First weekend of new resolve.....turned down an invitation to go Saturday shopping in Leeds with the friend who is my favourite person to clothes shop with. Anyone who shops recreationally will know that there are friends who make shopping a joy, and some you'd never shop with - they're just don't approach it in manner compatible with your own M.O! For me, and for her, its all about the hunt for the perfect what-ever-it-happens-to-be-at-that-moment and any physical launching self at shops is preceded by much online research in order to fully scope all the options, much emailing of links and frank and open discussion of the micro-details. Getting the shops-to-teashops ratio is also crucial (a very good shop will necessitate 3 sustenance breaks), there should be time to visit Charbonnel et Walker, and - in my case - the Chinese supermarket, Global Crystals and the haberdashers. These last three serve as useful cigarette breaks for my friend, who is more of a bulk buyer of lipsticks from SpaceNK and non-mainstream, extraordinarily luxurious perfumes than i am - so we do mix it up a bit.......
That's a long para about shopping for a blog that's about NOT shopping! But Saturday shopping in a big city centre that you know like the back of your hand (when you don't technically really need anything so there is no pressure) is quite close to the top of my favourite mindless and shallow things to do when you need to chill list. So is also nice to write about. But it's the trap of (my own) brain-disengaged-overconsumerism that i want to reflect on this year. Not really so much in terms of the inner 'why' - we all know that on one level the 'why' is lack of confidence. We suspect that every doubt and dissatisfaction about ourselves can be put to bed once and for all by the perfect (and I mean perfect) LBD, or that boomeranging moods can be permanently lifted by those kneel length purple boots or forest green velvet coat, to mention a couple of recent (and as yet unworn) purchases. As a strategy, it doesn't work. I have the perfect LBD. I've got ten - or twenty. Did they do a great job as LBDs? Yes, each in turn. One of them is particular outstanding. Anything achieved in terms of seismic shifts in my inner landscape? Of course not. Sadly, not even the Karen Millen one-shouldered bandage dress (and I really did have prayer-answering Holy Grail of Dresses expectations when I handed over the £120 for this one).
So rather than re-hashing the armchair pyschology blah blah blah antecendents to overconsumerism, I'm happy to accept it's a combination of the need to self-bolster, boredom, lapses in imagination and societally encultured notions of 'I'm worth it' and 'it's normal'. But I've decided I'm not happy with continuing to do it, hence the NY'sR. Unlimited opportunity - quite literally - to purchase what, relatively speaking, amounts to vast quantities of brand new clothing (we're not talking one on, one in the drawer and one in the wash here) is something that I have always intellectually accepted as being somehow morally wrong (as in the global social injustice sense), irrational (as in continuing to overfeed an already-rammed wardrobe with brand new things) and borderline insane ('inventive' extra wardrobe building in every nook and cranny) - but there's a difference between 'intellectually accept' and 'live differently'.
Right now its 'live differently' that I'm interested in. And settling on two simple rules and sticking to them - how hard can it be? Rule One has worked so far: I didn't shop in Leeds this weekend, and since the New Year I have trawled both a TKMaxx and an entire retail park for a birthday present and neither of these resulted in a clothing purchase. I haven't even bothered to check out the charity shops in Hebden Bridge today.
Rule Two: to offload a proportion of what's been hoarded to date by finding a thing per day to take out of the house is harder. There is something emotionally needy squatting in the heart of my procrastination and resistence to actual get on with this!
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