Meet the millionaire who’s given up SHOPPING!
Sponsored runs in old linen shorts. Zoom meetings in muddy jodhpurs. And recycling her designer shirts. Multi-millionaire Dragon DEBORAH MEADEN’s pledge not to buy new clothes for a year has gone so well, she’s doing it all over again...
MOST of us, if pressed to take part in a charity run, could root around in our wardr o b e s and muster a pair of Lycra shorts, trainers and a sports top. And if we couldn’t find something suitable, we’d nip out and buy it.
Not Deborah Meaden. When the Dragons’ Den star agreed to join a 10k race this summer — ‘and believe me,’ she says, ‘I’m no runner’ — she didn’t have a thing to wear.
She cobbled together an eccentric blend of High Street casual and sporty, and exhumed an old pair of lace-ups from the bottom of her shoe cupboard.
‘I teamed some tailored linen shorts from L.K.Bennett with a T-shirt,’ she says, ‘but I have a few problems with my knees and I thought: “I’m not going to be able to run in these old shoes.”
‘So I had to succumb. I confess it! I spent £70 on a new pair of trainers.’
Why the mea culpa, you may wonder. Why did Deborah, 61, feel so guilty about shelling out a few quid on essential footwear for a sponsored run which saw her raise £7,500 for the wildlife conservation fund Tusk Trust? It wasn’t exactly a flagrant act of selfindulgence — particularly for someone who’s worth around £40 million.
The reason is that this time last year, Deborah made a pubic pledge not to buy any new clothes, shoes or handbags for 12 months.
‘I’d been thinking about our national obsession with consumerism for some time,’ she told me last January. ‘I’d also been contemplating all the clothes, bags and shoes in my dressing room and
There are far better things ahead than any we leave behind
C.S. LEWIS
realised I had enough to last a lifetime without buying a single item.’
She had a laudable motive for this act of self- sacrifice. Mindful of the effects fast fashion has on the planet — we in the UK send 13 million items of clothing to landfill every week — and conscious that if we double the number of times a garment is worn, we could cut greenhouse gas emissions by around 44 per cent, she decided to do her bit.
‘I wanted to do something to help. And in a small way, I could. By buying fewer clothes and keeping old ones for longer, we can reduce the adverse effect on our planet,’ she said at the start of her challenge.
So deborah made her pledge: ‘I will re-use what I already own, redeploying the stash of designer shoes, the rails of ball gowns, dresses and suits; the three drawers of jumpers and dozens of scarves I have acquired since I first appeared on dragons’ den almost 15 years ago.’
And by making the promise publicly — to our readers and to her 434,000 Twitter followers — she knew she could not renege on it.
Today she’s delighted to announce she has been true to her undertaking with one single, minor infringement: those running shoes.
‘I have stuck to my pledge!’ she says. ‘I’ve bought one thing — the trainers — because I couldn’t do the run without them. But otherwise I haven’t cheated once.’
BUT what a year it turned out to be! In many ways, the challenge has been less ex acting because, thanks to Covid, she hasn’t had the usual glittering functions and high-powered business meetings to attend.
‘Instead, I’ve spent most of the year in my farmhouse in Somerset,’ she tells me in a Zoom call from that 16-acre property. ‘To be honest, I’ve barely felt the pain of self-denial.
‘There have been no “I’ve got nothing to wear” moments. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed not having to buy clothes, because I don’t like browsing round shops.
‘I’m all for easy shopping. If I’m in London, I go to Selfridges or I buy online on sites such as Net a Porter.
‘So I think I should extend the moratorium. Perhaps for another six months or even a year. It hasn’t really hurt, and I want it to.’
Today we find deborah in festive mood, in her large beamed office converted from a farm outbuilding. She has a tinsel halo in her hair and mudsplattered jodhpurs teamed with sheepskin boots (sitting at her laptop she kicks her legs in the air to show me).
The ensemble is topped by a snug grey, wool jumper which, like the boots, is from Cornish clothing company Celtic & Co. ‘I wore these jodhpurs to go riding in yesterday and they’ve got mud on them. No not horse manure! I draw the line at that,’ she laughs.
‘I’ll probably wear them for three days or so.
‘I wear jumpers maybe eight times between washes (I always wear something underneath them) — unless they’re covered in dog hairs.’
‘So you’re not over fastidious about cleanliness?’ I joke.
‘very nicely put!’ she laughs. By cutting down on washing, she’s also saving energy and helping to husband the world’s resources.
Jodhpurs are her favourite garment and she’s practically lived in them during lockdown.
‘I’ve probably worn them for 90 per cent of the time. The cost per wear, she says — a figure calculated by dividing the price of a garment by the number of times you wear it — is a very good value 30p.
‘Sometimes I laugh at myself. For Zoom meetings I’ll wear a lovely silk blouse on my top half — I’ve got a beautiful purple diane von Furstenberg one I’ve had for eight years, and I team it with a ten-year-old Alexander McQueen leopard-print scarf — and I think: “You’ve no idea what I’m wearing on my bottom half!”
‘I love the shape of jodhpurs. They’ve got more structure than leggings and they give at the knees but don’t bag. They’re a great design.
‘The ones I’m wearing today are showerproof because it’s howling out there, and when I run from my house to the office I get wet.’
Practical, no - nonsense and straight-speaking, deborah is, faceto-face, warmer and funnier than her dragons’ den persona.
She’s been on the BBC 2 Tv series, in which would-be entrepreneurs pitch their business ideas to five multi-millionaires willing to invest their own cash, since 2006.
So far she’s ploughed more than £3.3 million of her own money into around 63 nascent businesses. At the start of her nonew- clothes experiment, she apologised in advance to viewers that she would be re-wearing the same old outfits, which she did during this year’s filming in the summer under strict Covid guidelines.
Today, s he says there are investment pieces in her wardrobe that she’s worn at least three dozen times. ‘I’d rather pay £1,000 for a dress and wear it 30 times than £100 and never wear it,’ she says. ‘I really do get value from my clothes. And if I see something languishing in my wardrobe t hat I haven’t worn for a season, I give it to a charity shop.
‘My husband, Paul, thought my no-newclothes- f or- a- year plan was a great idea.