Welcome to Jumper Slut, an oddly specific new intermittent feature here.

I'm like Carrie Bradshaw, but for wool.

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I suspected I was on to something when I’d mentioned my charity shop sweater obsession here and a fellow Substacker asked to see a photo of the spoils. You have no idea how thrilled I was to find a kindred spirit.

You could say I have a type.

Then just yesterday, I posted a note about my fondness for my Conair sweater shaver, and was once again delighted at the response. So when today, I was out with some friends and a young woman came over to say she loved my outfit, well, I knew that the moment for us to come out from the shadows and unite had come at last. We are the cozy. We are the sometimes itchy and a little moth-eaten. We are… the jumper sluts.

I came to Scotland with three sweaters and have since purchased uhhh, six more (my two big cardis are a separate category) but don’t judge me, it’s cold and rainy every fucking day here. You will always need one. I brought my cardigan when I was in the UK in JULY and baby, I wore the hell out of it. It gets cold at night! Also, my jumpers are the best. I genuinely believe they have made me a better person. Allow me to go on, as if you could stop me.

Patron saint of jumper sluts.

Almost all of my wardrobe is secondhand. I have thrifted my whole life, but over the past few years, as even “better” mainstream brands like J. Crew and Banana Republic have churned out cheaper and shittier clothing, I’ve all but given up on mainstream retail. (This 2023 feature from The Atlantic provocatively titled “Your Sweaters Are Garbage” offers some useful insights.)

I get clothes off eBay and Poshmark when I have a very specific thing I’m shopping for (like a brand’s coveted wool trousers from a few years ago, that someone else has already grown tired of). Don’t do this unless you know your size in a particular brand and era very well, bcause brands change their sizing all the time, the bastards. Almost everything else is thrifted. And that means I can mostly wear clothes made of wool and cashmere and cotton and silk, and carry bags made of leather. Nothing fancy, nothing trendy, just good things. Things I sometimes have to put a little work into.

Over the break, I took two sweaters to my tailor, because she is literally a wizard at repairing sweater holes. “The moths love wool and cashmere,” she said, surveying the damage. And I realized, right, because they don’t want to eat plastic. Can you blame them?

The only weather that counts.

I like sewing a button back on, or having my trousers taken up, or a seam repaired. And I loovvvve hand washing a sweater, or running my precious Conair razor over all the little pills (A commenter here compared it to ASMR and I GET IT.), or giving it a steam to refresh it. Because I’m caring for my things, and they’re things that someone else once cared for too. It gives me the feeling I had at V&A East Storehouse in London last summer, that sense of being close to the beautiful humanity that objects really can communicate when they aren’t made specifically to be thrown away.

Americans now buy roughly 53 new garments a year, four times more than we did in the year 2000. And may I point out, we had H&M and Old Navy in 2000. It’s not like fast fashion wasn’t a thing then. It just wasn’t the literal garbage pile it is now. And we only wear about half of what we’re buying. It’s kind of gross.

Actually, this is the most memorable scene in the whole movie.

I’m hopeful about the GenZ-led trend of de-influencing — not just clothes but beauty products and more, because I may be sustainable in my wardrobe but I’m as vulnerable to a new hyaluronic acid as the next person. (I’m currently doing a Project Pan challenge and wow does it take a long time to finish a lipstick.) I want to believe we’re starting to wake up and see that overconsumption of cheap shit isn’t just bad for the environment, it’s bad for the soul.

I’ve realized that I don’t feel good about myself when I am wearing things that I don’t respect. Yeah, I think I should respect my clothes. I want to love them and take care of them because when you care for things I think it helps you care about things.

I am an unemployed person who can’t go buy high-quality new things in fancy shops anyway, but I actually really like wearing other people’s old clothes. I like imagining where the woman who had my Paddington coat before me went in it. I like the connection my clothing gives me to my tailor, and to my local charity shop that will take the money I give it to help other people, and my daughter when she borrows my nice Italian wool coat. That all just seems nice and kind and human.

So I’m figuring that now and then I’d like to share my sweater situation with you, and I would LOVE for you to share yours. This is our space, this is our time, jumper sluts. I truly believe we can make the world a better place, one cable knit at a time.

OOTD, and yes that’s a puzzle behind me because I’m also a puzzle slut.