Growing up, I found myself loving everything about fashion. Whether it was designing fake outfits or throwing my Barbies a fashion show, I was always fascinated with what people wore and why. Having designed billions of different outfits in my notebooks as a child, I was always fascinated with different aesthetics, styles, and structures of fashion that formulated into such a diverse world of opportunities. I was a fashionista - what can I say?

Although making  my color-pencil designs into a reality was always my dream, it became less realistic when my sewing classes were a complete failure. In this realization, I knew that my shopping habits would have to supply my passion, resorting to good clearance racks, deep searching online, and hours in the dressing room. Thus, my clothing addiction took physical form. 

I realized quickly that if I found a piece of clothing that was affordable and also fit me well, I should buy it in at least two to three colors. Before I knew it, my clothing supply had grown vastly. I continually widened my horizons through colors and patterns, textures and cuts, or even aesthetics and decades. Although I loved each piece I was collecting, it all became a bit much very quickly. My closest was bulging, and I had begun intricately folding each piece to fit it all in my dresser drawers. 

While each piece of clothing I own is greatly important to me, I have absolutely no reason for the multitude in which I own. I don’t have enough days in the year to wear what I have! After years of searching, clearance rack obsessing, and focusing on street wear, short skirts and a plethora of going out tank tops, my space for clothing has dwindled to nearly nothing. 

Outside of simply lacking space for new clothing, I knew I had a problem by the time I began searching for clothing methodically - racking my brain for a mentally cataloged top, knowing exactly what corner of my under-bed storage would supply me with my niche top for an evening out. I knew where each piece was stored, but I surely wasn't wearing them all. 

While nothing has been done since realizing the mass amounts of clothing I possess, I continue to find it fascinating why I suddenly find this surplus to be an issue. My dream was to have all the clothes I want for each unique style or occasion. But recently, I realize I have been looking for too much of the wrong thing.

My senior year of high school, I bought a piece of second-hand clothing for the first time. I purchased my beautiful, dream prom dress from Poshmark, a well known resale website. Although I was only able to wear this dress for pictures with family and friends, I had unlocked an entirely new market of fashion items to buy. (Woo!) I began buying gently used shoes and unique tops off of second-hand shops. I could find rare and unique items that would be gone in seconds off of Facebook marketplaces or Depop storefronts. 

All the while, I was simultaneously splurging on hauls of one-use tops for parties or random sparkly dresses from Shein. These items would be used for off-handed party themes or random Halloween costumes, but they weren’t long term solutions to widen my wardrobe. I bought clothing second-hand, but I was also buying clothing from cheap websites focused on producing fast fashion. While these two options of buying clothes don’t equal out on the karma scale, nothing turned me away from buying ethically or unethically, as long as I was getting new clothes. 

After taking a communications class focused on “fashion in the media” my junior year of college, I had studied some of the impacts that fast fashion can have on people and the environment. Fast fashion can be defined as “inexpensive clothing produced rapidly by mass-market retailers in response to the latest trends”, according to Merriam Webster Dictionary. While new trends cause an uproar for new clothing to be available in the market, these trends can be fleeting, meaning too much is supplied with not enough demand. 

After watching the documentary, The True Cost (2015), my eyes were opened to what my unsustainable shopping habits were aiding. Landfills were shown brimming with tattered clothing that barely made it off the production line, or people were pictured working endless days for little pay in unjust working conditions. In the past, I had been happy to find Shein clothing at thrift stores, making it cheaper than it already would be, but racks have been filling for years with a series of cheaply-made clothing, all sold by companies with hidden, terrible conditions for workers. 

Although I knew poor working conditions were apparent in some parts of the world, I rarely thought that my actions would be directly contributing to the issue (little miss first world problems, right?). Why would I support this kind of mistreatment of people and the environment? All for a stack of clothes that will serve me two purposes in the next year? It wasn’t worth it, but I had been caught in the web of needing to consume it for personal desire. After learning more about fast fashion and its impacts, I took a halt from these websites and began focusing my attention on buying clothing through sustainable routes. 

Since coming to the University of Michigan, I have seen and interacted with a wider variety of people and ideas than I could have ever hoped. Coming from a small town, I was used to collective thoughts and binary ideas. My world expanded so vastly when I came to college, and I was exposed to new ways of life in every class I took, lecture I sat through, or person I interacted with. 

With greater access to diverse ideas, backgrounds, and experiences, I widened my horizons in my personal choices, activities, and ways of existing. Although this was my hope while coming to a Big Ten university, I was also hit with the harsh realities of entering school while exiting a phase where everything in the world had halted. I felt overwhelmed to say the least. Although priorities and normal rituals of life had changed during the pandemic, it was also the time to remember how we all function, care about each other, and proceed in our daily lives and habits. 

In my first years of college, I was working tirelessly for mass amounts of LinkedIn connections or fading away into an obscene amount of TikToks before going to bed in the wee hours of the morning. I often found myself buried in media, work, and the push to do more things - even in my severely desired free time. As I looked around, I saw student after student experiencing the same issues, as well as professors, professionals, and the working majority. What are we missing out on during these periods of severe consumption? 

I hope to find a trend in how we continue to spend our time, money, and personal freedoms on the wrong things, rather than the experiences we are actually seeking. While we spend copious amounts of our lives searching for the next big thing we want or need, what gets lost in the middle of it all? While trying to find solace in a pastime we enjoy or a new food we want to try, consumerist behavior leads us to paths of pure consumption, rather than true experience. That is a hefty statement, but I hope to dig into why we continually search for new things to consume over the experiences we so often speak about having. Are we overcrowded by messaging, forced to utilize escapism tactics, or simply missing what we are attempting to experience? 

Is it all too much, or not the right stuff? 

Stick around for a deep dive into Industrial Desires, including tactics of consumerist psychology, historical consumption definitions, and real world examples of consumption.