Last year the hashtag #NoBuy began to gain traction on TikTok—a nascent anticonsumerist movement that encouraged people to curb their spending. More recently, bolstered by rising prices and a bleak economic outlook, the sentiment has snowballed into “No Buy 2025,” both a pledge and a challenge to fight back against overconsumption. It’s no longer a niche social-media concern: You can read about it everywhere from CNN to Vogue, and consumers even coordinated a one-day economic blackout last month. All signs point to the potential for profound change in how younger generations—mainly Gen Z and millennials—are shopping and spending. A recent joint report from McKinsey and The Business of Fashion declared, “2025 is likely to be a time of reckoning for many brands.”
While “no-buy” (and its “low-buy” counterpart) carries a broad umbrella—from ditching impulse purchases to cutting back on all nonessential spending—a popular category where participants are looking to pare back is clothing (an industry with a track record of exorbitant waste). Users post tips like “shopping” your own closet to rediscover and focus on what you have instead of what you don’t, while some share their self-imposed “rules” for the upcoming year. Others dish out more actionable advice: unsubscribing from fashion brands’ marketing lists or blocking e-commerce websites to avoid temptation. It’s both a rebellion against consumerist culture and also, much more practically, a way to save up money.
To dive deeper into No Buy 2025, GQ reached out to Alec Leach, a former fashion editor turned author and consultant who writes the excellent and timely “Ordinary Delusions” newsletter. His first book, The World Is on Fire But We’re Still Buying Shoes, is an inquisitive and clear-eyed exploration of contemporary consumerism, showing how navigating an interest in fashion in today’s age is a path full of twists and turns and smoke and mirrors. It’s a worthy read for anyone interested in examining their own relationship with clothes and how to become a more conscious shopper.
Leach spoke to GQ about why the “no-buy” movement is finding a larger audience, his own year of shopping only secondhand, and how he believes truly personal style is achieved by saying no more times than yes.
Alec Leach: The fashion industry, in general, has just been sleepwalking into this really uninspiring dead end for a while now. If you think just how commercialized all of the luxury brands became, how ridiculous all the collaborations got, how marketing has just been seeping into every corner of culture. There’s only so much that people can take, especially when the creativity behind it is really lacking. I think it’s inevitable that, at some point, people are going to get really, really bored of it all.
You definitely notice that if you think of buying something and sort of put it on hold for a couple of days, a lot of the time you just don’t feel as excited about it. There is a real kind of momentary thrill to shopping that often masks the fact that you’re shopping for boredom or to avoid difficult feelings or just as a habit rather than actually needing or wanting the product that you’re looking at. So putting something on pause for a bit is definitely a really good way of figuring out if you actually want or need something.
I did a year of only buying secondhand. I didn’t do a year of not buying anything, but the year of only buying secondhand was really not that hard. The secondhand market is just so great. It’s not always easy for me, I normally need an extra large and 34-inch length for trousers. But generally, if you are down to dig and know who has good curation, then you can very easily just completely sidestep buying new things.
It definitely became a lot more about digging for something. You become more proactive about it, thinking, “What is it that I need?” You can’t go onto an online shop and just casually scroll through it. You have to be a lot more deliberate. I remember thinking, “I’d really like [to have] a Carhartt jacket,” and I had to really dig for one that I wanted, and I got it. It’s probably the hardest-working thing in my wardrobe, still. I wear it all the time.
You have to be more intentional about it. You do have to think, What is it that I really want to be wearing? Or do I even need to find anything new right now?
I don’t pay that much attention to much of it anymore. I couldn’t tell you what Loewe looks like right now. I couldn’t tell you what Dries van Noten looks like. I wouldn’t be able to tell you what Marni looks like right now, but I could tell you who I think makes a decent hoodie that would work for me or who makes good shoes. I know a lot more about the stuff that specifically works for me and that I like. You only have so much space for so many things in your life when you get older, and you only have so much time for so many things, and it’s really more a process of cutting out all the noise and just focusing on the things that mean something specifically to you.
It's all connected. If you look at what's happening in the world, you've got a growing awareness of mental health and growing volatility in the economy and the job market. For many people, especially in countries like the United States, life is just getting harder, and a middle-class lifestyle is becoming more and more out of reach. 2008 was an interesting example of the aftermath of the financial crisis, but at the same time it had this huge resurgence in really well-made products because people wanted their money to go a long way. I know we're not in the middle of a financial crisis right now, but that's proof that shopping habits do reflect and change with the times.
Real style and real taste are a lot more about what you don’t do than it is about what you do. It's about the things you say no to, more than the things you say yes to. For me, it's really about homing in on the 1% of the market that you relate to and ignoring everything else.
There are all sorts of limitations around what you can buy. Price points and whether or not something fits you well. Sizing is always a difficult factor for different people. So that’s one factor that you always need to bear in mind. Just generally, with aesthetics, what works for you? What do you want to wear? What do you not want to wear? What stuff is just practical for you to wear? There are just many practical considerations you need to consider as well. But for me, it's really about saying no to a lot more things than you say yes to.
Once you have a good amount of really great clothes that you love wearing, you get to a point where it’s like, I mean, I could wear that but also not the end of the world if I don’t. I think there’s a lot to be said about knowing when enough is enough.