The No New Clothes Challenge Continues

We’re entering the fourth month of our summer without purchasing new clothes.  We began in mid May, and now we only have a few weeks left to go.  I don’t think that my husband as thought about this challenge once.  It hasn’t really been that hard to resist the urge to buy new pieces of clothing for either of us like I thought it would be.

The longer this challenge continues, the more I want to keep it going.  Why not go a few more months?  Could we make it through the winter?

Picking up a new piece of clothing is so easy for anyone to do.  In your mind, does it seem like you’re always donating old clothing, too?  Maybe the rational to buy new clothes is: why not get something new if I like it and it’s at a great price?  Or if I got this item, could I be fashionable or classy?  Would people treat me differently if I wore that?  Could I put it in my closet where all those old things used to be?

My answer felt like it was yes too often.

hikinghiking in perfectly acceptable clothes

I feel like I was always pretty rational about clothing purchases before – no brand names (except Ann Taylor Loft clearance rack) for me and good rain jackets for both of us.  Now I’m not so sure.

This experiment has been teaching me a lot these last few months:

  1. Most people probably don’t know just how many clothes they already have.
  2. When we only have access to a limited number of clothes, it turns out we think even less about what to wear and who cares.
  3. Making a conscious effort to avoid clothing stores and departments raises self esteem.  You stop thinking about size and weight and comparing yourself to the women posing in pictures and other customers.
  4. Bringing less stuff into the house makes my home – and thereby my life – feel so much simpler and less cluttered.
  5. Clothes can last a really, really long time.

Right now, I feel like buying more clothes would be like buying more fresh cherries when we already have plenty in the fridge.  You all know what happens then.  We can’t resist eating the new cherries because they’re fresher and firmer.  The old cherries go bad and land in the trash.  Those older cherries were perfectly fine until we introduced the newer ones.

Many of you mentioned similar ideas about buying clothes when we talked about this subject last.  Some of you even considered jumping aboard.  How is it going?  Have any of you noticed anything different about your habits?  How about within yourselves?