Cut to me, a young healthy lady walking down the sidewalk in New York City. I had a brand new job and a long term, live-in relationship. I was on the verge of paying off my student loans. Things were going (more or less) great.
But life is about solving problems, so naturally I looked at my overstuffed closet and decided it was a good time to solve that problem.
Let me explain. My closet was bursting partly because space is rare in New York apartments, but also because I spent all my money at Uniqlo and Zara. Fast fashion had a tight grip on my wallet, and I had no room left for it. What’s worse, I wasn’t even wearing most of what I bought.
Most women only wear 20% of what they own, so I wasn’t alone.
Of course, fast fashion is also bad for our planet and for the humans who need to sew it to survive.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, an astounding 84% of unwanted clothing can end up in landfills or an incinerator. And according to the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, the fashion industry produces almost 20% of the world’s annual waste water, 10% of global carbon emissions, and you get the picture.
The obvious solution for me at the time was to create a life where less was actually more. That meant buying and owning fewer, but better, clothes.
Not fast fashion, no no. Slow fashion.
Having a minimalist wardrobe (another term), if you didn’t know, is supposed to solve the world’s problems while magically opening up space for the happiness that’s been eluding you because of your big ol’ crowded closet.
This line of thinking is what led me and many others right down the rabbit hole of what we call minimalist fashion.
Looking for like-minded folks on this journey, I chose my Instagram handle: lovewearlast.
I put a ton of thought into that handle, and figured I would eventually write a system or book based on that phrase. To buy only clothes that you love, that you’ll wear, and that will last. It was just another way to frame this new minimalist ethos I’d started to adore.
Taking cues from my new community, I posted photos of my outfits and struggled for meaningful captions.
I joined #10x10 challenges, where you wear only 10 items of clothing over 10 days, and earned some new followers.
I bought clothes from “approved” sustainable brands like Vetta, Eileen Fisher, Amor Vert, and others, and sold anything Zara-like on Poshmark. Other gals dropped into my DMs with a compliment, or a correction.
When a new blog called “The Minimalist Wardrobe” started to recruit for contributors, I jumped at the chance to articulate my perspective. I wrote articles like “Stop counting your clothes!” and “10 holiday gifts that aren’t things.” With every post, I gained hundreds of followers.
Hold up, was I becoming an influencer?
Yes. But so was everyone else.
Thousands of men and women had come to the same conclusion about their closets — a kind of fast-fashion hangover en masse — and were flocking to Instagram to fill the void.
We tried to crack the influencer code by consistently posting our #ootds, tagging sustainable brands, getting sponsored, producing videos, commenting on the right posts and paying services to like-farm and follow-unfollow other users. (I may have paid for one of those such services.)
But the glaring problem with bringing minimalist fashion to Instagram is that, really, it should be inherently minimal, i.e. really boring. The core tenet of minimalism is that you hardly buy new things and just wear the same stuff over and over again, right?
Instead, I and the rest of the community were pouring countless hours– maybe even more money than before — into making our feeds interesting enough to get more followers, more likes, more brand partnerships. Even the world’s most visible personal minimalist, Marie Kondo, had to create a line of stuff to extend her legacy.
Less is more had quickly turned into too much and never enough. I had joined a race with no finish line, and what’s worse, I was running out of content.
My saving grace ironically came in the form of an epic breakup. (You know, that long-term relationship I mentioned.) For the first time in a while, there was a more important problem I needed to solve.
I deactivated my account and found the space I’d been looking for all along.
