A Year Without Shopping: What Emma Edwards Learned About Money, Confidence & Clothes

By Molly Benjamin, Founder of Ladies Finance Club

Listen to the full podcast here.

If you’ve ever stared at a wardrobe full of clothes and still thought, “I have nothing to wear,” this episode of Get Rich is going to feel very, very familiar.

I’m joined by one of our most-loved guests, Emma Edwards from The Broke Generation, to talk about her new book, The Wardrobe Project: A Year of Buying Less and Liking Yourself More, and the challenge she set herself that most of us can’t even imagine doing:

A full year without clothes shopping.
No new clothes.
No secondhand.
No rentals.
Nothing.

What started as a way to spend less on clothing turned into a powerful lesson in body image, confidence, emotional spending, minimalism and self-awareness.

When Shopping Becomes a Shortcut for Confidence

At the end of 2022, Emma realised her relationship with shopping and her wardrobe didn’t match the rest of her financial life.

She’d already done a heap of work on her personal finances, written her first book Good With Money, and built better money habits. But there was one category that still felt out of control: clothes.

Her spending on clothing and clothing-adjacent stuff was sitting around the $5.5K–$6K mark for the year. That number wasn’t outrageous, but what bothered her was this: after all that spending, she still didn’t love her wardrobe. She still felt triggered by “new arrivals,” influenced by what other women were wearing online, and often found herself clicking on links and adding items to cart as a way to deal with uncertainty, changing routines and post-lockdown body changes.

Like so many women, she was using clothing as a shortcut to feel like “enough”. Clothes weren’t just about covering her body, they were about identity, social comparison and confidence.

So she decided to flip the script and see what would happen if she removed shopping from the equation entirely.

A No-Buy Year… and the First Wobbles

Emma didn’t go into the challenge blind. She knew she had more than enough clothing already, even if that meant repeating outfits and wearing the same pieces in different ways. The part that scared her wasn’t living without new clothes, it was what might come up emotionally when she couldn’t rely on shopping for a quick hit of confidence or distraction.

The first few months were surprisingly easy. She got creative, started combining clothes in new ways and actually wore more of her wardrobe instead of repeating the same 10% all the time.

The first real challenge came with the change of season. As the weather cooled, she noticed herself slipping back into old habits mentally: lingering on shop windows, being more easily influenced by what she saw on social media, feeling tempted by the idea of a “new season wardrobe”. Even though she wasn’t allowed to buy, the urge was still there.

The difference this time was that she didn’t act on it. She observed it. She treated herself almost like a case study in emotional spending and clothing behaviour, noticing what triggered her and when she felt most vulnerable to impulse buys.

Your Wardrobe as a Story, Not Just Stuff

One of the biggest shifts Emma experienced was seeing her wardrobe less as “a pile of clothes” and more as a collection of stories.

Some pieces were there because she’d seen them on an influencer and wanted to feel like that person. Others were bought in the wrong colour or fit, but she hung onto them because she loved the idea of them. Some dresses belonged to versions of herself that no longer existed. Others were tied up in body image – things that only fit during a certain hormonal week or at a certain clothing size.

She realised a lot of her wardrobe fell into two buckets: items she liked in theory but that weren’t quite right in reality, and items that represented a fantasy self rather than her actual life.

Without new items constantly arriving to distract her, she had to confront these things properly. That’s confronting, but it’s also where self-awareness grows. It forced her to ask, “Why did I buy this? Who did I think I’d be when I wore it? What was really going on when I tapped my card?”

That level of honesty is uncomfortable, but it’s incredibly powerful, especially if you’ve ever used shopping as a way to soothe stress, boredom, insecurity or low self-worth.

The Surprise Side Effect: Better Body Image

Emma went into the challenge expecting it to help her finances. She did not expect it to improve her confidence and body image.

Throughout the year she started documenting outfits that she actually liked on herself, snapping quick photos and saving them into an album. Over time, this became visual proof of what genuinely worked for her body, her colouring and her lifestyle, not some model on a website.

She stopped chasing the clothes she thought she “should” wear and started seeing what actually suited her. No filters. No fantasy. Just reality.

Without constant new clothing to hide behind, she had to face herself in the mirror more often. And instead of that being a punishment, it became freeing. She wasn’t dressing to become someone else. She was dressing to feel like a confident version of herself.

By the end of the year she realised she felt better in her body than she ever had before, and that wasn’t a fluke. Removing the constant noise of shopping had given her space to build a more grounded, respectful relationship with her appearance and her clothes.

From Shopping Highs to Intentional Style

After a year off, going back to shopping could easily have turned into a binge. Instead, it was calmer, slower and more intentional.

Because she had spent so long living with what she already owned, she understood herself on a much more granular level. Not just “I like dresses” or “I prefer jeans”, but:

• which fabrics feel comfortable
• which necklines make her feel good
• which sleeve lengths and hemlines flatter her
• which shapes of jackets and trousers she actually reaches for
  
  

That kind of detail changed everything. She no longer buys clothing based on emotion or vibes alone. She buys based on knowledge about her body, her style, her wardrobe and her lifestyle.

It also made her far more minimal and sustainable by default. When you deeply understand what works for you and you’re less emotionally triggered by every trend, you naturally buy less and wear more of what you already own. That’s good for your bank account, your wardrobe clutter, and the planet.

She describes one of the biggest mindset shifts like this: instead of being most excited by what’s in the shops, she’s now more excited by what’s in her own wardrobe.

Cutting Back Without Going Cold Turkey

You don’t have to go a full year without shopping to benefit from some of these insights. If you want to reduce emotional spending on clothing and feel better about your wardrobe, you can start small:

• Spend time in your existing wardrobe first. Try things on. Notice what you avoid and why.
• Challenge yourself to create a few new outfits from pieces you already own, even if it feels awkward at first.
• Pay attention to your emotions when you’re tempted to shop – are you tired, stressed, lonely, comparing, bored?
• Set gentle boundaries, like delaying purchases for 24 hours or limiting yourself to a small number of intentional buys each season.
  
  

The goal isn’t to never buy clothes again. It’s to move from automatic, emotional purchases to conscious, confident ones.

What About Kids’ Clothes?

Emma also hears from a lot of mums who notice their own shopping patterns showing up in how they buy for their kids. Sometimes they’re over-buying because they didn’t have much as children and want to give their kids a different experience. Other times it’s guilt, comparison, or simply habit.

The same principles apply: understand the feelings behind the spending, separate wants from genuine needs, and remember that love and security don’t come packaged in tiny matching outfits.

Your Wardrobe, Your Money, Your Energy

At its heart, this conversation isn’t really about clothes. It’s about how we see ourselves, and how quickly we try to fix discomfort with our debit card.

Clothing, shopping and our wardrobe can become tangled up with self-worth, body image and identity. When we slow down and bring some self-awareness and curiosity to that, we get to choose differently. We can move towards a more minimalist, values-aligned, sustainable approach to style and personal finance.

You don’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to own the “capsule wardrobe” of Pinterest. And you definitely don’t have to do a hardcore no-buy year to start feeling better about your money and your clothes.

You just have to be willing to look at what’s really going on, and take one small, honest step at a time.

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