Whether for financial reasons, environmental concerns, or simply being overwhelmed by your closet, there are a lot of cases for a low-buy year, season, or month.
When I asked the Slow Fashion Saturday community about their slow fashion intentions, the most common response was that they wanted to do a low-buy or no-buy year.
I have a similar goal this year — I want to prioritize only adding intentional, high-quality pieces to my closet without breaking my clothing budget. This will mean being selective in the number of items I add to my closet.
Everyone’s low-buy will look a little bit different. But these tips will help you create your framework and stick to it for a successful low-buy year.
1) Set a Clear Intention
Define your goal, your why, and understand where you’re at now. Here are some prompts to help you set your intentions!
Determine what qualifies as a no-buy or low-buy year for you
Perhaps you’re taking Tiffanie Darke’s “Rule of 5” challenge and adding only 5 things to your wardrobe. Perhaps you’re committing to only buy 1 piece per month. Perhaps you don’t want to buy any new fashion item this year. Maybe you’re going to take a complete pause for a few months, even including secondhand items.
Choose what will work for you!
For example, if you recently experienced size fluctuations, a major lifestyle change, or moved to a different climate, a full no-buy or super restrictive low-buy might not be realistic for you this year.
Or perhaps it’s the other way around — maybe you’ve purchased a lot of clothing and footwear in the past 4 years and you want to create tighter parameters around a low-buy.
Consider what makes sense for your life and budget right now.
Get clear on why you are taking this challenge
There might be several reasons here — perhaps you want to save money and you want to feel more in control of your closet.
And then go a level deeper:
Why do you want to reduce your overconsumption? (To feel more confident about your personal style? To align your fashion choices more closely with your environmental concerns or passions?)
Why do you want to save money? (To pay off debt, to save for a home down payment, to create an emergency fund?)
Think about how you want to feel at the end of this year. Do you want to feel calmer when you go into your closet? Proud of yourself for being a more conscious consumer? Confident because you’re more in control of your finances?
Decide how you will track your progress
If you’re taking this challenge for financial reasons, add up what you spent on fashion last year. Use this as a benchmark to compare what you spend this year.
If you’re taking the challenge because you’re overwhelmed by your closet, count the number of items currently in your wardrobe. If your goal to reduce the total number of items, take a tally at the end of each season to see how you’re doing. (My free closet tracker is an easy way to do this!)
Or if you’re taking the challenge primarily for sustainability reasons, perhaps you want to also track the type of items you purchase. For example, maybe you want to only buy secondhand or only support sustainably-minded small brands.
Lean into the slow fashion habits you already have
This was something that sustainability creator Immy Lucas included in her low-buy planning YouTube video: “what good habits do I already have?” I loved that idea of starting the challenge with a positive mindset acknowledging what we’re already doing right.
Maybe you always shop secondhand first, perhaps you don’t buy fast fashion, maybe you mend your clothes, or you already wear what you have a long time. Keep doing more of that and go from there!
2) Do a Closet Audit
Take stock of what is already in your closet, counting how many pieces you have in each category. You’ll then also have a total of how many pieces are in your closet. This process might take anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour, depending on how many clothes you have and if some are in storage or not.
If you’re not sure about everything in your closet, take a moment to do a mini closet audit first, with three categories.
- Keep in closet: pieces you enjoy wearing or are excited to wear
- Separate out: pieces that haven’t been worn lately (or at all) but have potential — challenge yourself to restyle those pieces to see if they could work!
- Take out to re-home: pieces that don’t suit your personal style, lifestyle, or don’t fit (and aren’t alterable)
If you want an easy way to keep track of your garment categories, my free closet tracker template is here to help!
If you did the mini closet-audit, only count the items in the first two categories.
For the third category, you can resell, swap, gift, or responsibly donate to an organization that has a direct use for that clothing, such as a refugee center or safe house. If you’re clothing is not wearable or salvageable, check out Suay’s fully circular take-back bag!
Once you know how many pieces are in your wardrobe (and how many you have in each category), reflect on the following:
In which categories do I already have enough or too much in my current size?
- This becomes your “do not buy” list.
Are there any categories I have a gap in that needs to be filled in my current size?
- This becomes your “ok to buy” list or your wishlist.
3) Set Up Systems for Success
As the James Clear quote goes from Atomic Habits, “you do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
Plan your purchases
Whether you want to utilize the “To Buy?” tab in my Closet Tracker template or just keep track of your most-wanted/needed pieces in your Notes app, this can be a powerful practice.
Or perhaps you want to plan when you will buy.
Tiffanie Darke suggests planning your “Rule of 5” challenge pieces evenly throughout the seasons.
And one Slow Fashion Saturday subscriber had a great idea to plan these purchases around upcoming planned travel. Tying an item to an experience can add a sentimental value to them, making those garments all the more special.
If you plan your purchases around certain times, you can still enjoy that element of discovery. This is a way to engage in a low-buy without a prescriptive shopping list. (Though I think a loose list is still helpful, as you’ll still want to make those limited number of purchases count!)
Remove shopping temptations
No matter how strong our willpower is, at one point it does run out — so why not make it easier on ourselves?
Unsubscribe from newsletters, cancel subscriptions (like Prime), unfollow or mute accounts that push constant consumption, delete shopping apps, log-out of shopping accounts, and remove “saved card” details from payment processors or other shopping sites you frequent.
Determine what to replace shopping with
When you want to change any habit, the first step is building awareness on why we have that habit in the first place. What need is that habit satisfying? What purpose is it serving in our lives? (E.g., Does buying from certain brands make us feel like we’ve “made it” and are successful? Does shopping give us a dopamine hit after a long day of work?)
One we know that, we can start to find healthier alternatives to meeting that need or desire.
I know shopping and buying new things can add a sense of excitement to my day. So a replacement could be taking a weekly dance class (my favorite habit I’ve acquired in adulthood!) or I could be more proactive about planning fun activities with friends that I can look forward to.
I also know that putting on a new garment can make me feel confident. As a replacement, I could spend some time shopping my closet and creating fresh outfits in proportions that flatter to satisfy that purpose.
This one is quite personal, so it might take some time to get clarity on it.
How can you support yourself with community and accountability?
Will you track your clothing spending and come back to it each month?
Will you share your goal with a partner, friend, or loved one? Or even better, can you have someone join the challenge with you?
There are many subscribers of the Slow Fashion Saturday newsletter that are doing a low-buy year so that’s been something we’ve been talking about lately! We’d love to have you in that newsletter community.
Cultivate a positive mindset
A low-buy or no-buy challenge doesn’t have to be viewed as scarcity or as a punishment. It can be an opportunity to have renewed gratitude for the abundance in our closets, or a moment to pause and reflect.
It also can be a chance to start noticing what you do like already about your clothes, your outfits, or your closet. What did you get right? Which purchases were a good investment? What pieces do you wear all of the time?
Another subscriber shared that she found it helpful to track her outfits and note down what she liked about each outfit. As she said, “I can’t tell you how helpful [noting down what I liked about each outfit] has been. It’s much more motivating to develop a plan incorporating positive realizations than negative perceptions. Such a great reminder that gratitude is where it’s at!”
I’m a big fan of cultivating gratitude with our closets because it helps us get off of the “never enough” consumption treadmill. I find gratitude to be foundational to a slow fashion mindset — it helps us appreciate the abundance of what we have and inspires us to care more for what we own.
Are you taking a low-buy or no-buy challenge this year?
Stay inspired on the journey by joining the Slow Fashion Saturday newsletter…
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