This is Life and Art from FD Weekend. I'm Lila Raptopoulos. For the past year or so, our fashion editor,

Lauren Invick, has been committed to buying less stuff, like very committed to it. At the start of

2023, she pledged to buy just five new items of apparel a year. We're talking five new things

across clothing, shoes, accessories, all of it.

She was allowed to buy as much secondhand clothing as she wanted, but we all know how hard buying secondhand clothing can be.

And Lauren did all of this because she's trying to live sustainably.

And this idea of five new fashion items a year comes from a think tank that's crunched the numbers on the

environmental and economic impact of clothing and shoes. And they've concluded that for people

living in the world's wealthiest nations, that number should be five. Today, Lauren, is here

to talk about the benefits and difficulties of buying less over the past year.

Lauren, hi. Welcome to the show.

That was a great summary.

Thank you.

To start, can you tell me how this all came about?

Like, when did you come across this pledge and what made you decide to commit to it?

Oh, I can't remember if one of the studies authors email me directly or I might have read about it in one of the trade publications like Women's More Daily or Bizza Fashion.

But for me, it was so interesting because we so rarely see numbers around like what should we actually be buying or not buying. I feel like the way that people kind of cut back and try to live more

sustainably is like they don't drink almond milk because they heard almond trays use a lot of water.

Or like they've heard that like wool is sustainable.

So they'll buy sweaters, but they're not buying leather.

And a lot of times that is not really very well backed up by

data. So for me to find a study that was like, okay, actually, yep, if you're living in this country,

...