Cheapness done wrong UPDATED

OMG girls, what we should totally do is channel our obsession with eating nothing whatsoever and then feeling all bad about it when we slip up and down a cheesecake into one great big no-shopping "diet." Wouldn't it be awesome if we could apply that purity impulse that once drove mankind towards religion and sexual restraint (or at least guilt) but makes us think just one chocolate truffle will make us obese to another clichéd women's pleasure: buying new clothes? Like, we can declare a teensy purchase at J.Crew "sinful," then collectively pat ourselves on the back for going a whole five minutes without buying anything other than accessories. We can merge the language of paraphrased-Christianity and fad-diets and create something uniquely painful to read, it will be super!

So I guess it's clear where I stand on "The Great American Apparel Diet." (Unfortunate name, but at least it's not The Great Forever 21 Diet.) But the whole thing's not totally off-base. If you're buying clothes about which you're not 100% enthusiastic, in designer-denim-induced-debt, buy less. And when possible, avoid purchases that already have it-seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time written all over them. Much as I have a momentary desire for these, it's unclear what buying them would accomplish, other than help the Japanese economy, and ultimately, post-second-round-as-thrift, add to the trendy-purchase landfill.

But does the whole thing need to be dressed up as cutesy 'diet'? (It's effectively the reverse of the Worst Advice Ever.) Despite occasional nods to wholesome alternatives to browsing H&M, the goal here seems not to be to abandon shopping for something more productive, but rather to give it up so as to blog self-righteously about how one was able to Resist the siren call of the H&M downstairs.

Still, as pleasures go, if you're not spending beyond your means, where exactly is the harm in buying some clothes, sometimes? Is keeping store employees employed not enough to cancel out the environmental and child-labor disaster that is, in 9 out of 10 circumstances, your new tank top? If your concerns are purely ecological, couldn't you just go used-only and shop away? But yes, given that people do not tend to shop exclusively in thrift stores except out of need or hipsterdom (or Finnishness - the Finns love their used clothes, apparently), there is an impact on the planet to take into account. But this is true of nearly all human experience. Should we all get standard-issue potato sacks and abandon Consumerism along with personal style? Has taking an all-or-nothing stance benefited Americans as food-dieters, and if not, why (other than the obvs - to sell books) embrace it for shopping 'dieters' as well?

UPDATE

See also Jezebel on this.