From Shopaholic to Curious Consumer

16.01.12

1 Life & Style

Rhiannon Williams reflects on her year-long shopping spree

The ATM’s balance enquiry button fills even the most cautious of spenders with feelings of trepidation. Some of you will probably also recognise that nagging feeling of guilt, that quickening of the heart as you hand over your card. Denial may be your old friend, an ever-present companion who slithers away only at the dead of night. You’ve probably read articles on ‘creative accounting’, on how to calculate ‘cost-per-wear’, allowing you to convince yourself that that “it-bag”, a monstrous hybrid of dullish metal and luridly dyed leather, is within your economic reach.

You are not alone. British personal debt, as of October 2011, stood at £9,500. More and more people are suffering from what Oliver James terms ‘affluenza’: feelings of depession, anxiety and hopelessness which stem from the dogged pursuit of materialism. No longer does the inevitable crisis strike around mid-life; people in their twenties and thirties are now succumbing to stress, to breakdowns brought about by their failure to achieve the consumerist dream: the right car, the perfect flat, the ideal wardrobe, that elusive paradisiacal life we see flickers of on screens and billboards.

This feeling of needing to consume is something that I know only too well. When I was 18 and briefly had access to my own income, I developed something of a shopping addiction. I would buy 10-15 fashion magazines a month and trawl them, manically; folding back the corners of the glossy pages that held the things I wanted: dresses, skirts, handbags, shoes, cosmetics (most of which were completely unobtainable). I was a cog in the fast fashion machine, robotically gobbling up advertorials and lusting slavishly over what magazines professed to be the item of the moment.

I remember the buzz I felt as the cashier’s fingers gently wrapped my new purchase in featherlight tissue paper. I loved the experience of shopping; the iconography, the ritual, the mollified anxiety brought about by a new purchase. I loved possessing this tangible thing, which muffles insecurity like a warm blanket before retreating until the next time; ephemeral. I loved the feeling of increased status that came with a new purchase, the looks of envy and of admiration. I would compare myself to richer friends and relatives, who seemed to have access to a security that was not only financial, but emotional, a kind of acquisitive stability from which I felt excluded and alien. It was, I suppose, a kind of unhappiness. An unhappiness which I tried, desperately, to subdue through emulation.

And then, one day, I stopped shopping. Not completely, you understand; in today’s society such a goal would be a tall order and, considering our current economic climate, somewhat irresponsible. But I started thinking more about what I bought and where it came from, how long it would last (often not very long at all) and what the impact it would have on my finances. There was no ideological epiphany, but as I became increasingly interested in politics and current affairs, the probability that someone had been exploited in order to create the blouse on my back became impossible to ignore. I realised how foolish I had been; that many people live unhappy lives and then die, surrounded by objects they cannot take with them. Things, stuff, stopped mattering.

We now live in society where people have rioted for trainers, for plasma TVs. A society which may be more ruptured and divisive than one in which people riot for food. This acquisitive impulse, this need to consume, is not sustainable in either sense of the word. Nor is slavishly following a never-ending cycle of trends and fashions a way to live your life. Think of all the things that you have bought but never worn. The British fashion industry produces two million tonnes of waste every year. We are in the ‘society of the spectacle’, a society in which its alienated members are besieged by advertisements, in which their relationships with one another become mediated by images. Alienated from one another, we are also alienated from the goods themselves, from their materiality, from their process of making.

I am not telling you to stop shopping: our economy needs us to shop. But I am asking you to stop and think before you buy something, particularly an item of clothing. Ask yourself if it is built to last, if you will always love it as you do now. You’ll find that after ten seconds of quiet contemplation , more often than not, you will turn on your heel and walk away.