Determined to get her money’s worth out of the wedding dressed she spent over $1,000, an Australian woman has been wearing her wedding dress everywhere, a year after her wedding.

43-year-old Tammy Hall adopted an anti-consumerism lifestyle in 2016, after a trip to India opened her eyes to how much we as a society consume. She vowed not to buy any new clothes or footwear for a whole year after she returned home to Adelaide, in Southern Australia, which turned out to be very easy, but last year, as her wedding day approached, she faced a puzzling dilemma. She wanted to look good on the most important day of her life, but how could she justify spending a small fortune on garment she would only wear on that day? In the end, she just decided to get her money’s worth.

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Do you buy too many clothes? Or do you often buy new garments only to wear them once before throwing them away? Research shows that you are not alone; a recent YouGov survey in Australia has shown that roughly a quarter of Australians have thrown away an article of clothing after wearing it just once.

Entrepreneur Sarah Freeman was so shocked by these findings that she decided to do something about it. She has founded a “clothes library” in Sydney, where customers can rent clothing instead of purchasing it; this way, you can still only wear it once, but without being wasteful.

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From everyday groceries to household appliances and rare souvenirs, artist Kate Bingaman-Burt, from Portland, Oregon, keeps track of everything she buys by making silly drawings of something she purchases every day. She started this habit six years ago and has since then published two volumes of a book on the topic, called Obsessive Consumption – What Did You Buy Today?

Kate Bingaman-Burt is an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design at Portland State University, but she’s also interested in modern consumerism. In 2002, she started documenting her shopping by photographing everything she purchased, and continued doing so every day until 2004. Then, she decided to combine her artistic talents with her interest in everyday consumption by replacing the photos with drawings she did herself. For the last six years, she has been making drawings of at least an item she buys every single day. The six years of the project have been compressed in two volumes of a book entitled Obsessive Consumption – What Did You Buy Today? published by Princeton Architectural Press, but can also be viewed online, on Kate’s official website.

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Chris Jordan is a photographic artist who uses his artworks to bring awareness to a serious problem of our time – consumerism. Seen from afar his images look like modern recreations of famous masterpieces, but as soon as he approaches the viewer is confronted with thousands of photographs of waste assembled into a beautiful picture.

He’s been called “the ‘it’ artist of the green movement” for his ability to send clear messages about mass consumption through beautiful images that end up disgusting the viewer. But while he’s always been interested in photography, he studied law school and became a corporate lawyer who only dedicated his free time to his favorite hobby. His father, a businessman, had also been passionate about photography and Chris remembers he “was filled with regret” that he couldn’t practice it full time. So, determined not to repeat his mistake, the young lawyer moved to Seattle, and quit the bar after ten years of practicing law, to dedicate his life to photography.

It was definitely a risky move, but definitely an inspired one as the success of his early shows in New York and Los Angeles propelled his career. Chris Jordan came to tackle consumerism by chance. He had taken photos of a pile of garbage and found it beautiful because of its complexity and great color, but when friends of his, who were active in consumerism, started commenting on it, he got the idea for his future projects.

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