 months to spend money on clothes and shoes does not feel difficult at all right now.
My life has been cluttered for too long. Clothes were just another form of clutter for me.
5 comments:
Fantastic post! I'm not a shoe girl myself, but I do seem to have accumulated a lot of clothes over the years. Might have to set myself a clothes purging challenge this weekend.
Now books and DVD's, that's where I could not buy any for a year.
This is such an appropriate post for me. I don't have a lot of clothes, but I do need to do a clothes purge. I'm starting my new job on Monday and I committed the terrible sin of buying a few new things for my new job before the clothes purge. But now that I have read this, the purge will definitely take place on Friday!
Great post! We pretty much stopped all clothes shopping when money got tight. I thought I would feel deprived, but it hasn't been bad. You're right....it IS liberating!
Normally by now I'd be starting to worry about what we're all going to wear for Christmas. I don't know exactly what we're going to wear this year, but I do know our outfits are in our closets somewhere. :)
One of the biggest ways for me to weed out stuff I hang onto for way to long is to either pretend I'm moving or actually MOVE. When I moved in August after living in one place for seven years, I realized I had saved clothes from seven years ago that I hadn't worn in all that time.
I still had maternity clothes - fat clothes, skinny(er) clothes and everything in between. For some reason, I kept clothes I didn't even like.
Getting those things out of my life, made me feel more free and now I can make a conscious decision on what I will wear.
Your commitment will show you that we often get things just to have them - not because they add to our happiness.
Cool post.
My wife tells me all the time: If you haven't worn it in a year then get rid of it! I recently got rid of a good amount of clothes from my closet that I don't wear anymore. Now when I buy clothes I make sure to understand why I'm buying them and make sure it's stuff I will use.
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