'I banned myself from buying clothes for one year. What happened next shocked me.'

The below 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. You can order your copy, here.

I think the fact that I'd made so much progress with my finances but still couldn't quite kick this clothing thing really came to a head in 2022. The two years prior had been spent bouncing in and out of lockdowns where I, like many people, bought clothes online despite having absolutely nowhere to go.

Unfortunately, my affinity for red wine and cheeseboards during lockdown also meant that my waistline expanded with every day we spent inside, so most of the clothes I'd bought didn't even fit by the time I could actually wear them.

Then we hit 2022, the first year without a lockdown, which means adjusting to what we came to call the 'new normal', and grappling with who we were after two years of life being somewhat on hold. I went into lockdown an ambitious, bushy-tailed 29-year-old and emerged a burned-out 31-year-old with more question marks about herself and the meaning of life than ever before.

Watch: The truth about sale shopping on the Nothing To Wear podcast. Post continues below.

I spent that year reinventing myself over and over again. Grappling with my new dress size and an ever-present craving for confidence meant I leaned on my enjoyment of buying clothes as an emotional soothing technique.

That year, I also went all in on my side hustle as a freelance writer and content creator, and I hoped that leaving a job I was struggling with would help improve my sense of self-image.

This change in career path and work normalcy sparked a change in identity and a craving to be successful that lent itself perfectly to my attempts to buy my identity. The job I'd left before going into self-employment full-time was a pretty toxic environment, and my confidence was left shattered for quite some time.

That, combined with the identity shift of being newly self-employed and making this big bet on myself, plus the vulnerability that comes with going out on your own and not 'quantum leaping' (to quote my least-favourite girl bosses) to exponential success created a breeding ground for my clothes-buying compulsions to reactivate. Despite what the girl bosses will tell you, diving into self-employment is tough.

I've lost count of the number of times I've heard someone say, 'Once I quit my job and went all in, I was making three times my salary within the first year'. Yeah, didn't happen to me, gang. Still waiting for that magical day. I'll keep you posted.

I'd see other businesswomen in matching pink suits or minimalist beige outfits, and equate that to their success. If I looked the part, I'd be the part, right? I developed this belief that if I could dress the part, cosplay as the confident, knowledgeable, expert businesswoman, that would be the difference between adding up whether I'd made enough to cover my expenses that month and thriving in self-employment.

Safe to say I'd had enough of the hold clothes had over me. I was sick of always buying clothes and never having anything I felt good in. I knew I was too reliant on the dopamine of having an online order delivered, and I wanted to do something radical to change it. Enter: the idea for an experiment.

Basically, I was in a pattern of very clunky buying. I'd buy nothing for a while, largely by avoiding going to the shops or because nothing online triggered my desire to replicate the style of an influencer living in a loft apartment, then I'd buy several things at once, kind of out of nowhere. I got into the habit of ordering a few items at once online (which is really dangerous for racking up the notches of your total items purchased in a year, by the way).

Something about the thrill of having several items in a package to tear open was so exciting to me. Multiple possibilities, a treasure trove of dopamine, so many chances to reinvent myself all packaged up into a squishy bundle lobbed onto my doorstep by a postie.

A lot of my purchases of this kind would happen when I shopped the sales. I was an absolute sucker for a really good sale. I'd find myself looking at one specific item, and thinking 'I'll just see what else is in the sale'.

If the prices were particularly attractive, I'd then race through the site throwing things into my cart with reckless abandon, with more consideration for the price than the actual purpose of the item in my wardrobe. That's how I'd end up with stuff in the wrong colour, or in a size that wasn't quite right, but with a price tag I couldn't say 'no' to. Once I was done on my supermarket sweep–style binge, I'd open the cart, look at the total, maybe remove a few items until the price was something I could gag down, and then check out. I came to realise that I've shopped this way for much of my life.

Single-item purchases would drip money out of my account one by one, but I was often enamoured with the idea of a multi-item sale spree. Shopping in this way caused so many problems:

• I'd end up with stuff I hadn't thought through properly—accelerating my journey to regretville.

• I'd buy based on price or perceived saving, rather than whether it was what I actually wanted.

• I rarely said 'no'—I'd buy in a colour or a size that wasn't quite right, and vow to try and make it work.

• It would be more about the dopamine of the order arriving than actually building a wardrobe of things I could truly wear.

• It left me no room to understand what I wanted or needed in my wardrobe.

At one point in my life, I'd whack these kinds of splurges on my credit card for an extra layer of avoidance, but even when I'd got out of debt and sorted my money stuff out, I still found myself in the same emotional cycle of buying when it came to clothes.

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The emergence.

As the shops closed on 31 December 2023, I sat with an immense feeling of accomplishment. I'd bloody done it. I'd gone one whole year without buying clothes, and not only that, I'd enjoyed it! The satisfaction I felt was really quite remarkable, and I'm genuinely not overselling that. Not only did I have the pride of completing something I'd set out to do for one whole year, but I was certain I wasn't the same person I was a year ago. I saw someone else in the mirror looking back at me.

If you'd have told me before the Project that I'd be forever changed afterwards, my mind would be leaping and bounding through every iteration of my fantasy self, giddy at the thought of undergoing some kind of transformation.

But real change isn't like that. Real change isn't the flip of a switch or a complete 180 on your identity. Real change occurs gradually, and actually becomes part of who you are and who you've always been.

I knew I'd changed because I felt different. But I knew I'd undergone deep change when I realised that the person I saw in the mirror hadn't fundamentally changed from the outside.

We're conditioned to believe we'll feel differently after big external changes, such as weight loss or a new style or a new haircut or a new outfit—as though we're candy in a wrapper. For years, I'd been trying to change the wrapper, but never what was underneath.

Now, though, I knew for certain the change was real because, to an outsider, the wrapper looked the same.

Emma Edwards. Image: Supplied

The key shifts I never expected.

There were three key parts of the major shifts to how I felt at the end of the Project, and I want to break down each one individually, because they all represent a different aspect of the change I underwent.

1. I felt happier

It's sometimes hard to pinpoint exactly why I felt happier, but I think it came down to the fact I'd stopped relying on those external things to feel good. I hadn't realised how much the seemingly enjoyable process of buying clothes was keeping me stuck until I cut it off completely and learnt to create my own joy without it.

In the time since completing the Project, I've paid extra attention to online content about people's decisions to do low-buy or no-buy periods, whether for clothes or just stuff in general. Not once have I heard anyone say they weren't happier afterwards, or that they were happier when on the consumption hamster wheel. And bear in mind, it doesn't really serve algorithmic advertising for that message to be pushed. If there were an alternative perspective (i.e., that withdrawing from consumption was a miserable feat), I'm almost certain we'd be hearing it.

While my no-buy was only for clothes, the knock-on effect meant I consumed less overall, and felt broadly less reliant on 'stuff'.

2. I felt more confident

If there's one message you take from this book, let it be this: I found more confidence from not buying clothes than I did from buying them. Yikes. What does that say about my previous pursuits?

Confidence is something I'd chased for years, and I conflated so much of my idea of confidence with the way I felt about my body. It was always a case of 'when' something had changed, I'd be free to be confident. As if the confidence was in there, just shackled by a few extra kilos or a few flyaway hairs or the absence of the perfect white T-shirt.

It was always when I lose weight, when I look polished, when I get that job, when I have a thigh gap, when this, when that. Experiencing confidence without any of those changes I thought I needed was eye- opening, and it taught me that I could change the way I saw myself whenever I wanted, without the need to consume.

This realisation got me thinking more about our culture of clothing consumption and its effect on us. We buy all of these things to look a certain way—but is that actually what's stopping us from seeing our real selves, the ones that don't need shiny things to be worthy, but who just are worthy for the very reason that we exist?

We're conditioned to have these insecurities, and then offered up psychological relief in the form of avoidance by hiding in the clothes we see on racks, chasing the images we consume online, and never really, truly seeing our reflection in the mirror. When I took away the option to hide my body or contort it into clothes to fit a mould, so many of my flaws went away too. So it begs the question: do our insecurities exist without the solutions we're sold to fix them? I'm starting to think they don't.

3. I felt free

The mental peace of withdrawing from clothing consumption is one of the most important things I took from this experiment. I'd had absolutely no idea how much my mind was cluttered with things I could want, with decisions to buy or not to buy, with fantasy stories of what an item would do for me, with battling priorities—save or buy this thing? Should I, shouldn't I? I'll just check cashback sites.

Listen: On this episode of Nothing To Wear, hosts Leigh and Chelsea chat about building a wardrobe you'll actually wear. Post continues below.

I wonder if it's on sale. I wonder if my size is back in stock. Taking all of that away felt like a weight had been lifted. We often think of saying 'no' as something restrictive. Like we regress back to our childlike selves being denied an ice cream. In this context, the 'no' was liberating. I wasn't saying 'no' to things I needed, or things I even wanted. By saying 'no' to clothes, I was saying 'yes' to so much more.

• Yes to having enough—and therefore to being enough.

• Yes to more choices, more agency over my decisions.

• Yes to more money in my bank account, and less pull to impulsively buy something that I think will make me happy.

• Yes to more space in my wardrobe.

• Yes to less packaging.

• Yes to more mental space and less decision-making.

• Yes to creativity with what I had, and with a hobby I'd always wanted to reignite (sewing).

• Yes to a more sustainable way of participating in clothes.

• Yes to myself as I am, without the need for a shiny new 'wrapper'.

Image: John Wiley & Sons Australia.

The Wardrobe Project: A year of buying less and liking yourself more by Emma Edwards (Wiley, $34.95), is available 26 November at all leading retailers. You can order your copy, here.

Feature Image: Getty. (Stock image for illustrative purposes).