Good As New

We’ve got another guest entry from Do The Green Thing this week. Olivia Knight has shared her thoughts on a consumerism and on a challenge that she set herself that would send the average fashion lover crazy!!

Read more to find out exactly what this entails…

So London Fashion Week is over. I followed as I always do. But taking on my Not New Challenge last year – 12 months buying only second hand clothes – has changed my life so profoundly that even though my official challenge is now over I can’t look at the  catwalk the way I used do. I just don’t desire this stuff anymore.

This doesn’t mean I’ve lost my love of clothes, my sense of style or that I don’t love shopping. But I’ve given up entirely on the Fashion industry.

The much-celebrated Marc Jacobs ‘Barcode’ T-shirt says it all really. Fashion is about consumption. It’s a machine that makes us spend money (that we don’t often have) on things that are deliberately designed and manufactured not to last more than a season.

I now shop only in vintage stores, flea markets and charity shops. My conscience is clear, my wardrobe is delightful and my bank balance is better off. My addiction to consumerism – the reason I started my challenge – has gone. I will never go back to newness. And I am much happier for it.

Two Things I’ve learnt this last year about behaviour change:

1. Private resolutions don’t work, public projects do. If you want to change something about your life don’t try to do it quietly and don’t try to do it permanently. Just challenge yourself to change a specific behaviour for a set period of time – that could be a year but 6 months will do the trick – tell everyone about it and then blog about it. Turns out the change becomes pretty permanent.

 2. Not new tights are not nice.

Next up, getting rid of the car.