J.Hafberg: May 2016

So many people have been asking me what I am going to do when I reach a year – “Aren’t you excited?” “What is the first thing you want to put on?” “You have to wear something crazy!” But the fact is that I have kind of just been dreading this point, because I don’t know how to proceed from here. I just know that this has influenced me much deeper than I could ever have imagined, it was maybe in the beginning just a month long experiment that would be over and would maybe give me a few answers to my curiosity – but the fact is that I don’t think that I can ever go just back to how it was before. So that is why I sit here, confused about what to do, still wearing the same clothes.

What I have come to realize is that if I would go straight back to wearing ‘all’ clothes, I would have a few problems.

Firstly, I have sold and given away most of the clothes that I owned before my year started. But even if I hadn’t done that a lot of them would not be relevant for me to wear today. This is because we are so fast influenced by trends and bombarded with new styles and options that most of my clothes from a year ago wouldn’t be as current as they were then.

Secondly, if I were super excited about ‘finally’ getting to wear something different, which is not the feeling that I have – although a lot of people don’t seem to understand that, and would go out and buy me something new and current and totally out there, it would go against everything that I have been standing for in the last 12 months.

So really, these options are not appealing to me at all.

I know that people talk about the fact that fashion and clothing is a way to express ourselves and be individual, but after having taken a step back – I don’t feel like this is as true to all of us as we would like to believe – and are encouraged to believe. I have actually in some ways felt the opposite. I have noticed that all around us, and especially in social media platforms like Instagram and Snapchat we are so heavily exposed to pretty things and pretty people living their shiny lives. Even thought we don’t think we are or deny the fact that this has an influence on us – it does.

And I could see it clearly as I started my experiment. I completely stopped buying clothes, and things for that matter, and when I would get exposed to hidden advertisements that are lying all around us, I would just think “No, I don’t need this, it is not relevant to me anymore. I just have these few pieces of clothing and they are all I need right now.” And as time went by I could feel that I completely stopped seeing these things and thinking about stuff that I should buy or own. Everything that I had and all the things around me became so much more valuable to me and I felt that I really where using all my things to the fullest.

I started becoming more of an owner to my clothes and things – instead of a consumer, like we have in the past few years become.

If I got a stain in my shirt I would act out on it right away, and always got them out. I had some accidents, ripped my shirt, got a cigarette hole burnt in it and I just took care of it, mending my things instead of easily laying them in the closet until enough time had passed for me to throw them away. I washed and waxed and shined my shoes regularly, I hung my woolen sweater out to breath and I put my jeans in the freezer. I even started fixing the holes in my socks, which is something I had never done before. All of these things are something that I mostly had to do for them to survive this long, and now when I look back I just think that it is ridiculous that I hadn’t been taking this good care of all my things before. No matter how cheap they had been or how fast I could go out and replace it with a new one. And I think this is the biggest problem and the biggest fault on our side, the consumer side.

I am not saying that I haven’t bought a single thing in a year, I have bought some new underwear and make up, I just feel freer from constantly having to live up to a standard that is laid so secretively around us. Suddenly I felt like I had a free pass, I didn’t have to take part in all of this madness anymore.

It almost just feels like a privilege sometimes. And I think I need some more time to adjust and think this through.

So for today I will go out and celebrate wearing my one true outfit.

12 pictures representing 12 months of the same clothes