How are you getting on with Less?

It's different, right? Here's my Q1 wardrobe report. Oops, it's more than I hoped...

It’s not easy limiting yourself to only five new items a year. In fact, as I found out last year, it’s only just possible. With a small second hand allowance (four more items), I managed it. But what was interesting was how much I learned along the way, about myself, about style and about the growth of the clothing industry.

Over lunch with a colleague last week, she asked me how I was doing this year. “What’s your Q1 update?” she asked (she works in a corporate). Well the Q1 update is three new things already (help - it’s only just May) and two terrible second hand choices, one of which was sent back.

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Quickly: I bought a suit from Mother of Pearl for a return to the office, and as that was a jacket and trousers that counts as two items. I also went against all my advice and walked in to my favourite clothes shop (Diverse in Tufnell Park, London - it’s local, independent and extremely well curated for my taste) and fell for the sale rail. A £900 Margaret Howell blazer was reduced to £200. That was still a lot of money but when you aren’t buying something from Zara every 5 minutes, it was just about affordable. This blazer is wool, oversized and makes me look amazing. I can hide in it, whatever my shape, and it’s cut so cool it works with everything. I don’t regret it and I reckon I will wear it till I die.

The suit from Mother of Pearl has been longed for for about 12 months.

Wearing my treasured new Mother of Pearl suit. Two items out of five.

I have always admired Mother of Pearl creative director

Amy Powney

(check out her film Fashion Reimagined, and her new Substack). She has thought very hard about her supply chain, her materials and her impact which means every piece in her collection is incredibly well considered. I always knew I wanted to spend one of my precious five with her. Amy doesn’t make many clothes, nor does she order many of those she does make, so if you want to be on the right side of that dump of fast fashion in the Atacama desert, anything you buy from Mother of Pearl helps you get there. It’s a vote for the kind of fashion future we want. I should also add Amy has a very distinct aesthetic, and her pearl studded knits, shirts and coats are aspirational fashion code. I thought I would buy one of those - the pearl being a style semaphore for cool sustainability - but Amy asked me to try this suit for a shoot. I wouldn’t normally have considered it but I loved the way I looked in it. I went home and thought about it for two weeks (golden 14 day rule of consideration) and realised it was exactly what I wanted. Every time I have worn it, I’ve had compliments. It’s another ace buy.

So with a black blazer and a neutral trouser suit, I can see what’s going on here. I’ve been very conservative because I know my clothes need to last me. I can’t afford to buy something I won’t wear often (ahem, the vintage see through crochet skirt from March I haven’t worn yet. Even though, as the vintage dealer kindly pointed out to me in an instagram DM, it’s pretty similar to the one Victoria Beckham has just designed for Mango).

Now: back to Less. This also happens to be the title of a new book from Patrick Grant, the Savile Row tailor, founder of Community Clothing and judge of BBC TV’s Great British Sewing Bee. Like Amy, Grant has put much time and thought into creating a fashion business that serves its workers and respects its materials, so while he makes expensive bespoke suits for gentlemen who can afford them, he also makes very accessible t shirts, socks, chinos, jackets and everything else you might need at his factory in Lancashire. This is his Community Clothing line, where he can control every stitch - meaning his new line of plastic free sportswear is just that, and his claim to be British Made couldn’t be truer.

In Less: Stop Buying So Much Rubbish: How Having Fewer, Better Things Can Make Us Happier, Grant argues our case. He knows fashion makes too many clothes and it’s making us all ill. He traces our relationship with clothes from pre industrial times to the present day and argues what everyone on this Substack knows to be true: we need to buy less and buy better. Buy the best you can afford (and if you are not buying quite so much, you will be able to afford a little more). Grant mourns the time when we used to care a lot about our clothes, pointing out that today the average person has nearly five times as many clothes as they did 50 years ago. He points out we are living in the age of ‘Want’, a hyper consumerist market where the more you buy the more you crave.

“We can choose not to engage with any of it if we wish to. If all these clothes did make people happier and it did improve their lives, then I would accept that. But what we increasingly find is that the pleasure you get is incredibly fleeting and those who disengage from it are better for it. They are not constantly anxious with keeping up with what now can’t be kept up with,” he told The Times this weekend.

All this is very timely, as a new 45 minute documentary film from Patagonia says we are living in the Shitthropocene. It’s a riff on the Anthropocene, the Age of Man, and centres around the fact that we are currently consuming 62 million tons of clothes a year, with a projection of 102 million tonnes by 2030.

Of late, I had been grimacing to friends who ask me how my Rule of Five is going. Of course I feel regretful I can’t have unfettered access to fashion and splurge to my heart’s content. A designer last week expressed incredulity at the idea of Less: “But I get so much joy from fashion!” she said to me. And I wholeheartedly agree. What Rule of Five does is show you how that joy can be made all the sweeter if we save for it, think about it, treasure it. If we get creative with mending, altering, swapping, renting and borrowing. I’m still riding high on my own wardrobe: on average we only wear 30% of our wardrobes, but in the last 18 months I reckon I’ve upped to that to about 60-70% of mine. I have loved and am still loving digging out old pieces and styling them in new ways, giving them new life by putting then with my hand full of new things.

It illustrates the need for all of us to have good foundational wardrobes, so please do think about every piece in yours. Every time you buy something think how useful it will really be. In Grant’s book he recounts how clothes were once so precious that they were itemised in wills. Clothes were handed down through generations because they were precious and valued.

I think my Margaret Howell blazer will make it that far. I’ll leave it to my daughter if she promises not to lose any more of my shoes.

Now - I need to hear your Q1 updates! What have you bought, what have you discovered, and are you enjoying your fashion diet? Please tell me in the comments below!

Tiffanie x