From June to the end of August I bought no clothes at all. Not a no-buy in the way people do them online, with a rulebook and a progress post every fortnight. I just wanted to know what I would actually miss, because I had started to suspect the answer was nothing, and I did not much like what that said about me.
The first three weeks were easy and slightly smug. I have a lot of clothes. Not buying more of them is not a hardship.
Weeks four to seven were the interesting bit. That is when I noticed how much of my shopping was not about clothes at all. Saturday morning, nothing planned, a bit restless — and my feet just take me down Wilbraham Road. I was not going because I needed anything. I was going because it is what I do on a Saturday and because the hunt is quite a nice feeling and it is free to look. The trouble is it is not free to look, not really, because I look with my hands and my hands find a four pound jumper.
So I had to find something else to do on a Saturday. I went for a lot of walks. I got a bit bored. That was probably the point.
What I actually missed
One thing. Trousers. I have too many jeans and almost nothing else, and there were about four weeks in July where I would have paid real money for a pair of lightweight trousers that were not denim. I did not buy any, and I wore the same linen pair until they went shiny at the back. That is a genuine gap and I had not spotted it in three years of buying things.
What I did not miss: anything else. Not one item. I did not once open the wardrobe and find nothing to wear. I have been telling myself I shop because I need things and it turns out I shop because it is Saturday.
The bit where I caved
On the 26th of August, five days early, I bought a coat. Charcoal, heavy wool, no label worth mentioning, twenty-two pounds in a shop in Stockport. I had been looking for that exact coat for about two years.
I am not going to pretend that was a failure of discipline, because I do not think it was. That is the coat I will still be wearing in ten years. The point of not buying things for three months was never to prove I could go without — it was to work out which purchases are the coat and which ones are the four pound jumper I bought because it was Saturday.
I have started again since, obviously. But I go with a list now, and the list is short.