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Depending on the source, the average American buys between 1 and 1.3 new pieces of clothing every single week—and consumption is at an all-time high. So, why aren’t we tired of cheap shit yet and how can we better understand our psychological obsessions with spending? Well, we’re diving into it with sustainability expert and author of Consumed, Aja Barber.

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Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and Katie Gatti Tassin, with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is our Chief Content Officer and additional fact checking comes from Kate Brandt.

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Mentioned in the Episode

• ChooseFI episode on Liz Frugalwoods

• “Will Americans Ever Get Sick of Cheap Junk?” by Amanda Mull (The Atlantic)

• A Brief History of Consumption (MIT Press)

• Edward Bernays clip on public relations (YouTube)

• Today’s debt-to-GDP ratio (Treasury.gov)

• “Without restriction, how do you avoid overconsumption?” from Dana Miranda (Healthy Rich Substack)

• “The Financial Case for Creativity” blog post

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Aja:

We as citizens are buying five times more clothing than we bought in 1990. We need to be asking ourselves, do you need the thing you are buying? Because whether or not you can afford it has no bearing on the life of the garment worker that didn't get paid. We need to be questioning over consumption.

And so when it comes to fast fashion, slow fashion, I think that leading with affordability is a little bit of a misleading question. I think we need to lead with do I need this item? And was the person who made this item treated fairly? Those are two questions that people don't really want to ask themselves in a system where over consumption is key. But that is the question we should actually lead with.

Katie:

When I first became interested in personal finance, it was 2018 and the ChooseFI podcast was my radicalization vehicle of choice. And I think listeners of the show, particularly the listeners of the early version of the show, will probably remember Brad and Jonathan's soothing, upbeat banter. And you might even recall an interview with one Mrs. Frugalwoods. Now, Mrs. Frugalwoods was this woman named Liz, who identified strongly with and enacted this ultra-frugal mentality. And I remember that I immediately clocked it as very reduced, reused, recycle coated, but with the explicit intent of making it easier to save money.

And now it's kind of hard to recall the details of that conversation anymore, but at the time I remember feeling as though it had liberated me from my consumerist tendencies. She was showing me a better way. It was a way without fast fashion, without trend monitoring even makeup, and it freed my mind and my checking account from that constant sense of obligation of maintaining appearances. My mom had been badgering me to hang up my shopping addiction since I was little enough to beg for Children's Place gift cards for Christmas.

But in one hour long conversation, Liz had basically powered down all of my worst impulses. It was a real turning point for me. And much like my reflections that I've shared in the past about untethering from the Hot Girl Hamster Wheel surprised me. I was also surprised not just at how much money I saved after I adjusted my habits, but also at how much simpler my life became. Her approach made my life so much easier, which I was not expecting because consumption is, in many ways, it's an obligation. It's a job. You have to decide what you're going to buy. If you have decided you're going to keep buying new stuff all the time and deciding that I wasn't going to do that, and that, okay, I know that these things are not going to make me any happier, so I'm just going to stop paying attentional together. It was kind of invigorating.

And here's the thing. The key was that I had not been shamed into avoiding lulus.com. I had not been punished for my blessed little pleather miniskirt halls that I used to love every fall, but that somehow there was something about her rhetoric at the time that had irrevocably deflated my desire for more stuff.

The compulsion that I used to feel that would prompt me to scour a clearance section at Sacks because I wanted to find the thing that was under $50 had been muted. And for the first time in my life, I felt like I could see through the consumerism matrix in a way that I never had before.

This is The Money with Katie Show and I'm your host, Katie Gatti Tassin. Today we're talking about over consumption and specifically American overconsumption, how we got here, what it says about us and how we might understand ourselves better so that we actually feel the desire to change.

So my goal today isn't to scold you or to put forth some diatribe about why you need to quit spending money, but I want to dive into the phenomenon itself. I think shame is in some ways an effective driver of behavioral change, but I think it is inherently limited. And so I think it's more interesting to try to unpack why we do the things that we do and derive desire to change from a more sustainable place. My guest today is Aja Barber. She's a writer, a stylist, and a consultant focused on the intersections of sustainability, fashion, and the textile industry. And her work is interesting because it weaves together a lot of themes that you don't often find in conversations like these, like wealth inequality and racism and feminism and colonialism, and how these systems of power affect our buying habits.

So even though I have welcomed back some of my materialist impulses, I have purchased platform Louboutins. So I kind of feel like I have to say a lot of this shielding my closet. But my Frugalwoods inspired shift was relatively permanent. It did mark a real shift in my behavior that has really not changed since then. I have not seen stuff in the acquisition of more stuff in the same way ever since. And in retrospect, I don't think there was anything particularly special about the interview, but it was for whatever reason, the skeleton key that perfectly fit my unique psychological profile.

And that's what I hope today can be for some of you. I think my experience was telling it illustrates that consumption can be just as emotional as it is practical, if not more so. And the way it's framed and how we relate to our consumption habits can push us closer to one-click checkout flows or build barriers between them.

Amanda Mull writes for The Atlantic, she says, “Consumer choice is the animating logic of so much of American life and buying things is how we are taught to assert our agency or express our political views and embrace our identities.” So you've probably heard the phrase vote with your dollars. This is endemic to the American way of life. This idea that you can enact change in your consumption habits. And I think there are a lot of really interesting implications of that idea. So the data that she includes supports this idea that actually much of the spending on ultra cheap platforms like Temu, the new Amazon competitor comes not from people that just can't afford to shop anywhere else, but from people who can roughly half of the American sales on Temu come from households that are earning $130,000 per year or more. And so Amanda looks at this in her piece and basically says, we are nowhere near peak consumption. Like the unquenchable thirst for cheap shit is still alive and well… [TikTok compilation]

So how did we get here? We're going to get to that right after a quick break.

Alright, how did we get to this point? What makes the American pattern of consumption so unique? So in looking into this, I found something from the MIT Press that says, over the course of the 20th century, capitalism preserved its momentum by molding the ordinary person into a consumer with an unquenchable thirst for more stuff. So in 18th century England, this pursuit of opulence and display first began seeping out from the very small confines of the very, very rich. So it was like a very small minority of people in 18th century England that kind of were playing this status game.

But as capitalism kind of changed the world and the postindustrial United States started to export its culture everywhere else, it was individual desire that became democratized. So it was this idea that you can express yourself through your purchases. This animating logic of American consumerism as Amanda calls it, rather than actual wealth or political power or economic power being democratized.

And this shift in the US describes the social choice that was made at the turn of the 20th century between something that is known as a steady state economy that's capable of meeting everyone's basic needs and would have reduced working hours to one that prioritizes growth. We obviously know which one was chosen, we know what direction we went in. But according to MIT, even if a shorter working day became an acceptable strategy during the Great Depression, the economic systems orientation toward profit and its bias toward growth made such a trajectory unpalatable to most captains of industry and the economists who theorized their successes, if profit and growth were lagging, the system needed new impetus.

There was a consumption economist at the time named Hazel Kyrk who argued that “a high standard of living has to be a dynamic progressive standard.” So in other words, what it looks like to live a good life has to be a constantly moving target. In order for all of this to work, contentment in this framework is complete anathema to growth.

So it totally sounds unthinkable now, but at the time the economy's most pressing problem was not that there was too much demand and not enough supply. The situation that we kind of find ourselves in now sometimes where the supply side inflation is an issue, it was the opposite. There was a real fear that overproduction was going to be the nail in the coffin of the US economy and that because the industrial revolution had enabled mass production at this scale that was formerly unrealized, people were nervous that further growth was going to be impossible simply because we had too much stuff and people were not going to be able to buy it fast enough. We were not going to be able to use things as quickly as we were making them.

In the 1920s, the president of the United Fruit Company wrote about his fears about the public and their lack of consuming power, and that is just so wild to read now a hundred years later because we know that he could not have been more wrong. We have exceeded all expectations on the consumption front.

So at this point, enter Edward Bernays. He is considered the father of public relations. He's the nephew of Sigmund Freud. Maybe you've heard of him. And Bernays knew a thing or two about manufacturing demand and pulling psychological strings to do it.

Edward Bernays clip:

Many people believe public relations is…publicity. Public relations is not that. It is a two-way street advising the client on attitudes and actions to win over the public on whom viability of the unit depends. And then educating, informing, and persuading the public to accept these social goods, ideas, concepts, or whatever.

Katie:

He wrote, “A thing may be desired not for its intrinsic worth or usefulness, but because he has unconsciously come to see in a symbol of something else, the desire for which he is ashamed to admit to himself because it is a symbol of social position and evidence of his success.”

So TLDR 2024 translation, you don't want stuff because there's any special functional purpose that that stuff is going to serve. You want it because it represents something else. And that is the slight of hand that advertising and marketing creates and performs, is to transform something from just a thing into a symbol of something else, something that you identify with, right?

So in retrospect, obviously we know the 1920s, this was the boom before the crash. The debt of the time was very large. It was over 200% of GDP and all of the recklessness and the euphoria propped up the economy for its greatest crash before or sits. And so for context, we hear all the time that today's debt to GDP ratio is completely untenable at 123%. That was 200%. So apparently we have been in a much worse position before.

The decades that followed were a bit of a timeout for the big consumer push because of the Great Depression and the war. But don't you worry, things picked right back up in the 1950s with a conspicuously wasteful consumer binge. When American journalist and social critic Vance Packard described the role of advertising as to “stir up status consciousness;” stirring up status consciousness. He called it the industry of “want creation”.

In an essay I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I referred to these things as implanted desires that it works best when you perceive it to be something that you actually want, but it's almost always going to be implanted inside of you.

So here's where philosopher Herbert Marcuse nailed our predicament. He wrote, “People in the act of satisfying our aspirations reproduce dependence on the very exploitative apparatus that perpetuates our servitude.” This really strikes me as the incredibly pertinent center of our Venn diagram, our Kamala Harris approved Venn diagram, of psychological fulfillment and personal finance where those two circles overlap. Think about a luxury car purchase and maybe that luxury car purchase is a bit of a stretch for you financially, but maybe you have a really long commute to your job and you don't love the job, so you want to spice up the commute. You want to make yourself feel better. You want to feel like, Hey, I'm working this job I hate and I spend a ton of time in my car, but at least it's paid well. So let me now spend that money on this luxury car that is going to make this a little bit more tolerable, a little bit more bearable. But in the act of doing so, you are committing to the ongoing payments of that purchase, which just serves to further entrench your reliance on the very job that makes you want to ease your dissatisfaction with the Italian leather seats in the first place.

So it's kind of easy through those types of examples to see the ways in which this philosopher was totally dead on in the act of satisfying our aspirations. We've reproduced our dependence on the apparatus that makes us want to satisfy those aspirations in the first place.

But here's where the relationship between recognizing consumption shortcomings and resisting the tendency toward restriction can get a little bit wonky. So the most obvious destination where we could drive this train is straight toward asceticism. Well, alrighty, might as well just hoard our pennies for the rest of our days. Never buy a thing. Obviously that's not good, right?

And writer Dana Miranda, who writes the Substack “Healthy Rich” points out in this piece called Without Restriction, How Do We Avoid Overconsumption? She basically says, hey, money's sole purpose is to be spent. The other things that we do with money, saving it, investing it, what have you, those are simply means of furthering the goal of eventually spending it in a different way. In other words, saving is just a detour on its way to spending.

So she employs this food analogy. She says, I don't eat whole bags of gummy bears in one sitting anymore because it gives me a stomach ache. It's not because diet culture is restricting my food choices. So love the food analogy. I think that comes in super handy here and she reminds us not to conflate consumption with the active spending. They are similar, but ultimately there are important differences. And I think those of us who are already prone to restrictive tendencies have to tread really carefully here similarly to if you are someone who has experienced disordered eating tendencies, you are not going to benefit from being lectured about how the American diet is full of preservatives and ingredients that other governments ban.

But to extend the food metaphor, making this distinction reminds me of the way in which sometimes the human body will crave sugar or carbs, like we will perceive a craving for sugar and carbs when what we really need is hydration or protein or fiber. Our signals get all crossed and it just causes us to misinterpret the deep appetite that we feel for one thing as a compulsion for something else.

And I think there's something interesting about that experience of desire itself, especially the nature of an implanted desire, one that has been manufactured by that industry of want creation. So I try to notice now what hooks my psyche most effectively. And the simplest explanation I can offer is that the narrative subtext that often backtracks my impulses is often a sense that this item is going to move me closer to the woman that I want to be, that it is going to change me in the way that I want to be changed. So this is why certain arenas of consumerism really have no power over me. Jewelry, for example, for whatever reason, I am rarely sucked into that vortex, but there are other areas of consumption and consumerism that require an active resistance for me. So things like athleisure, things that kind of connote that, oh, comfortable in control on top of it. Any purchase that furthers that image, I'm like, ooh, maybe I need that.

So I think it's interesting to pay attention to the cravings that you think you're feeling and then maybe questioning what is the craving underneath that. So where do we go from here? Before I tell you where I have landed with this discussion, I would like to welcome Aja Barber to the show.

Aja, in your book you talk about your time at Rude in London and how their clothes are produced ethically. So I'm curious for someone who is brand new to the world of fashion and asking questions about how things are getting made, can you walk us through what ethical fashion looks like throughout a supply chain? What should people be looking for?

Aja:

Yeah, first I want to say Rude does not make clothing anymore. I don't want anyone to be like, let me go and find them because actually it's really, really hard to stay open as a small business. Every now and then they'll do a small run of some really nice t-shirts or something.

But for the record, ethical fashion for me personally looks like people being paid fairly. It looks like trying to find the best fabric that you can work with and one that has equity built into the supply chain and fabric is like a whole ‘nother world of its own. So I would say if someone is just a beginner to this look for clothing where the person who made the garment is paid a fair wage, and that one's an easy one because people will massage the truth about it.

But unlike sustainability, which really can be quite loosey goosey when it comes to whether or not your garment workers are paid a fair wage, they either are or they aren't. And people will say, oh, we're working towards paying a fair wage. That's not the same as paying a fair wage. Where with small ethical brands that do pay their seamstress, they're sewers, they're everyone a fair wage, they're happy to tell you about that. There's no loosey goosey flowery language when someone's like, yeah, I'm a fair wage employer. So just look for that.

Katie:

Yeah, so the other day I was inspecting a shirt I was wearing for information about where it was made, what it was made from, and I found the Fair Trade certified tag inside. And it got me wondering, is that a legitimate stamp of approval? Is that a good thing or is that one of those things at the grocery store where it'll be “all natural” and it doesn't really mean what you would think it means?

Aja:

I think that certification could be a really good thing. Sometimes it isn't always clear and concise because there are so many certifications, but one of the things I think is important for us to keep in mind is that the process of certification is actually really time consuming and costly. So a brand that is based in the global south, in a place where most of our clothing is made and Bangladesh for instance, they might not have the same tools and access that those of us in the global north have. Should we be demanding that their B Corp when they've literally invented woodblock fabric and everyone's knocking them off and they're doing it ethically in a village that they were born in and paying people and organizing, should we really be like, yeah, but you really need to spend hundreds of dollars on a certification, otherwise I can't trust you?

Sometimes I think it's important to actually just invest in getting to know a brand because when you actually take the time to do that, you will see whose businesses are actually keeping people paid and treating people well and who aren't. And that will be really clear to you if you pay attention.

I think fair trade is a really great standard, but it depends on what element of it is fair trade, right? Is it fair trade cotton? It needs to be more information than that, but I'm not knocking fair trade at all. I think fair trade is quite cool.

I would say you're not going to find the information that you're looking for on the tag when it comes to fair wages. You have to ask the corporation. They don't put that on the tag. I wonder why. Because nobody is making them.

Katie:

And I mean in personal finance spaces and spaces that are trying to encourage people to be financially responsible, the principle emphasis often is on affordability and are you buying things you can afford? And you have noted in your work in the past that this focus on affordability, particularly within the fast fashion conversation actually leads us astray. And I would love for you to tell us more about that.

Aja:

It leads us as stray because we as citizens are buying five times more clothing than we bought in 1990. So we need to be asking ourselves, do you need the thing you are buying? Because whether or not you can afford it has no bearing on the life of the garment worker that didn't get paid.

We do this thing where we only think about these systems in relation to ourselves, the end consumer, but in actuality, these systems are harming our planet and it's harming our brothers and sisters all over the world, and we need to stand in solidarity because our liberation is intrinsically linked to their liberation and we need to be questioning over consumption.

And so when it comes to fast fashion, slow fashion, I think that leading with affordability is a little bit of a misleading question. I think we need to lead with do I need this item? And was the person who made this item treated fairly? Those are two questions that people don't really want to ask themselves in a system where over consumption is king. But that is the question we should actually lead with.

Katie:

I had heard you say in a different interview, affordable for whom?

Aja:

Exactly.

Katie:

Because it’s not affordable for the people.

Aja:

The planet can't afford it. We know that we are in a climate crisis and the fashion industry adds to that climate crisis with 8% to 10% of global carbon emissions depending on what study you look for and who you ask. Or it's 8% to 12% actually. Anyways, we're in a climate crisis and the fashion industry is aiding in that.

And so when we talk about affordability, who is this affordable for? Because we can't afford to live on a burning planet. The person who made the clothing can't afford to not get paid. The person who has the factory in their backyard can't afford the pollution and waste that is making their local river turn colors. I would argue that very few of us can actually afford this system. All we're getting is stuff, but we're not getting a nicer life out of it.

Katie:

We'll be right back after a quick break.

In the financial space and in kind of the circles that I'm in when we talk about things like inflation and prices rising, almost always there's going to be someone in that conversation who is going to orient it around one of two things, immigrants or low wage work like, oh, well, it's because they're trying to raise the minimum wage. Or there's people who are taking our jobs and it's making things more expensive. Rather than looking up and going, well, who's sitting at the top of this pyramid? Who's setting the prices? Who is being maximally extractive?

Aja:

Exactly.

Katie:

And it always just strikes me as a little bit convenient and illogical.

Aja:

Disingenuine as well.

Katie:

Yeah, and I do think that there are people who genuinely think this too, who have been told this so many times that they actually believe it. But it's interesting when it's like, so why though would we look at the people in the system with the least amount of power as the ones that are scapegoated for the economic problems that we have? And I've heard you talk in the past about how sometimes we'll blame low income consumers for these dynamics in the consumption space. Absolutely. Well, fast fashion has to exist because some people are poor. And I'm curious if you think there's a parallel here?

Aja:

That's an amazing parallel because it's completely accurate. If all of the people who lived on and around the poverty line, and that varies from country to country, put all of their money together, they probably wouldn't be able to build a billionaire. But if you look at who is at the top of all of these systems, who owns these companies, who sits on the board? Who is the CEO? There's a lot of billionaires. Isn't that funny? It's almost like everyone from every class is buying into the system regardless of whether or not they need to buy clothing for that price.

People don't want to own their nonsense when it comes to over consumption because we know that it's kind of this thing where nobody likes to feel like, oh, the wool's been pulled over my eyes, look at me buying all this stuff I don't need because of pernicious marketing, we don't like owning up to that.

And I think a good example I use is when I lived in Virginia, I moved back in with my parents three times during adulthood. It was not easy, not easy out there. And if you're in that position, don't let anyone make you feel bad. It's very hard right now, and it has been hard since I graduated from school, but I remember sort of not justifying, I kind of always knew that fast fashion was a little bit of an icky thing even though I didn't have the facts and the figures and the tools. But I remember sort of looking back and thinking I was technically low income a lot of times and I still didn't need to shop that way. It doesn't matter because I had tools and resources and I was buying more clothing than I could ever really wear in a calendar year.

And so when I look back at my past habits, I might have been making what technically would qualify as poverty wages at some points in my adult life, but I was still buying things I didn't need. You can't escape that. That is what our society pushes and we need to get a handle on our own spending in our own ideas of what is value and what and what we need and what we don't.

Katie:

I think that the question of value here is really interesting because I tend to have some loose associations between money and value with clothing. And I do think that there's somewhat flawed. So generally we associate fast fashion with lower costs and not always, but that tends to be the rough correlation.

Aja:

People talk about affordability all the time in reference to fast fashion, but Zara and Anthropologie are both fast fashion companies and they are not cheap.

Katie:

And that's where I'm wanting to dig in because I think conversely, we assume that if something is very expensive that it must have been because it was produced in an ethical or sustainable way. And I was reading a novel review the other day that Henah sent me that name, dropped this specific pair of designer pants, and it did it in a way that indicated, oh, I should know about these pants, so I'm looking up the pants. They're $1,400 wool pants. And I sat there looking at them and I was like, I wonder how much, if at all price is an indication that something is produced non-exploitatively or is this just completely a flawed mental shortcut?

Aja:

I think it really depends on who's making it and what their intentions are. There are some designer brands where they don't cut corners and you know that they have extremely high standards. And then there are some designer brands where you're like, I don't know where that was made. It really just depends on the company and what the goal is of the company, and it's very, very murky. So I don't blame citizens for not knowing, but what I do encourage people to do is to reach out.

If there's a company that you are really, really interested in and you like what they do, but you want to know more and you don't think that they're communicating it well, you should reach out to them and be like, hey, is everyone in your supply chain paid fair wages? Because as we found recently with Loro Piana, that isn't the case. They sold what a $10,000 sweater and then it turned out that they weren't paying some of those people, which honestly shame on them.

Katie:

Yeah. It is shameful.

Aja:

Really disappointing. But I think that we have space to hold luxury to a much higher standard, but no one's going to do it if it doesn't fall on us basically.

So one of the things that I see that I think is really just a way of brands like obscuring that they're being murky with our supply chain is listing on the tag, like designed in, I'm sorry, but someone can design your garment on an airplane if they want to. It doesn't really matter where your garment is designed. What matters is if the people making the clothing get paid. And so whenever you see the words designed in, just know that that brand is being deliberately murky. I think that that should start to set off alarms for us because I just feel like the brands that really want to do well and they want you to know about all the cool things they're doing, they will make that very clear on their website.

And you can find that for a lot of brands I buy from brands in the UK where I know their workshop is in Brighton, I know that they're a fair wage employer. I know that they're closed for two weeks at this time period because everyone goes on holiday and this is the type of stuff where you know that you can invest in this product. But I think in order for us to get to this point where we're asking these questions, we actually have to be invested in the things that we're buying. And for too long we've been told to just turn your brain off and shop.

Katie:

Yeah, I've actually noticed that. I think on Apple products, they say designed by Apple in California.

Aja:

Yeah.

Katie:

That same language.

Aja:

Exactly.

Katie:

Yeah, we know where you making those iPhones.

Aja:

Yeah, exactly. Cool design, but made in a factory that has netting outside.

Katie:

Yes. And you mentioned that you think there are some designer brands that aren't cutting corners or that aren't doing it right. Are there any that you would feel comfortable enough to name drop?

Aja:

I don't think that—this is also a problem. The fashion industry is still very hush hush because people want to protect their interests. People will be like, I found this amazing factory where they make this amazing type of woven thing, but no, I'm not going to tell you on my website because then my competitor is going to go there.

So I find it is all still very murky and it needs to be less murky. I get told a lot of things by luxury brands off the record, which I think definitely needs to be shared, and I never get permission from it because people are still very much about safeguarding their sources and I don't want this company by our competitor coming in and undercutting us. So that's still a problem within the industry, and I don't really know what the answer is to that.

There was a viral video on Instagram recently that I just saw where this girl was had just done a tour of a really nice wolf factory in Scotland, and then she was like, yeah, and then they brought us to this one room and they were like, okay, you can't take any pictures in this room. And the reason why was because the room was just full of Dior scarves. There are some really amazing factories that are still doing amazing products for luxury brands, but because there are so many different supply chains, it's kind of the luck of the draw, isn't it?

The brands that I know are producing ethically are slow fashion brands. They're luxury brands that I definitely like and think that they do a good job, but the ones where I know no are the ones that are open, and that usually happens to be slow fashion.

Katie:

Are there any slow fashion brands that you want to name drop?

Aja:

I try not to do that. I don't want to push people towards buying things just because we're still in this mindset where people are like, oh my God, the planet's on fire, so I need to start shopping differently. And it's like, no, you need to ask yourself, do you actually need to shop? You need to ask yourself why do you feel like the solution to these problems is for you to immediately shop but shop differently, buy different things?

I really struggle with this idea that people think that you can ethically consume slow fashion in the same manner that we have been consuming fast fashion. But that's what happens when people are like, well, it just needs to be cheaper. I'm sorry, but you either pay people or you don't. And if you do pay people, then you can't magically make that price cheaper if you want to stay in business.

And so I feel like people have a lot of delusions about what a slow fashion world should look like based off of wanting to operate within this fast fashion mindset where in actuality, if you are changing how you were doing things because you know that the system's bad and the planet is on fire, you don't leave with where do I shop from? Now you lead with how do I do things differently?

So I would say for me, 10 years ago when I was a fast fashion shopper, I was buying upwards of 68 items a year, which is what the average is. Today I might buy half of that because I am still a fashion editor and I like to buy slow fashion, wear it and trade it and mint it, but I keep track of what I buy. I have a rule for myself that if it can't be produced from a brand that I know pays fair wages and it has to be bought secondhand.

So I've changed the way I operate. I buy probably 70% of my wardrobe secondhand now, which means that there is absolutely no rush because with secondhand shopping online, it's kind of the luck of the draw. You get it when you get it, and that's great, and it's a lucky day, but there's no real rush because they're never needed to be. I didn't need to shop the way I used to shop. And a lot of us really don't, but we don't want to lean into that because we've been trained to shop that way. It's a lot of habit breaking that people aren't really ready to engage with until they're ready. And I can't push people to do that, but I can give them the facts.

Katie:

And to what degree do you think that the ability to do that turn your brain off and shop moment, to what degree do you think that the fact that we can basically take the ramifications most of the ramifications of the purchasing behavior and literally ship it somewhere else, it's “out of sight, out of mind” enables it to continue?

Aja:

Absolutely. I mean, so one of the cool things about being old on the internet is that you remember when things were done differently. I remember when clothing would come into department stores like six times a year. You had your seasons and then you had a holiday season and you had Easter, and that was when stores would get new things in. It'd be like, woo, ooh, JCPenney has Easter dresses. It wasn't anything like it is today.

And I also remember the ‘90s seeing a big boom of Made in America, and also union made tags within clothing that you would buy. It would be like this was made in a union factory. So I remember having these signifiers that things were being made in the states, things were being made by people having being paid fair wages in the ‘90s. All of that changed with NAFTA and trade agreements going overseas, that sort of stuff.

So I remember seeing all of this happen within my lifetime, actually. And yeah, I think once we started to see a lot of manufacturing jobs go overseas, our connection to how things were made and who made definitely changed. If you were a child in the sixties and seventies, maybe your aunt worked in a clothing factory. My dad worked in a factory when he was a kid, a teenager, not a kid. He worked in a factory when he was a teenager making steel pots. He's from Pottstown, Pennsylvania. That was a summer job that a teenager could get working in a place where pots were made and a lot of members of his family worked there, his grandmother worked there. That was how he got the summer job.

So there was a time period when a lot of things were made in the states. And I think when that happened, we had a much deeper connection to some of the consumer goods that we were buying. Where today, I think it's a lot different. I think how we view these systems are a lot different. And the out of sight, out of mind stuff also of course extends to the end of the supply chain where we know that a lot of the clothing that we are donating to charities and secondhand isn't being sold because we're all buying a lot of clothing, which means that a lot of it is being dumped in countries in the Global South where again, it's so much clothing, they are not able to wear resell sort through all of it. So it just becomes waste. It becomes waste in someone else's backyard, which is deeply unfair.

And again, if we did not have a system where we could make our waste someone else's problem, I think we'd be looking at the system a lot differently. If I went to a beach in England and it was covered in clothing waste, if we didn't have a system where I couldn't put clothing into a bag and then it would get downgraded and downgraded until it ended up someplace like Ghana or Kenya and we had to live with all of our clothing waste in the UK, you guarantee those systems would change overnight.

You guarantee there would be regulation about overproduction, and I think that people would not buy as much because they would worry about what to do with it at the end of its lifecycle. If there were laws that you couldn't throw away clothing, sometimes I like to think about what my life would look like if I had to live with everything I've ever bought…

Katie:

Just a house full of shit.

Aja:

A house full of shit. And I think people really experience that during lockdown, to be honest, because people always say to me, which direction do you think we're going in? Do you think we're getting better? People always want me to tell them that things are getting better and I can't do it. What happened was during lockdown, we became more polarized. There were some people who were already thinking about this conversation. They were already going, I'm not feeling so good about this. I think I need to do something different. And then lockdown happened, and those people took that moment to really lean into the conversation and to also take a good look around them and realize that they have more stuff than they probably need for the next 10 years. So you have that camp of people, which yay, thank you. Join us. Join us.

And then you have the other group of people who were not thinking about this, who don't want to think about it. And then they discovered this website called Shein where you can buy a hundred items of clothing for $500. And all these people on TikTok are doing this thing where they're buying all this clothing and then they just go through it all. They're like, keep wear, wear. Oh, I don't know about this and I'm going to do it too, and then I'll make a video. So we definitely went in two different directions. We became more polarized and we have to figure out how to get people from the other side over into our camp.

Katie:

Well, I think there are two really interesting things that I want to pull out of what you just said. The first is if there were laws that said you cannot just be willy-nilly discarding things, you can't just constantly be buying and throwing stuff away. I do think that that kind of emphasizes the fact that there are systemic policy wide changes that could happen. Those things are possible, and in the absence of them, I think your point about how do you get people onto the side, I think what was a big shift in my life was basically realizing that consumerism, not only was it not making me happy, but it was actively making my life worse.

And I think that there is something to that of no actually disengaging and divesting from this is going to free you from an obligation that you might not even realize you feel because it's just the water you're swimming in. Keeping up with trends is work. Constantly having to be on the lookout for the next thing that you should have. It's exhausting. It's exhausting. And I read an essay the other day that I thought really described it well. They were talking about that hot, erratic, adrenaline fueled moment of finding the thing that you think you should have and how we often culturally frame shopping is something that is very enjoyable and I suppose in certain contexts,

Aja:

Retail therapy.

Katie:

Yeah, it can be.

Aja:

I'm always like, it is not therapy. Therapy is therapy.

Katie:

Yeah. It's giving it that rebrand of actually this isn't fun. It's kind of the messaging technique that we're seeing right now in politics, which is like, these ideas are weird, these guys are weird. It's like if you just kind of start framing consumption and buying shit constantly, it's like, this isn't fun. What do you think of that as a strategy?

Aja:

This is what I'm seeing happen actually, because there's a lot of videos that are about hyper consumption on Instagram. You see the ones where someone's like, get ready with me, we're going to pack my Stanley for the day. And then I was just—

Katie:

The ice mold.

Aja:

Yes. And then proceed to clip a tractor trailer's worth of shit onto a cop. And if you read the comments, people are like, are you okay? It's reaching a point where people are…

Katie:

Like, the Stanley has a fanny pack.

Aja:

People are like, we are not okay. It's like, oh look, I have to decant my entire skincare routine into these little things that I'm going to clip onto my cup to walk. What is happening? What is happening? I don't understand. Oh, I need a ring holder for my rings on my Stanley Cup. You don't need any of that. You just don't.

And I think people are really starting to see how ridiculous it is. The one I'm talking about currently on social media and my Patreon group is about, I stumbled upon this account, I'm not going to say their name. I don't want to be mean. Basically, there are accounts where people will pay money for someone to scoop a bunch of beauty products out of a bin and that you pay for the size scoop that you want. They will have a massive plastic tub of lip gloss, and then they take this big scoop and you get 28 lip glosses in one go, and then they show you what you've got and they package your order.

Katie:

So it's like bulk candy shopping.

Aja:

Exactly. It takes me three years to use a lip gloss. When I use a lip gloss, I actually mark it as an accomplishment on Facebook just to be a troll how Facebook has the mark safe feature.

Katie:

Marked safe from Mark Jacobs.

Aja:

“Finish that one lip gloss that you thought you would have forever.” So this idea of someone buying 28 lip glosses in one go is so unhinged unless you are sharing it with your entire dorm. And it's like, this'll be fun. We can all get lip glosses and there's just no point. No one needs 28 lip glosses. You'll turn a hundred before you use them all. You will. And also, cosmetics don't last forever. They have a shelf life.

Katie:

Yeah.

Aja:

I think through social media, we're seeing things get real gamified and people aren't realizing that there's actual planet earth on fire consequences to these things.

Katie:

Yeah there are stakes. It's not a game.

Aja:

There are stakes. There are the beauty industries responsible for billions and billions of packages of plastic waste every single year, and no one's making them recycle it. But unfortunately, because of social media, I think we really have become so detached from our habits and the impact that it has on other people.

Katie:

It's interesting too to kind of paint that, I guess duality because the Shein haul on one hand is an example of how a trend started proliferating and became more and more normalized and then therefore more and more damaging.

Aja:

Shein is one of the most profitable companies in the world now.

Katie:

That's also just unbelievable given how cheap their stuff is. They literally, there's no way that they're paying anybody.

Aja:

Yeah, honestly. And there's been a few exposes. There's one on a website called Public Eye about how the people that make their clothing get paid 3 cents an hour or something like that. And one such takeaway was that they said that one of the seamstresses was kind like, yeah, people are only going to wear this once anyways. They know what the score is here. And it's like, this is horrendous.

And then let's talk about the fiber content because I have never taken inventory, I don't think I could. Shein has what, 600,000 products on its website at one go out of those 600,000 products, these are just styles. I would say more than 60% of that is going to be polyester, which is plastic. And guess what happens to polyester? It doesn't biodegrade. It stays on the planet for longer than we do. It gets into your water supply when you wash it because it sheds. And then you've got microfibers. So think about how much polyester tat is being sold every single day. And then think about our drinking water or the fact that they found microfibers in a human placenta.

Katie:

I didn't know that. That's terrifying.

Aja:

Yeah. Microfibers have been found in lung tissue. They've been found in testicles.

Katie:

Oh my God. I think that that's the kind of information that it brings the stakes back into frame where right now the consequences are you basically have all the upside of endless cheap shit and none of the downside. But I think when you start to talk about and bring that back on screen of like, well, but actually I think that there was the Brandy Melville documentary that recently—

Aja:

I watched that one.

Katie:

And they showed the beaches in Ghana and I was like, I am never going to look at clothing the same way. And it's like those are the types of images that just stick with you and I think have the power to…

Aja:

Those are the images we need to see regularly and we're not seeing enough of them.

Katie:

You should pass it in every checkout process. You have to click past the pictures.

Aja:

Yeah, exactly. Do you know what this system is doing?

And we talked about microfibers, but let's talk about the fact that a lab in Canada tested Shein items for lead and the items that they tested came up five times over the legal amount of lead count. Basically they tested like a baby's outfit.

Katie:

Logistically speaking, why is that stuff allowed to be shipped? Why are you allowed to buy this?

Aja:

Deregulation.

Katie:

Can we get a Reagan drop please?

Aja:

Hahaha.

Katie:

Milton Friedman clears throat.

Aja:

Exactly. And Shein is, I don't want to say brilliant because I find it horrible, but they've managed to really work with the loopholes that we have in the system, the amount of tax-free stuff that you can buy before you have to pay tax on it and things like that has really worked in Shein's favor.

And I find it really scary because they sell things like beauty products. I remember looking at, they had this selection of bath bombs obviously trying to undercut lush, and I looked at the ingredient list and it was just like “fragrance.”

Katie:

Arsenic.

Aja:

No, you could tell it was not a concise list of ingredients on that bath bomb. And I'm thinking people are putting these products on their face and their body and whatnot. I saw one case on TikTok where someone had painted their nails and their nails had turned colors basically.

Katie:

And you live in London, so you have different, the EU regulations are a lot different as I understand it.

Aja:

Yeah. I still think she and skirts around a lot of that.

Katie:

Interesting.

Aja:

The EU regulates companies. Definitely. Well, actually the UK is out of the EU, so there we go. I know. Great. Yay UK. Woo. I think the regulation for beauty products is higher in Europe than it is in the States, but Shein still finds a way to skirt around that stuff.

Katie:

Yeah, I, and I think that there's something that I appreciate about the work that you do, which is kind of leaving space for different experiences and there's a level of empathy and trying to understand that different people are coming from different backgrounds and might relate differently to this stuff, the fact that one size doesn't fit all. But I think that there was absolutely, there was one note that you had made about someone who maybe grew up in poverty, was only ever able to get secondhand clothing, might want to prioritize buying the things that they buy new because they can now. And these are conversations that are worth having as we move forward. I'm curious if you have a consumption framework or philosophy that you follow personally. It sounds like you have some rules in place for yourself about shopping secondhand, about tracking what you're buying. I'd love to hear more about that.

Aja:

So I grew up in a family that was lower middle class, and I wore most of my sisters hand-me-downs up until I was a certain age where I could buy my own clothing. So when it comes to fast fashion consumerism, I was like right for the take in. I was like, come get me. I'm here. And so I had to really unpick that feeling of lack within myself that made me feel like the way I could make my life better is if I always had a endless revolving wardrobe of the latest trends.

So that takes some deep internal work, but once you do that, I tell people to move at the pace that works for them, right? Not everyone's going to be able to quit fast fashion, cold turkey, and that's not what I'm asking. But what I am asking you to do is examine your spending habits and examine what you're buying and why and whether or not you actually need it.

Because when we do that, a lot of us find that absolutely not. We do not need all of that stuff. So for me, I always challenge people to take a little break, just take a break, unsubscribe from some of the apps, cancel that email mailing list that gets you every time when your paycheck coincidentally arrives, take a break from the spending and see what you notice. I'm not saying you can never shop from those shops again, but just challenge yourself to a month off and see what happens if you don't buy something apparel base for a month. How do you feel about it? And then when people are ready to take it farther, I challenge them to see if you could buy like 50% of the new to you items in your wardrobe secondhand. For me, I'm at 75%. I haven't bought a new pair of jeans since 2018. It's great. I found the jeans that I like and then I just go on eBay and look for them. It's awesome.

I challenge people to really sort of move within their intersection and that's going to look different for the person that really does not need to be buying fast fashion. And I think that is, a lot of people recognize that that's you, but if that isn't actually you, how can you move in a way that's equitable to you and the planet? Can you start to learn how to repair things? Can you swap with your friends? Do you already do hand-me-downs? Can you buy something secondhand online? Depop is huge and it's really fun. And once you start using these apps, it could be really thrilling to find something. For me personally, I like to go and try and buy things that I couldn't afford years ago.

I love the Finnish brand Marimekko, and I just love to have a little piece and I'm like, wow, I really wanted that dress in 2012 and somebody is selling it in 2024 for like $30. Cool. That feels really good to sometimes get things that you've wanted for a long amount of time, not new, but gently use, and you get to give it another life.

So all I ask is for people to really start to investigate their consumerism and move within the intersection that they're in. There are going to be some people that can't quit fast fashion yet, but they're working towards it. That's really good. Just something, don't throw your hands up in the air and go, well, nothing to do with me. Because honestly, if you like living on a clean planet where people are treated fairly, it has everything to do with you.

Katie:

Beautiful. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Alright, so I want to circle back a little bit to that essay I mentioned that I published a few weeks ago. I wrote it when I was in the midst of working on this episode and doing research for this episode because I was struck by a line that I read about sustainability that over consumption happens when humans use more than they produce.

And for some reason the phrase jumped out at me and made me think not just about the literal production and consumption cycle, but about an individual's relationship to the things that they are making. It made me think about maybe a pre-capitalist, pre-industrial revolution world when people were very intimately connected to the work that they were doing, whether they were part of the 94% of Americans who lived on a farm and were producing everything that they consumed themselves, or a specialized craftsman that was making goods to sell to somebody else with their own two hands.

And this felt like it was in really stark contrast with the fake email jobs of today and the way in which we tend to seek, I think meaning in consumption potentially, because we aren't actually all that attuned to our capacity for creation.

What if being disconnected from the things that we make and the things that we consume is what's turning us into the “hungry ghosts,” as writer River Selby says. So put another way. Maybe it's that the analogous protein, hydration, fiber, the genuinely nourishing macronutrients that we can consume, that our bodies are actually craving. So in this instance, the act of self-expression, something that we are currently taught to enact through our purchases, through our transacting and creativity and generation. The act of generating, maybe it's just getting misappropriated in transmission and it's coming out the other side as a hunger for that sugary substitute. The quick dopamine hit of acquisition, the buying new things.

And maybe if we try to satiate ourselves first by literally producing and making things and engaging with self-expression and creativity in a different way, maybe that'll restore the balance in the signals and we'll find ourselves just wanting less.

That's all for this week. I will see you next week on the Money with Katie Show. Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and me, Katie Gatti Tassin with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is our chief content officer, and additional fact checking comes from Scott Wilson.