Outside In | Hong Kong is shopaholic and wasteful, even with a retail slowdown
Two thirds of Hong Kong consumers say they have more clothes than they need and half have clothes that have never been worn and are still carrying their sales tags
I have an embarrassing confession: the average age of the shirts hanging in my wardrobe is around 20 years. I seem to remember a surge of shirt-buying activity in the mid-1990s during the peak of Hong Kong’s flamboyance before the Asia financial markets crashed in 1998.
The fact that I had had a particularly successful diet, and needed some clothes that did not sag off me, may have contributed too.
This obviously makes me one of the retail industry’s worst nightmares. It also makes me an odd fellow in Hong Kong, which must surely rank among the world’s epicentres for oniomania.
We owe this wonderful word to Emil Kraepelin, the German psychologist who in 1924 first homed in on the problem of people who suffer a compulsive need to buy stuff – in particular to buy clothes. Nowadays it has a more scientific-sounding acronym to describe it – CBD, or compulsive buying disorder.
If there is any word for the opposite of an oniomaniac – what about a nononiomaniac, a word with a wonderful chewability to it – then I am that person. And as I stumbled upon the recent Greenpeace International Fashion Consumption Survey, I felt as virtuous a nononiomaniac as I have felt in a very long time.