A shopaholic’s dilemma: caught in the crossfire of economic and eco-anxiety
Anne McElvoy is a devoted consumerist but are her spending habits right or wrong for modern times?
MWe’re pulled between green concerns and Rishi’s message that shopping is our civic duty
y clothes shopping habit is honed by decades of practice as a luxury-loving bargain hunter. Drop me anywhere and I will find something vital to acquire. In my bulging wardrobe, the latest Zara print jostles for space with the vintage jackets. My shoe cupboard has Imelda Marcos pretensions and those “investment piece” winter coats are arrayed in their mothballscented closets awaiting liberation day for winter wear.
I once set out to buy two cappuccinos and returned instead with velvet embroidered end-ofseason Emma Hope evening shoes; like Meg in Little Women, I have a posh-frock fixation which led both of us to splurge with sporadic morning-after repentance: “It haunted her, not delightfully as a new dress should, but dreadfully like the ghost of a folly.”
As we delve back into normality, my wardrobe-of-yore beckons. The lilac “pants suit”, snapped up in New York in March 2020 (still more suited to US Vice President Kamala Harris’s next glossy photo shoot than my day job) nestles expectantly alongside a Greek kaftan creation, channelling Mamma Mia with its jaunty colours, but optimistic for the pebble beaches in the Swale estuary zephyrs.
My Olympic level of commitment to consume has meant I even managed to shop in places where busts of Marx and Lenin were official icons. I lived for a number of years in the retail desert of East Germany in the 1980s, where I would scour the racks of the Centrum “people’s department store” and emerge triumphant with a passable Romanian trench coat and Hungarian court shoes for Communist-era Cinderellas. Alas, they rubbed my heels so raw that I had to buy a pair of grandad “People’s Own” slippers, which I wore while covering the turbulence of the opposition movements in the run-up to the fall of the Wall. As a war correspondent in disintegrating Yugoslavia, my uniform was darkcoloured clothes to avoid being too conspicuous – and a navy flak jacket. My light relief came when an airline lost my luggage and issued a voucher, and I was able to experience the sheer bliss of spending on some Belgrade bling.
Regrets, I’ve had a few. A pregnancy shopping itch that resulted in me buying a bulky leather jacket, which made me look like a tubby Stasi agent. I have far too many “meh” striped shirts and cheap T-shirts and beach sandals, separated like sad twins in the bottom of half-empty holiday cases. Squirrelling odd items away for some unforeseen “occasion” is a quirk, too. I may one day wear my vast satin Roksanda Ilincic tiered opera coat, so voluminous it looks like a prop from Don Giovanni, but I have not yet imposed it on a neighbour in the stalls.
Less would definitely have been more, and quality should have trumped unsatisfying quantity. I was forced to confront my shopaholic tendencies when, presenting the BBC Radio 4 series Across the Red Line, I was asked if consumerism rots the soul.
Exploring two contrasting viewpoints of combatants, we invited veteran consumer champion Harry Wallop to defend acquisitive tendencies, alongside Cinzia DuBois
– a YouTube star and author of Responsibility Rebellion. She is part of a growing millennials-led movement to quit non-essential shopping for (at least) a year and a convert to minimal spending thereafter.
This topic resonates strongly at a time when we are being pulled between enhanced and sometimes preachy green awareness to buy less and Rishi’s economic messaging that it is our civic duty to head back to the high street to save it.
But when it comes to shopping, for many of us, it’s complicated; even ardent recyclers struggle to offset their carbon (high-heeled) footprint. The psychological and emotional drives behind consumption can veer between simple hankering for fun and the cheerful stuff of life – and using shopping as a displacement activity for other shortcomings or frustrations.
And consuming represents a particular conundrum now that there is a sense of widespread relief that the high street moratorium is over. Latest statistics show that the high street rallied as shops reopened and sales from April to June were the best three months on record – up nearly a third on the doldrums of a year ago and 10 per cent on pre-pandemic 2019.
Shopping, let’s remind ourselves, also represents livelihoods – often for part-time women workers. The Centre for Retail Research says nearly 200,000 retail jobs disappeared in the first year of the pandemic. Online shopping thrives – but that, too, has its environmental costs in courier miles.
So where does that leave my own joy of shopping? Is it a means of selfexpression – even liberation – or a mirage of evanescent satisfaction? I am mostly of the consumerist persuasion that shopping is life-enhancing; part of the human drive to have pleasurable things around us as well as being part of the great advances capitalism has brought.
But when DuBois shared a sobering back story, on the show, about her family experience of consumption as a debt spiral leading to more anxiety and unhappiness, I was reminded that retail pleasure can also become a damaging itch-scratch cycle. Shopping can be an addiction. I’m probably not the only serial shopper who then leaves the item in a bag for ages or (shameful confession) forgets they bought it for a while at all. The dopamine hit is real.
I also have some feminist unease about adverts pushing the idea that we need their wares to “feel confident”. I love a power jacket (or five) as much as Miranda in The Devil Wears Prada, but – unlike when I dressed for my first job interview – I now know that confidence and ease come from within and can’t be bought.
The exchange of views across the “red line” of initial disagreement, over how we consume, refined some of my own thinking; the ebullient defence of the finer things in life made me ponder whether I could finally make a promise to myself to buy better quality staples and wear them rather than hoard. I have also vowed to avoid wanton impulse buys, because yes, the environmental argument is strong but also because I think being a clutter-bug is more Miss Havisham than stylish.
In truth, I couldn’t sustain DuBois’s year-long break from shopping. The sadness of never going fantasyshopping in Chanel again or asking for their outsize sunglasses as a birthday treat to enhance my Audrey Hepburn credentials, would be too much to bear. And in 2020, retail sales in Britain were worth £437billion – a business well worth supporting for livelihoods and creativity.
But I am trying to be more mindful about using retail therapy to offset stress, worry or boredom. I will try harder to avoid the transient fashion hit – asymmetric hems never work out, garments with fringes won’t last, low-rise jeans are in the sales for a reason. Consumerism may not rot the soul, but as we shop on after the enforced pause, we might think a tad more about what to buy – and what to leave.