The forthcoming book follows her journey of one year without buying anything new and how it changed her relationship with money and her self-worth. (Source: Emma Edwards/Instagram)
Financial behaviour specialist Emma Edwards, founder of The Broke Generation, is sharing her radical personal finance experiment: a whole year without buying a single item of clothing.
No new outfits, no second-hand finds, not even rentals. What began as a no-buy challenge soon became a powerful lesson in self-worth, resilience, and the surprising freedom of living with less.
In the exclusive extract below, Emma shares the six buying patterns we get trapped into thinking we actually need.
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The impact of our consumption habits creates an environment where we’re cornered from every angle. We have a collection of clothes that don’t work together, don’t make us feel good and don’t allow us to express ourselves the way we want to, which leaves us looking externally for what we’re not getting. The problem is, when we look externally, we buy more and more of the same.
Unravelling that idea of what can happen when we’re in a ‘yes’ state, a state of openness to consumption even though our intentions might suggest otherwise, got me curious about some of the unhelpful buying cycles I’d been stuck in. I really leaned into understanding how I ended up with the wardrobe I currently had, and what I could learn from the mistakes I made over and over again.
I realised that if I could establish the mistakes I was making and the ways I was buying the wrong things, I’d stop feeling compelled to buy more and more over time. Here are some of the patterns I uncovered in my wardrobe, and that I’ve seen in others’ too.
Once I liked something in one colour (often black), I’d giddily run out and buy it in another colour, thinking I was making some kind of ultra-smart decision and capitalising on what I loved. I’m going to give you a piece of advice now that I hope you’ll remember for many years. If you ever utter the words ‘I’m going to go and get this in another colour’ – run. It’s a trap. You probably won’t like the other colour, and it’ll just sit in your wardrobe and collect dust.
There are certain things in my wardrobe that I struggled to wear confidently outside of one specific outfit silo. Usually, this is a sure-fire sign that I’d bought it in a very specific context, like copying or replicating an outfit I’d seen someone else wear.
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Seeing someone wear wide-leg trousers with a specific type of shirt and then buying said shirt is all well and good in that one outfit context, but unless we actually integrate the item into other outfits, it’ll always just be a one-hit wonder.
Why I ever did this is so beyond me. There are certain items in my wardrobe that haven’t ever been right for me. How do I know that? Because I bought them that way. I’ve made this mistake time and time again – either I’ll try something on or order it online, and it won’t be quite how I hope or expect it to be, but I’ll keep it anyway because I like the idea of it so much. Or I try to convince myself I can somehow make it work, or it’ll look different when my hair and make-up are done.
Trying to get yourself to wear things you don’t love or aren’t quite right is always going to keep you wanting to buy more. While we might get the dopamine hit at the time of buying, the loop doesn’t ever really close.
The process of the book reveals the worst spending impulses Emma maintained. (Source: Supplied) · Breeana Dunbar
Ever go out looking for something specific, like a black jumper or a red cardigan or a pair of white jeans, and despite not being able to find what you want, you’re so hungry to start wearing that item that you get something that isn’t quite right and tell yourself it’ll do? I had a few items that fell into this category.
I recognised this mistake both in my wardrobe during the Project, and in memories of items I’d owned before. This was proof of the urgency and pace that existed in my buying habits, as though once I’d got the idea of an outfit or an item in my head, I had to get it even if it wasn’t perfect.
Isn’t the whole point of neutrals that they’re, well, neutral? They go with everything? Yeah, no. I learned the hard way that just because you have a wardrobe full of neutrals does not mean you have a wardrobe full of outfits. Who knew that not all blacks are the same. Not all whites are the same. And don’t even get me started on creams, stones and beiges.
Having an event or occasion to attend is one of the most common reasons why we buy clothes. When we want to look nice, we invoke the shortcut of buying something we’re excited to wear. The problem with this is we’re then left with pieces we bought for that one specific context, in a similar way to when we buy to replicate a specific outfit. That item is then siloed in our minds, and we’re less likely to want to reach for it for the next event.
Plus, we’ve built up that behavioural loop of an event or occasion being a trigger to buy.
This is an edited extract from The Wardrobe Project: A year of buying less and liking yourself more by Emma Edwards (Wiley, $34.95), available 26 November at all leading retailers.