We’re all guilty of buying too many clothes. Now one woman has pledged to wear the same dress for a year – with a different twist every day.
There’s no such thing as a free frock. The fashion industry produces 3.1m tonnes of CO2 and 70m tonnes of waste water a year, not to mention the amount of herbicides, pesticides and toxic chemicals released into the environment. To dress ethically, we need to buy fewer clothes – even if the ones we do choose are Fairtrade and made from organic cotton. But unfortunately for us, humans are intrinsically hardwired to crave novelty. Who hasn’t got a buzz out of buying a brand new outfit?
I asked Tony Juniper, the ex-director of Friends of the Earth and a Green Party candidate, how he believed we could protect the planet by consuming less when most of us want more. “We need to study psychology and find out more about the brain”, he said. “Deep within us we have an innate desire for comfort, for security and for status. We need to get to grips with this and start crafting alternatives that get the same brain reaction.” Scientists have already found the part of the brain that we use when we want to buy something new (the nucleus accumbens in the cortex; we release the neurotransmitter dopamine, a precursor to adrenalin, when we shop).
