Anti-consumerism and material culture

This paper examines three artefacts representative of anti-consumerism: the 'Blackspot Unswoosher', a shoe produced by the 'Blackspot Anticorporation' and publicised as the shoe that will reinvent capitalism; 'Buy Nothing New Month', a Melbourne-based initiative promoting a 'more "custodial" valuing of possessions' based on the premise of 'old is the new new'; and 'Buy Nothing Day', an international day of protest against over-consumption that encourages consumers to advance sustainable causes through the slogan 'participate by not participating'. In doing this, it aims to shed light on new approaches to sustainability emerging from consumer culture. These approaches, as the paper shows, advocate for a movement away from modern consumerism towards sustainable ways of consumption. The discussion of these artefacts draws on critical approaches to consumer culture and is framed by what I propose to call "the sustainable turn". The literature suggests that from all the approaches to sustainability emerging from consumer culture, anti-consumerism appears to be the most radical and paradoxical. Unlike other approaches based on "greener" forms of shopping, anticonsumerism explicitly advocates a reduction in levels of consumption. Ironically, however, the tactics utilised to advance anti-consumerist agendas are still based on and operate within the commercial circuits that it opposes. The discussion of these cultural artefacts presents some insights of what could be a more sustainable cultural economy, while at the same time it identifies the paradoxes intrinsic to approaches to sustainability emerging from consumer culture.