something old NOTHING NEW

twenty four

I can buy new things again in 24 days, but right now, and probably only for the next few days, a dress I have had my eye on for literally over a year is on clearance sale, in my size, for $50 at a local boutique. It was made in Australia, it’s really pretty and goddamit I just want to buy the damn thing but will I feel awful about it later? Probably not. It’s velvet.

Which Clothes Are Greenest? A New Rating Tool - WSJ.com »

Chilling Out

Every year this thing happens in Sydney, usually around Easter, where you realise that you can’t leave the house after sundown without a cardigan. After about six months of running around in nothing but flippy dresses and thongs (or at least, that’s what should happen, this summer just past was kind of a disaster) this is a rude awakening for the entire city, and Sydneysiders from Broadway to Broadmeadows spend weeks bumbling around in a wind-whipped haze, puzzled as to why they’re suddenly required to wear clothing of a weight they might associate with a small child. It’s hilarious, actually, watching peope wrap themselves in ever-more layers, layers, layers as they desperately try to avoid the inevitable; the inevitable being that they would be more comfortable if they just bought themselves a damn coat.

I love winter fashions but I am a cold weather wuss. God knows why I think it’s a good idea for me to move to the northern hemisphere (currently on the 2013 to-do-list) because the minute the temperature drops below about 20 degrees I basically become housebound. I require swathes of clothing, high wool counts, doonas that could probably kill you if you got stuck under them… the whole deal.

I think part of the problem is that I really believe magazines when they run features along the lines of “Double Your Wardrobe: Just Add Tights!” Tights have been my winter mainstay for years. Throw a pair of 40-deniers on under a summer dress and you’ve spared yourself the financial hassle of actually getting winter clothes, right? I’m starting to think: wrong.

The biggest problem in Sydney (and, in face, most cities in Australia) in winter is not the temperature per se but the windchill factor. Being right on the coast, you really feel the ice-cold ocean winds blowing in from May-August. This is a problem landlocked, fog-drenched cities like London just don’t have. I lived in London for six months, from the middle of winter to the beginning of summer, and I found wearing t-shirts in 15 degrees to be totally doable. Anyway, my point is that that biting, sea-blown wind can’t be blocked out with a pair of 40-denier nylons. They simply will not do.

And anyway, as I miserably discovered this week when digging all my winter clothes out of hibernation, all my fucking tights have holes in them.

You cannot buy tights second hand. You just can’t. It’s gross and no second-hand store of any stratification (charity, vintage, consignment, whatever) is going to allow worn tights onto their shelves. Confronted this reality this week, I began to explore my options. My two favourites so far are: lay down the cash for the the more upmarket hosiers, like Leona Edmiston or Wolford. They’re a bit dearer than your average Razzamatazz (in the case of the Wolfords… way dearer) but in my experience, hosiery is definitely you-get-what-you-pay-for product. The extra cost will hopefully also encourage you (me, whoever) to take proper care of them (handwashing/garmet protectors/gentle cycle/never ever ever being tempted to just throw them in the dryer so you don’t have to buy a new pair of tights on the way to work just so you have something to cover your tiny little legs) ergo extending their life-expectancy.

The other fun thing I stumbled across this week were these little beauties: OKOK Hosiery. (Strangely, this webpage doesn’t seem to display their full range… Odd. I saw them in Maple Store Newtown, and THEIR website doesn’t seem to exist either… What a pain.) ANYWAY, the ones I saw were super cute bright colours, high wool percentage, AND (what got me most excited) the wool is all Australian and the tights are made in Melbourne! Amazing. I’m going to Melbs myself in just under two weeks. I’ll be saving pennies for a visit direct to the source. In the mean time, you can find me huddled under my inadequate doona with two pairs of socks on and seriously considering a mid-year jaunt to Noosa.

Running On Empty

I decided I needed to start running again this week.

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far far away, I ran every morning. Then it was every other morning. Then I moved out of home and honestly I more or less stopped exercising altogether. When I spent most of my days walking back and forth from my various houses to university and work and up and down hills to get to friends’ houses and from Bosch to Eastern Avenue in seven minutes or less, this was less of a problem, but now I spend my days seated in front of computers or curled up in bed reading. I know. It’s a tough life. But seriously, it’s not doing anything good for my cardiovascular health, as I am reminded every time I run for a bus. And I don’t think it’s doing anything good for my brain either. Up until very recently, I didn’t miss exercise, and I certainly didn’t miss running - all that sweating and early mornings and ugly clothing and yeah, no, it wasn’t high on my priorities. But a combination of things - and topping off the list, boredom - got me thinking about the pretty mad endorphin rush you get after a 200m sprint. Also I have a few things I’m really frustrated and a bit angry about at the moment and it’s been suggested to me that trying to squish down those feelings with yoga and lap swimming may not be the most productive thing. So for the first time in my entire life I am contemplating things like “BodyAttack” and “BodyPump” (why all this body business I just don’t know.) But I am super unfit and way too broke for gym memberships right now, so I decided to just attack this week with a bit of gentle walking and running. 

It has literally been so long since I did any aerobic exercise that my running shoes never came with me when I moved out of my parents’ house. I’ve moved about three times since then and never bothered to pick them up. So I assumed they’d still be there, right? No. I have no idea where they have gone but it would appear that my mother, in one of her rare fits of object-disposal-pique, decided they were better served at the local Vinnies than gathering dust in our shed.

For this morning, I paced around the park in my Chucks, but this is hardly a long term solution because they have holes in them and also none of that instep support and cushioning and shit you’re meant to care about. I clearly need to buy some new ones but guess what? Running shoes are pretty much the worst things in the entire world for environmental sustainability and ethical manufacture. (Nike basically brought the issue of slave labour to the world’s attention. Thanks?) And unlike other shoes, I can’t even pull the “The most sustainable thing to do is spend big on something that will last forever” because, provided I actually use the damn things with any regularity, you’re meant to replace trainers every year or so because the tread and cushioning wear out. Even the really good ones. (This seems like poor product design to me, but also they breed bacteria like nothing else and smell to high heaven.) So you can’t even donate them once you’re done, they tend to wind up in landfill and never ever ever degrade because they’re made of high-grade synthetics. 

So, what am I to do? Keep trotting around in Chucks for now, I guess (though they’ll need replacing soon enough and Converse’s environmental and human rights records aren’t much to write home about either…) But I started doing some rudimentary research into ethical footwear. This is a very basic chart guide to the best brands - though even the top brands leave something to be desired, I’ll probably wind up going for one of them next time I pop into Rebel Sport, and investigating any better options in the mean time. If anyone has any leads on this, I’d love to hear them. I totally cannot figure out how to turn comments on on this blog, but drop something in my ask box and maybe I’ll republish it for all to see. 

Make It Do: In my head »

On Poverty

In my last post, I mentioned that I’d become a little slack with my not-buying of things, that there were rules I’d allowed myself to break or go slack on. While I am happy to say I’ve not caved and spent hundreds of dollars at Sportsgirl (not that I ever would) and even managed to resist the siren call of the Pretty Dog summer sale, I’ve been way more lax when it comes to things like cosmetics and groceries.

When I started this project I said that anything I couldn’t procure hygienically second-hand should be procured as ethically as possible, and for a while I was doing well there. I’m lucky enough to live seven minute’s walk from a very well stocked organics/wholefoods/all natural hippie nonsense supermarket, and for months I happily frittered away my Centrelink payments on organic canned tomatoes and facial moisturiser. 

But here’s the thing. That shit is expensive. Like really, it is. I’m not saying it’s not worth it, I’m not saying it’s not justified, and I’m not saying I wouldn’t in an ideal world much rather pay an extra fifty cents/five dollars/whatever to keep crap out of my food and off my face and maybe preserve worker conditions along the way. But. But. But.

When I finished university on November 25th, 2011 my financial safety net, Youth Allowance, was (rightfully) pulled out from under my feet well before I’d had the chance to even think about how I was going to support myself as an adult. I was working three days a week selling kids’ clothes and toys to a horde of Christmas-panicked consumers, but this was barely covering my rent and bills, let alone indulgences like paraben-free foundation. When I realised I’d scraped the very last possible dregs out of my current tube of face-slap, and that I had a job interview the next day, and that I absolutely under no circumstances could justify spending any more than $20 on something to make me look not like a person who had not seen sunlight in months, I took the painful but inevitable trip to Priceline and bought some shimmery Rimmel shit for exactly $19.99. Oh, I felt bad about it. I felt for the little animals that foundation was tested on. I felt for the Rimmel factory employees who are probably paid a pittance to put it in tubes and stick stickers on it and drive it to distribution centres and whatever else. Also I don’t much like the marketing and advertising techniques of most major cosmetics companies, so I felt bad about supporting companies that perpetuate female self loathing, and on and on my guilt went, all the way downstairs into Bi-Lo, where I felt bad about spending money on fruit and vegetables I knew the farmers were probably paid a pittance for, and were covered in pesticides, and pumped full of hormones, and, and, and…

These are all real concerns, and I am not an idiot for having them. And frankly I’m always a little disappointed by the well-financed people I know who continue to buy home-brand goods when we now know how much that squeezes the profit margins of primary producers. (Also I’m confused as to why you would if you didn’t have to, because I do not care how many Supa Saver articles say otherwise, home-brand shit. tastes. worse.) But I am an idiot for thinking it’s a good idea to run myself into serious debt because I’m off buying apples reared by hand by trained nurses at a special camp in south-east Queensland. An idiot, and kind of spoiled too.

Thus, I have concluded that until I do not have debt (or at least until I do not have quite as much debt as I currently have) I cannot justify spending ten percent of my weekly wage on apples, or chemical-free nail polish. I just have to try and buy the cheapest, hopefully most ethical thing out there. (I’m heartened to notice that one of my favourite skincare brands, Natio, gets a tick from ShopEthical. Thank God.) But more often that not, I’m going to wind up in the Dollar Dazzler aisle at Coles and I need to be OK with that. If you see me there, eyeing off $1 packets of Coles brand pasta, know that somewhere in my head my nonna is weeping and cursing me in Italian. Mi dispiace, Nonna, but a girl’s gotta do what she’s gotta do.

Shrove Tuesday or; A Repentance

I wrote some time ago that I despise blog writers who feel they should apologise for not writing, and I still feel that way. So I’m not going to apologise to you for not having written in over four months (a third of the supposed length of this project) because you know what, there’s been a lot of life happening in those four months. What I am happy to publicly apologise for is slacking off on the actual commitment to this project in real terms, i.e., not buying new things. I haven’t been going crazy at Zara or anything - in large part because until about four weeks ago I was essentially unemployed - but it’s the little, essential things it’s easier to make excuses over. Like: a few weeks ago someone (I honestly can’t be sure who but I have my suspicions) in my house threw out our bathroom bin. Fair cop, it was gross and too small. But they didn’t think to replace it. You just can’t have a house with two, currently three, female residents and not have a bathroom bin, that’s disgusting. After a week or so of hoping thrower-outer would do the logical thing and replace it, I caved and bought a $12 one from Kmart. It was probably made with the blood and tears of Chinese orphans and just being in Kmart was enough to make me feel sick and guilty. The overwhelming stench of plastic and preservatives honestly gives me a headache, and that’s before you factor in the hideous fluro lights, the children baying for blood in the toy aisles and the knowledge that the staff are being paid somewhere around minimum wage to put up with all of it. I just hussled in there one day after work, scooped up my bin and two lots of plastic coathangers (it’s really hard to get secondhand coathangers, OK?) and scooted out of there again. 

It’s one of those situations where I know that better planning or possibly a little sacrifice would have enabled me to stick with my resolution. If I’d had the time or inclination to traipse around to every charity shop in a five km radius I might have been lucky enough to find something useable as a bin, or even some coathangers. Or I could be really frugal and say, “We’re not getting a bin in the bathroom til we’ve used up every single one of the plastic bags currently spilling from the bottom drawer of the kitchen,” and demanded that these be hung on the back of the bathroom door as bin-replacements.

But I didn’t do that.

Because a) if I’m going to spend hours in charity shops I want to be looking for something fun, frankly, and b) that’s gross. And most importantly, c):

I am not the only person my choices affect.

This is a very important thing to keep remembering when it comes to housey things especially. I live with other people who I want to keep happy, and they can’t be expected to give up things like bins just because I’m on some kind of half-baked crusade. That way madness lies, and also I’m about to ask them to start composting things, so I figure it’s important to pick battles.

There have been dozens of other little things along the way that I’ve made excuses about - and grey areas where I’ve taken the easy option - which I feel guilty about. It’s Shrove Tuesday today, the last day before Lent begins. Despite my only interaction with the Catholic faith being my Italian grandparents’ funerals about six years ago, I’ve given something up for Lent the last two years. In 2010 it was shopping and last year it was eating out. I was pretty successful at abstaining during the assigned period but not so good at keeping those habits up over a long period of time.

So this year, rather than give up something entirely new again for Lent, I’m reaffirming my commitment to this project, both in doing and in writing. I’m trying to decide whether I think it’s realistic for me to say I’m going to post every day, or whether I’d even want to if it was. I also have a very abortive attempt at a theatre blog floating around in cyberspace, which I’m not going to link you to until there’s more than one post up there. It’s just embarrassing. 

If I can steer this post into slightly personal territory for a moment, 2011 was a pretty shit year for me. Most days felt like a massive effort, which I either didn’t make and then felt guilty about, or did make and then felt unrewarded for doing so. The period leading up to Christmas - finishing university, having to face The Rest of My Life as an Adult - was particularly heinous and fraught with much temper-tantruming and hiding in bed and feeling by turns thunderously angry and utterly, crushingly defeated by the world. 2012 was on the up from almost the very beginning - new, excellent, proper-paying job; some nice creative projects; a general sense that the times they were a-changin’. It’s still been baby steps though. Most days are a battle against the ridiculous expectation that I should be able to stay in bed and still rule the world.

Last night I had a bit of a snap. I can’t tell you why, it’s secret. But it basically involved me putting on an iTunes Genius Playlist based on Aretha Franklin’s RESPECT (all my hipster friends are now judging me for using Genius but I don’t care because this playlist was the best thing IN THE WORLD) and dancing like a madwoman in my bedroom while cleaning it, and in essence attempting to say “THIS SENSE OF THE BLUES IS SOMETHING FOR WHICH I WILL NO LONGER STAND.” I’ve been spending a lot of time recently thinking about the concept of effort and how we’re basically sold this big lie by The Meedja et al that you should just like be yourself and do what you want but at the same time your life should look beautiful and be impressive and probably involve many anecdote-worthy activities and accompanying grainy-but-attractive photographs, but not if you’re trying too hard to make it happen, no, then you’re a try-hard and try-hards are the worst. Also that you should be loved for who you are and whatever, and people who try to change you are the devil incarnate and probably trying to control your mind. Well there’s a grain of truth to that but there’s also the rather pressing issue of: what if you don’t feel like doing anything? What if you don’t feel like being nice, or interesting, or even, like, present? Or rather you don’t feel like putting in the effort it would take to be those things because you feel like if you were those things it would come naturally and seeing as it doesn’t you’re obviously not and should just give yourself up as a lost cause now, complete with unwashed hair and unread books and unwritten blogs, because hey, that’s just how you are OK.

Well, no. Not OK. Not OK at all really because then you just wind up hating yourself and trust me, that’s not much fun.

It’s taken me some time to be comfortable with the idea of putting in effort. Effortlessness is great as an aesthetic choice (see Moss, Kate) but not so much as a lifestyle choice. If I had to frame this in terms of “giving up” something, I’d say I’m giving up excuses: too hold, too cold, too hungry, too tired, too don’t feel like it. (Too poor isn’t an excuse, it’s a genuine reason, so sorry when I don’t come to every single gig you invite me to this month.)

They say it takes 21 days to form a habit; Lent is 40 days which means the habit should be twice as strong by the end. Fingers crossed.

Mea Culpa, Gaia

A friend of mine pointed out the other day that, for whatever reason, most of my writing here has so far focused on my ethical concerns about new fashion. If that’s my primary logic behind the project, then why not make “only buying fair trade” or similar the restriction?

Well. WELL.

Funnily enough, despite being a pretty confirmed bleeding-heart leftie my whole life, it wasn’t the thought of tweens in Bangladeshi factories run by American conglomerates that originally sent me running from the racks of my local Westfield. (Actually, I didn’t spend that much time there to begin with, but more of that later.) It was reading – which correlated with my personal experience – about the amount of waste that manufacturing and retailing new goods generates. I can’t remember where I read it originally, but for all the details I needed to sufficiently appal me see Lucy Siegle’s To Die For, which I have mentioned before.

Example: cotton is one of the thirstiest crops known to man. It is also what we have decided to make the vast bulk of daywear out of. It takes thousands of litres to grow enough cotton to make the T shirt you buy for $5 from Cotton On or $30 from Country Road. (Or, frankly, for $100 from Alexander Wang… But the whys and wherefores of paying for designer casual wear is a complex issue to which I may return at a later date.) Odds on, if you only pay $5 for a t-shirt, it is going to be shithouse in quality – poorly cut, cheaply dyed, shoddy stitching and most noticeably it will survive your washing machine no better than the shopping list you accidentally left in your jeans on Monday afternoon. After maybe a couple dozen washes (fewer if you use a tumble dryer) it will start to pull, pill, fade, discolour and do all manner of unappealing things to your silhouette should you be foolish enough to attempt continuing to wear it. At which point you, dear reader, will probably do what any self-respecting sartorialist would do: you get rid of it.

Getting rid of it might mean one of two things. You might pop it in a bag of stuff that you later drop off at your local charity outlet. If you’re in Australia this probably means your local Vinnies, Red Cross, Smith Family or Anglicare, and when you’ve done so you’re probably going to walk away and give yourself a pat on the back for being so charitable, environmentally conscious and organisationally savvy (nothing like a wardrobe cleanout to make you feel you’ve made progress on an essay, right?) Well hold up there Mother Theresa, you ever been in the sorting rooms of one of these places? That’s OK  because I HAVE! Gosh you guys are lucky to have me. I worked as a sales assistant and stock manager at Vinnies for eighteen months in 2007-2008 (and yes, I got paid, and no, I don’t feel bad because I was freaking excellent at my job and ensured that lots of items that would have been otherwise undersold went for a price that meant Vinnies could run an extra food van one night, and yes, if anyone wanted to offer me a similar position now but possibly NOT with a Catholic organisation, I would BE THERE SO FAST) and guess what: poor people don’t want to wear your shit t-shirt either. If an item is stained, pulled, pilled or otherwise distorted, it can’t be sold. It’s insulting to people in need and is a deterrent for what we called “recreationals” which is basically a nice term for “filthy hipsters”. So it usually just winds up in Bin C: Disaster Relief or Bin D: Industrial Rags. Which seems fine – “at least it’s not landfill!” – until you realise that the amount of time wasted by staff in charity stores or sorting centres pulling the one or two useable items from bags of rags means less time spent actually attending to and merchandising their store, serving customers (of all financial stripes) and making money for the charity, which was presumably behind your well intentioned actions in the first place.

If you’re lazier – harsh but true – “getting ride of it” probably just means chucking it in the bin. No doubt about it, this is worse, because stuff in bins just winds up in landfill and just because something is 100% cotton doesn’t mean it is 100% biodegradable. It will break down – slowly – and in doing so, it will release all manner of toxic chemicals and dyes used to treat the fabric to begin with back into the soil. If it’s a polycotton blend – or worse, just plain synthetics – it will take decades – centuries – for it to break down. I am going to go ahead and assume you’re all intelligent enough to realise this is a Very Bad Thing, especially on a Very Large Scale. So yeah, don’t throw shit in landfill if you can avoid it.

NB I will be the first to admit that the above points create something of an unresolvable ethical dilemma for the conscientious closet cleaner. You have shit clothes – you don’t want them in your life any more – they’re no good to anyone else – but putting them in the bin is environmentally unsound. What are you mean to do? I came up against this in a very literal way last week when, in answer to increasingly panicked phone calls from my Dad (“I cannot even see the floor in there and your cousin is coming to stay in two days and your mother isn’t here and HELP ME HELP ME”, etc) I took on the mammoth task of clearing out my parents’ attic, which has over the last decade functioned as my bedroom, then my sister’s and is now something of a spare room/place we put stuff when we don’t know where else it goes. Previous occupier Tamara left it something of a state when she left the country six weeks ago and it’s been a morass of unwanted clothes and uncertain notebooks ever since. I took to it ruthlessly, keeping a stack of stuff for myself/my upcoming garden market, and dividing the rest into “Vinnies” and “Useless.” I felt bad about not being more creative about the “Useless” stuff – if I was a really crafty person I could have a rescued a lot of it for a project, I am sure, but I am not (yet) and there is already enough “one day I’ll use it” crap occupying every nook and cranny of my not-inconsiderably sized house. So… it probably will wind up in landfill. Which I feel unspeakably guilty about. But in a way, it is further strengthened my resolve on this whole business, because I don’t ever want to be looking at an enormous Chinese laundry bag worth of junk thinking, “I [or someone I love] have just contributed hundreds of dollars to the destruction of the planet in the production of the materials now ensconced in this bag, and I am about to further enable that destruction by placing these materials in a situation in which they will decay, toxify and render unusable the soil in which they are placed” ever again.

Knowing that in my lifetime I have probably thrown an embarrassing amount of stuff into landfill when it could have been usefully rehabilitated was a biiiiig motivation in this project. I definitely have sins to atone for. The idea behind something old NOTHING NEW was to force, on a one-person scale, a slowing down of the manufacture/consumption cycle. Every second hand T-shirt I have to buy is hopefully some way to begging forgiveness for every new one I have “had” to throw away, a little apology to Mother Nature for the resources I have greedily stolen from her. I don’t think me alone is enough to stem her rage, but I hope it’s a start.