How to Be an Unapologetic Outfit Repeater
If you saw me wearing this yesterday... thanks for remembering what I wore yesterday <3
Fashion is a cosmos — of expression and liberation; of culture and history. There is so much to be cherished in the act of getting dressed, so why does my wardrobe more often feel like a symbol of all that I don’t have, rather than all that I do?
I want to preface this exploration of consumerism, colonialism, and patriarchy by saying that I love clothes. I love putting together a ‘fit. I love witnessing others serving ‘fits. It’s one of my principal joys of existing in public (despite all of my dad’s attempts in my youth to convince me leaving the house wasn’t always a fashion show).
Unfortunately, this joy is also a massive business opportunity, and — shockingly — the wealthy elite aren’t passing up billions of dollars in favour of fair wages, humane working conditions, pollution mitigation, and giving women a fucking break. So, no, that urge to buy a new outfit for every occasion isn’t harmless. Far from it. I’ve been attuned to this truth for awhile, but there’s nothing like whittling down your wardrobe to the size of one checked bag and carry-on to make you interrogate the sinister social pressures fuelling your outfit anxiety on a whole new level — and, hopefully, begin to liberate yourself from them.
While I’ve been committed to the pre-loved life for the bulk of my twenties, my teens were a completely different story. A devoted Tumblr girl from the ages of about 11 to 16, a tendency to preoccupy myself with curating my “image” was working overtime in my psyche long before I entered the workforce. Once I turned 15 and started bussing tables on the weekends and after school — and funds began dribbling into my bank account outside of holidays and birthdays — my financial focus was singular and obsessive.
This era of my life in a snapshot: Urban Outfitters taking up permanent, prime real estate in my tab bar — cart full, wishlist overflowing. Lists of all the garments my wardrobe was “missing” — and would finally be “complete” once it no longer was — crowding the pages of my journals. Hours spent huddled in the backseats of my friends’ parents’ cars on the weekends, en route to bigger and better malls — malls that had stores like Brandy Melville, Hollister, and Victoria’s Secret Pink. Zaful bathing suits arriving in swaths of plastic throughout the summer; Pretty Little Thing, Fashion Nova, and Boohoo dresses for every “formal” occasion during my early uni days. You get the picture.
In reflection, this desperation to control my appearance was a form of lashing out — a fervent lasso-tossing in an attempt to capture and command my womanhood on my own terms (which, time and time again, solidified only the rope’s inevitability to slice through the mirage). But my rampant consumerism wasn’t halted by turning my gaze inward and tending to the wounds that inspired this misplaced fury. Not at first, anyways. The tipping point was actually a video about cows.
More specifically, the industrial dairy industry in America. A YouTube video I can’t remember how I stumbled upon, but which kickstarted a late-night viewing party of industrial farming exposés so horrific I woke up, announced to my family I was vegan, and never looked back. That was 8 years ago, and while my fast fashion tendencies wouldn’t cease for another few, it was my first experience with unveiling a system of violent exploitation that my consumption habits were directly supporting, denouncing it, and being moved to change.
Fast forward a couple of years, and the term “ecofeminism” was introduced to me by a philosophy professor during my undergrad in a course called Environmental Ethics. Broadly, the term marries feminism and environmentalism: arguing the exploitation of women and nature to be justified by the same logic of domination, thus inextricably linked. In the discourse that followed, the class explored statistics and case studies that demonstrated women to be disproportionately affected by the consequences of climate change, and the colonial logics that continue to escalate it.
My brain was firing; a Big Picture was emerging.
Then I read Aja Barber’s Consumed.
A haunting portrait of the state of the global fashion industry, Barber’s critical call-to-action brought me to an ethical standstill. As much as I’d begun to understand the systems of exploitation necessary for me to purchase clothing on a fairly regular basis (to put it into perspective, the average Australian buys 56 new items of clothing every year, according to a 2022 study by the Australian Fashion Council), I was still operating under the assumption that I could not afford to shop ethically (a practice strictly reserved for the wealthy), and that continuing to indulge my insatiable desire to express and perennially (re)define myself through clothing was an overriding act of empowerment.
But that justification was helmed by white supremacy. Steeped in the same logic as any argument that tries to position the desires of a single person in the Global North to access an abundance of “affordable” garments as even remotely comparable — let alone trump to — the exploitation of an entire labour force in the Global South (not to mention the ravaging of the natural world).
And if your feminism doesn’t include this labour force, it’s time to reevaluate. So I did.
The trouble is, unveiling the duplicitous underbelly of consumerism isn’t a foolproof antidote. Habits are hard to break — especially when the context of your life hasn’t changed. It’s difficult to face the ways in which you’re implicit in suffering — however physically far removed from it you may be — and even when you do, knowing an urge is rooted in privilege doesn’t do much to quell it, only to induce shame each time you see it through. This is where I think a lot of folks get stuck, or even turn back; feign ignorance, or scurry further into the embrace of oppressive logics — deflecting outrage in support of more tangible victims, for whom global systems of exploitation are positioned as accessibility heroes.
If you (like me most days) are operating in this uncomfortable, liminal state wherein your actions and moral compass are struggling for alignment — and you refuse to do a 180 — you might (like me every day) feel deeply seen and royally kicked in the ass by that scene in Fleabag season 2 when Claire gets her bad haircut.
(Google it and come back. It’s important, trust me.)
Whenever I start to feel myself drift into “maybe a new going-out-top will make me feel better” territory, I remember the red-hot assurance with which Claire storms into the salon with her sister, demanding compensation for her pencil-like asymmetric bob. “Show her the reference!” she orders the hairdresser, with the complete conviction of someone who truly believes they’re about to be validated in their vengeance; proven, once and for all, to have been nefariously duped.
And the thing is, she has been. Just not by the hairdresser.
Which brings me back to my opening question: why does my wardrobe (a collection of things I literally chose) more often feel like a symbol of all that I don’t have, rather than all that I do — the answer to which has a lot less to do with me than I’ve been conditioned to believe, but does require a brief venture inwards.
That’s right. It’s time to dig into the root of the urge! (I’m having a radical Ms. Frizzle moment.)
So, what are the underlying beliefs that compel us to click checkout when our bank accounts are far too sparse, it’s far too late at night, we’ve been doom scrolling for far too long, our knowledge of what something is made of — and by whom — is far too blank, and we simply just don’t need whatever that something is?
I recently went to see Aja Barber present a talk entitled “Slowing Down Fast Fashion” at the Sydney Opera House, and I believe she steered me in the right direction when she proclaimed: “You have to turn off your common sense to participate in consumerism.”
For, if our common sense is deactivated in these moments of vulnerability, then the beliefs at play must not be our own.
The revelation that follows: Our inability to feel satisfied — with our physical appearance, wardrobes, belongings, etc. — and our susceptibility to chasing it, credit cards outstretched, is not the result of a system short-circuiting, but a symptom of a system doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.
(Yes, it’s capitalism — surprise!)
I don’t know about you, but I find immense comfort in that. Accepting that I am porous — susceptible to the world-systems in which I live — brings me so much peace. It means I am not alone; that I exist in relation, not in opposition. But it is not in capitalism’s interest for us to feel this way — liberated in our porousness. In order for us to continue incessantly buying shit we don’t need, we must believe that freedom is achieved by hardening our shells; that we are, first and foremost, individuals, valiantly pursuing optimization on our own accord.
Disguised as our own, these beliefs veil the wounds we are truly seeking to heal. Instead of reaching out to one another, we’re busy emptying our bank accounts and getting asymmetric bobs in an attempt to bury our guilt and harness control over our own narratives. But so long as we prescribe to the quest for self-perfection, our narratives will always be, first and foremost, a pilgrimage for acceptance; for respected citizenship under capitalism.
Overwhelmingly a gendered pursuit, I also can’t help but observe hyper-consumerism — and its underlying logics of obsolescence — as a devastating diversion of attention. Implored by Naomi Klein in her most recent book, Doppelganger: “And so the question remains: What aren’t we building when we are building our brands?” (Klein, 67). Eliza McLamb — feminist podcaster, musician, and writer — took it to a truly haunting place when she tweeted: “The tragic thing is The cure to cancer is probably locked inside the mind of a girl whos obsessed w MyFitnessPal.” Not to insinuate that particular girl-mind is my own, but I certainly do recoil thinking about how much time I’ve spent obsessing over my wardrobe — funnelling my precious thoughts and labour into a system that exploits that of so many women, all whilst denouncing the perils of patriarchy that I experience (or have the potential to experience) first-hand.
(Deep breath.) As nefarious as this dupery truly reveals itself to be, it illuminates a way out that is worth working towards: radical satisfaction. For, the less we are preoccupied with optimizing the self, the more we are able to reckon with our dependence on one another — even to cherish it.
In practice, this requires unlearning a lot of colonial ideology — uprooting the belief that we are entitled to cheap clothing simply for living in the Global North — and reframing the very concept of assembling a wardrobe from a solitary pursuit to a remarkably communal affair. Clothes do not simply materialize. I do not believe this to be news to anyone, but how often, if you are honest with yourself, do you truly stop to think about where yours came from? Whose hands were involved? What generational knowledge was required? What tools? What natural resources?
I’m not saying you need to know all of the answers to these questions every time you buy something, but it is required that we care to know. Extending our curiosity towards understanding all that has gone into the creation of a pair of jeans is essential to liberating ourselves from the embarrassment capitalism conditions us to feel for being seen wearing the same pair every day (for, how extraordinary that one pair is!). Similarly, seeking beauty in the past lives of all of the garments you pick up at the thrift store is essential to fending off any second-hand stigma that lingers in the back of your brain.
Ultimately, the less we buy, the better, but what that threshold looks like is going to vary quite drastically for each of us — even more so throughout the different stages of our fluctuating bodies and lives. To be frank, I’ve felt like a ridiculous hypocrite whilst writing this. If you’ve spent any amount of time with me recently — physically or on the phone — you’ve likely heard me complaining ad nauseam about wearing the same goddamn outfits everyday. In a way, this whole thing was a just self-serving coping mechanism, but I’m putting myself on blast because I don’t want that guilt to manifest as unnecessary purchases instead of conversations.
Sooo… let’s talk about it! Let’s be vulnerable with each other about it! Let’s put down our phones when we’re feeling vulnerable about it alone at night! Let’s seek to de-center ourselves and champion fashion for the remarkable cosmos it represents; the transcendent unity of it all.
And to anyone who’s seen me in the same two sweaters everyday this past month… how wonderful it is that we get to see each other so often! To witness each other in this adventurous phase of life is an eternally priceless gift (Lululemon yoga pants could never!).
In My Brain:
Consumed: On Colonialism, Climate Change, Consumerism, and the Need for Collective Change - Aja Barber
Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World - Naomi Klein
In My Ears:
Faith Crisis Pt 1 - Middle Kids
What A Devastating Turn of Events - Rachel Chinouriri
In My Tummy:
Vegan Millionaire Shortbread Bars - The Conscious Plant Kitchen