I’ve wanted to write this piece for a while. It’s a struggle to work out how to include all that there is to say. So, in the first of three pieces, I’m going to embrace our motto of perfectly imperfect, and write what I can about Patrick Grant’s Book, Less. Stop buying so much rubbish: How having fewer, better things can make us happier.
My well loved copy is in the photo above, complete with dozens of post-it notes. In Grant’s own words, the book is “a discussion about consumption, work, quality, and how they shape our society and our happiness”.
The book starts with a beautiful essay on what makes Grant happy; the handcrafted mug gifted to him from his sister, the shirt his granny gave him from the Op Shop, hand knitted scarves and jumpers. He also credits his happiness to being in nature, and his meaningful work helping to restore jobs to towns that need them whilst creating quality clothing from natural fibres.
I love that Grant, a public figure, judge of the BBC’s The Great British Sewing Bee, owner of a Saville Row tailor and retailer Community Clothing, unashamedly loves wearing basically the same thing every day, when he could be flaunting a new three-piece suit each week.
The book is split into four parts; Want, Quality, Work and Less, and Grant talks us through how he sees these key themes combining to create the perfect storm for the almighty environmental predicament we find ourselves in.
A predicament that sees us sending 23 million unworn, returned garments to landfill or incineration each year (in the UK alone!) because it’s cheaper than re-processing them for sale, brands spending more money on advertising than on their actual product, and two thirds of the clothes we buy never being worn.
Of course, it wasn’t always this way. In Want, Grant outlines “how we went from needing very little to wanting everything”. How we have shifted from producing something for need and function to producing simply to sell, the introduction of the ‘brand’, online selling, and fast fashion.
Grant discusses how we have been very strategically manipulated into this state of overconsumption via a system that benefits a few, and harms many. Through huge advertising and PR budgets, billion-dollar brands are feeding us content to stir us to buy, constantly. Grant quotes advertiser Emily Fogg Mead as saying:
“We are not concerned with the ability to pay, but with the ability to want”.
I think about this for a moment, and I’m surprised by how many tactics I can reel off.
There are social media influencers with sponsored posts, discount codes, and giveaways, with their filtered and airbrushed photos. There’s ‘haul reels’, that show the high dopamine spikes of consumers (we don’t see the drop 48 hours later), new colours, styles and those that imitate outfits worn by ‘insert Hollywood celebrity’. Then there are scarcity tactics; limited time offers, new ‘drops’ that won’t last and timers that encourage impulse buys and create a sense of urgency to purchase.
There are free returns, saving you time and providing an insurance cover; ‘if I don’t like it I’ll just return it’ (only for this to be burned), bulk purchases of ‘buy 2 get the third free’, tell a friend, free shipping, and gamification with in-app games and point systems and rewards to boost engagement. The list is endless. Brands aren’t satisfied with us buying once, they want us to buy over and over. Each tactic is giving us another reason to buy. This, combined with the cheapness of clothing, is it any wonder that we are consuming so much?
One of the most outrageous facts here is the practice of burning clothing that has been returned to brands, by consumers, unworn. Because they’re so cheap, it’s cheaper to burn them than reprocess them and put them back on sale. “The British Fashion Council reported that 23 million returned garments were sent to landfill or incinerated in the UK in 2022 alone.” This is in one year, in just four nations!
So not only are we manipulated into buying more, but we’re also inadvertently sending clothing to landfill without our knowledge or permission to save a billionaire some money?
Towards the end of the chapter we see what all this manipulation and want has led us to.
“In 1970 the average person owned just 25 garments and spent 10% of their income on them. Today we spend just over 3% of what we earn on our clothes and the average Brit has 118 garments in their wardrobe – nearly five times as many for a third as much money.”
Why isn't this a good thing you might be thinking? More for less? Isn't that what we want? Affordable clothing? Affordable yes, but so cheap that we don't value it and it becomes rubbish, no.
We'll look more at quality and its role in next month's blog. Suffice to say, I’m a big fan of Grant’s work!
