Why Am I Committing To A To A No-Buying Clothing Year?

For 2025, I’m taking on a New Years resolution that feels both exciting and terrifying: to buy no new clothes for a year. This newsletter is a way to hold myself accountable. No brand-new pieces, no Sunday flea market finds, no practical heat tech socks from Uniqlo.

Since I was young, I've had a fascination for fashion, my mother taught me how to use a sewing machine when I was about 12 years old, and throughout my teens, I experimented with making clothes and reworking second-hand pieces. Unsurprisingly, I went to study fashion design after high school. At that time, I could randomly open the editorials of Vogue and tell you which pieces were from which designers because I would spend my free time browsing fashion show coverage on style.com. However, I left art school after a year to pursue engineering, and my trend knowledge quickly became obsolete when a new year of seasonal collections arrived.

My interest in fashion remained, not that I've cared much about following trends since then, but I'm fascinated by the expressive language of clothing. Some of my favorite YouTubers are fashion related, like Mina Le and Bliss Foster. Furthermore, my artistic practice is focused on textiles, both their technologies and the hands that craft them. Unfortunately, fashion isn’t just creativity and self-expression; it’s also deeply tied to the exploitation of labor and the environment. Something that I already knew, and you too, but I didn't want to think about much. However, my awareness has been growing after reading The World Is On Fire But We Are Still Buying Shoes, and I'm currently reading The Anticapitalist Book of Fashion, both purchased in museum gift shops (Side note: Maybe 2026 should be a “No New Books” year, because I’m alarmingly good at collecting them and not so good at actually reading them.)

Books seem to have this effect on me. I went vegetarian after reading Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer, which is encouraging for writers. But different from changing your diet, which you can do for a lifetime, I know I'll have to buy clothes again at some point in my life. Fibers wear out, body shapes change over time, occasions arise, and we can't go naked through life. So why am I still choosing to go without buying clothes instead of searching for more sustainable options? In short: to change my relationship with shopping. Simultaneously, I want to learn more about how the fashion system works and what truly sustainable and conscious fashion can look like.

I have more than enough clothing to keep me protected from the elements and look cute for a year. But, I suspect that shopping also fulfills another role. You find a new piece, and suddenly you're envisioning a better version of yourself wearing it. Buying it might not just transform your wardrobe but your entire sense of self. Perhaps shopping is a way to bypass real change. This is why I've decided to include second-hand clothing in the challenge. Although it is more sustainable, the thrill of finding something unique in a rack of random pieces fulfills the same role, maybe even more so. I want to see what happens when I eliminate the potential of adding clothes to my wardrobe out of the equation altogether. If there is something that I truly need, I have the skills to make something, borrow from a friend, or try out a clothes-lending business.

So what happens when I stop looking for the next thing to buy and start appreciating what I already have? What will putting an outfit together feel like after 11 months? How will my sense of personal style evolve when I'm forced to work only with what I already have?

I'll keep you posted on the journey here and I'm curious to hear your thoughts! Any challenges you are taking on in the new year?