Is the hyper-consumption era over?

I’m downsizing my life, again. Last time I did this, I had lots of thoughts and feelings about how the accruement of so many things was clogging up my vision, obscuring potential futures. This time, there’s no space for analysis: everything must go.

Ok, not everything. I refuse to part with the likes of a vintage leather turquoise trench, which still bears a label inside, imploring me in 1970s-style font, to send it to a Barnet shop for “impeccable specialist suede cleaning” (the shop in question closed in 2003). That’s history, baby.

Still, I have managed what once felt impossible: to reduce my entire wardrobe to three laundry bags. Large laundry bags, yes, ones that take up so much space in my bedroom that it’s starting to feel like a hostage situation. But three nonetheless.

Beyond clothes, I have left box after box of stuff on the street as an offering to the people of Peckham: brand new keyboards and bluetooth mice (yes, plural), crisp art prints I went to trouble of framing yet never hung, the second single duvet I bought due to a misunderstanding about the Swedish bedding system. Everything disappeared within minutes, either to be secreted in someone else’s house, or bartered in the square round the corner, where a dedicated community of crack cocaine enthusiasts gather every day.

Across the entire inventory I discovered so many duplicates of things: three pairs of dark denim boyfriend jeans alone; the same slingback flat shoe in about five different colours. Identikit hair gels and mousses and lipsticks in a particular crimson red shade that doesn’t actually suit me. The variations are so slight as to be negligible.

This is the rubbish left on the shoreline after a wave of rampant consumption recedes. It’s telling that the things I want to hold onto — like the turquoise trench — are unique pieces, not easily replicable. But when I was buying the same mass-produced items over and over again, I swear I had reasons. What if I lost it? Or it was dirty on a day I wanted to wear it? What if — horror of horrors — my will was briefly thwarted?

So goes the thought process of hyperconsumption brain, fatted on a diet of social media ads and influencer marketing. For just over a decade now, this type of super consumerism has been dominant. It has transcended simple retail behaviour, becoming entertainment, and been turbo-charged by influencers who made the mere act of buying something ‘content’.

But I sense a change in mood. A new supreme rises; the appetite for hyperconsumption is on the wane. Why, and what comes next?

Two very telling New York Magazine articles dropped in the last 30 days. The first appeared in the The Cut, penned by longtime fashion critic-at-large, Cathy Horyn. Titled ‘Fashion That Makes Us Want Again’, the piece examined how a trio of luxury brands — Chanel, Versace and Phoebe Philo — are managing to buck an industry-wide downturn. Horyn argues the designers behind these labels are making clothes people actually want to wear, that embody aspiration, yes, but also fit their realities.