Breaking Up With My Back-To-School Dress

As a kid, August meant trips to the mall for binders, pens, paper, and a new outfit. I loved it, but why wouldn’t I? Office supplies are glorious. Brand new highlighters, Post-its in a million shapes, folders to keep everything organized.

As a teenager, August meant a slim envelope arrived in the mail, inside it a single sheet of paper with my school year schedule. I remember the excitement of seeing a favourite teacher on my schedule again, and the impossibility of sleep on Labour Day weekend. Every year my mom took a picture of my siblings and I on our porch before we headed off to our first day of school.

Because I used to make my long-suffering little brother and sister play school, assigning them questions from old textbooks, no one was surprised when I decided to sign on for another thirty more years of back-to-school Septembers by becoming a high school teacher.

Now August is all about teacher nightmares, always with a few common elements. I can never find my classroom, and when I do, I haven’t prepared a lesson.

I don’t buy supplies any more, but I often buy new clothes. Early in my career, a brand new dress helped fuel the illusion that I knew what I was doing. As I gained more experience, I still felt like some new clothes could help me rock that first day back.

Last week, I went downtown to look for a dress. I’ve spent the last few years in jogging pants, working hard at home raising small children. Fatigue makes simple conversations a challenge; I felt like I needed some power outfits more than ever. Also, three kids have left me two sizes bigger.

Running my hands over expensive ethically sourced clothes that I most certainly could not afford, I realized something: I am losing my taste for endless and automatic consumption. Mindlessly buying stuff has become a bad habit of mine — of ours.

Could I find a dress in my closet that is suitable for a day in front of my students? Definitely. Up until noon, for the first time in months, the teens would be sleep-deprived too. We would muddle through together.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that our patterns of consumption have to shift. Our consumption of clothes is particularly fraught. For too long, we haven’t thought very hard about the cheap, disposable clothes we buy. These clothes are easy to justify when the alternatives can be hard to find and are often much more expensive. Many of us take solace in giving our cheap clothes to thrift stores, ignoring the fact that much of what we donate will be thrown out. It will happen out of sight, so we keep it out of mind.

Ten years ago, when I started teaching civics, I decided to include a unit on being an ethical consumer. I learned about globalization and its effect on consumerism. A book on fast fashion helped me understand why T-shirts were $19.99 when I was a teenager but somehow cost $6 now. I learned about the hidden costs of those cheap clothes.

In class, we discussed boycotting brands to express opposition to the company’s actions. I taught students about fair trade food and ethical clothing.

There was one thing I never discussed during our ethical consumer unit, and that’s the buy-nothing movement. The cult of consumerism is still wildly influential in my thoughts and actions. Of all the trends that have emerged over the past ten years—bbuying local, buying organic, and all the others—tthe idea of buying nothing, or at least buying less, is only starting to get a real discussion.

At the end of the day, I’m always trying to reconcile two parts of myself. There’s a part of me that feels unbelievably attached to things. Things as silly as a mug I love or a purple purse I bought on a whim. But there’s another part of me that feels ill at the thought of rising seas filled with islands of our garbage. I am filled with panic and dread, thinking about the world we are leaving for generations to come.

That panic can be productive though, if I use it as an impetus to shift my beliefs and actions. I’m starting to recognize that as a child of the 80s, I’ve focused too much on the third R, recycle, and not nearly enough time thinking about the first and more important R—rreduce.

Perhaps my Civics unit shouldn’t be called Ethical Consumer. Maybe it should focus on sustainable lifestyles. And maybe, instead of asking myself whether an object I want to buy will bring me joy, I should be asking whether I need that thing at all.