I Gave Up Free Shipping, Fast Fashion, and Being Pelit

I had so many clothes, none of them special. More than just a closet refresh, I needed to change my attitude toward clothing, money, and being pelit.

I used to think spending “lots” of money on clothes was a sign of moral failure. This mentality originated from one of the first words I ever learned, a word in Bahasa Indonesia, a language that my parents mostly stopped speaking to me at four years old. The word is pelit. I pronounce it as “puh-leet,” and Google Translate defines it in English as “stingy.”

Being pelit was never a compliment in my household. Though my parents used the word to describe many people, they had one main target: a family friend. Growing up, they regaled me with tales about the extremes of her pelit-ness. She would only charge her phone at her office, never at her house, to save money on electricity. Rather than spend the seven dollars at the local express car wash when needed, she would wash her car in her front yard once every few weeks. Each anecdote ended with an utterance of “pelit,” enunciating the “leet” in an upspeak that conveyed condescension and judgment.

That said, my parents were self-aware and called themselves pelit too when they were being pelit, but with a sense of pride they denied others. They also used the term to excuse their frugal idiosyncrasies. We avoided opening the garage door to conserve its battery life and refrained from using lights in hallways to save on our electric bills. These cost-saving behaviors may have seemed strange in other households, but they made sense to us, a self-described pelit family.

I was born and raised in Irvine, California, an Orange County suburb infamous for being a boring, upper-class bubble of meticulously planned gated communities. It’s not that we couldn’t afford to buy paper napkins. But we chose to steal napkins from fast-casual establishments like Chipotle because we could. My parents grew up in Jakarta and Surabaya, in financially stable families, as part of the ethnic Chinese minority during a politically tumultuous time in Indonesian history. Though my grandma burned Mandarin newspapers and changed our Chinese last name out of safety, neither of my parents ever felt the pangs of unavoidable hunger. Their thriftiness did not arise out of necessity, but perhaps it stemmed from fear of being unsafe, of an unknown future.

I also have a theory, purely conjectural, that there are two types of immigrant mentalities possessed by the Asian well-to-do: the cautious, pelit Asians who avoid using the dishwasher or turning on the AC to save money and the designer-label obsessed “Crazy Rich Asians” who hire private sushi chefs for their birthdays every year (made known to a wider global audience by the eponymous film). My parents are the former, Cautious Middle-Class Asians, and it is clear to me that a part of them likes being pelit to avoid the label of being nouveau riche.

Naturally, being pelit extended to clothing choices. My mom proudly never owned anything designer, and she taught me never to buy clothes at full price. A past version of me never paid for shipping whenever I shopped online. I would never spend the extra $7.99 if I could avoid it; I did my best to get free shipping by getting multiple variations of the same item or filling up my cart with clothes I half-heartedly liked. If a website didn’t offer free shipping, I would not shop there.

I was never explicitly taught to do this. But when I told my mom this over the phone, she said I was truly her daughter, a note of pride in her voice. I told myself I was too much like her to wear designer clothing. So I pushed down my childhood fascinations with the designs of Vivienne Westwood and Anna Sui and relegated myself to the Gap because I got further discounts by using their store credit card. How very pelit I was.

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“Why would anyone spend so much money on that?” my parents would wonder when fellow Indonesians splurged on designer clothes and other goods. The way “that” was pronounced conveyed everything: Clothes were not worth the effort, the consideration, and the money, especially when garments were readily available for cheap at so many outlets. This devaluing attitude toward clothing proves how well my parents have assimilated into American culture. With the domination of fast-fashion brands—including online retailers like Shein and Fashion Nova, and shopping-mall brands like Zara, H&M, and the Gap—American consumers today have expectations about clothing that previous generations did not always have.

According to the fashion writer Dana Thomas, author of Fashionopolis: The Price of Fast Fashion and the Future of Clothes, the founder of Zara, Amancio Ortega Gaona, switched its apparel-business paradigm in the late 1980s, exemplifying the era’s mindset around consumer goods: Gaona pivoted the Zara business model from following (and knocking off) ready-to-wear clothing by the high fashion houses to increasing the amount of clothing outsourced and produced in countries where labor is cheap. He called this “instant fashion,” writes Thomas: Gaona “swiped silhouettes from top-tier fashion houses, reinterpreted them in lesser fabrics, and offered them at bargain prices to the middle-market consumer.” It was a hit. Other fast-fashion brands followed.

This devaluing attitude toward clothing proves how well my parents have assimilated into American culture.

In those days, in the United States, 70 percent of the clothing that Americans bought and wore was made locally in the US, according to Fashionopolis. Today, forty years later, that number is much smaller; just look at the tag of your underwear right now. Also different from the 1980s? The amount of textiles in our landfills, thanks to fast fashion’s reliance on synthetic materials and promotion of overconsumption, which has doubled in the last two decades.

In the 2010s, throughout my twenties, I couldn’t have cared less about all of that. It was important for me to show my parents I could look “fashionable,” or at least presentable, while spending as little money as possible. I was already rebelling against their expectations in so many ways, failing to be skinny and struggling at various underpaid jobs in the entertainment industry. Being a “pelit” daughter, who modeled her spending habits after her parents’, was a sort of concession to them. So I shopped.

Pre-pandemic, I consumed a lot of fast fashion. Some clothes made me look “hot,” and others made me look less hot. I would have described the more flattering pieces as “cute,” but did I individually love any of these items? No, but they made me look presentable enough, and I got them in “deals”—not having to expend a lot of supposed effort or money (even though, looking back, the amount I spent on clothes was a lot because of the frequency of online purchases). I didn’t have to spend a lot of time and effort thinking about clothes. With a click of a button, they’d arrive at my apartment.

Another trend I succumbed to in the 2010s: that of being the cool girl. I felt like I was a “cool girl” for not caring deeply about fashion, a realm I had subconsciously deemed as frivolous and shallow. In a particularly cringeworthy moment, I once proudly told a guy I was dating that I wasn’t “one of those girls who cares about designer labels and that stuff.” Of course, the most crucial part of being a cool girl is that she has to look effortlessly hot, so clothing is still very much needed. But it was cooler not to care too much about the how and why of each garment or accessory, and today’s conglomerate fast-fashion brands, with lots of money and reach, are here to supply that need, no matter the environmental cost.

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“What is your most special item of clothing?”

This question, posed in a subreddit I was browsing while self-isolated at the height of the pandemic, changed everything for me. It haunted me as I pulled out clothes from overstuffed hampers and storage boxes, only to realize I had no answer. I had so many clothes, none of them special. I needed more than just a closet refresh; I needed to change my attitude toward clothes.

As I quickly learned, there were no easy solutions. There is no one-time payment; there is no secret map or book of knowledge that leads to a clear path of enlightened personal style. It takes time, trial and error, and deep introspection of the self. For me, that required confronting and ultimately dismantling the thriftiness instilled in me since childhood, the pelit mentality.

Like the development of my clothing and style habits, this pelit mentality did not change overnight, and it still lingers in other aspects of my life. (I could not tell you the last time I bought napkins for myself.) But still, the biggest change has been reflected in my clothes. Now, to slowly build a wardrobe that I love, I am exploring non-fast-fashion sources: local thrift stores, emerging eco-conscious brands, secondhand luxury websites such as The RealReal and Vestiaire Collective, resale markets such as Poshmark and eBay, and more. It takes more effort and time on my end, but the results are worth it.

It takes time, trial and error, and deep introspection of the self . . . dismantling the thriftiness instilled in me since childhood, the pelit mentality.

While I’m still always trying to get a deal, whether that be through purchasing the item secondhand or getting my hands at the ready to browse the Ssense sale, I am no longer pelit when it comes to what I wear. Nowadays, the most important deal to me is the cost per wear throughout the years. And when I love a piece, such as the opening 1998 spring/summer Mandala dress by Vivienne Tam, I know I will wear it for a long time, because its artistry defies trend. By consciously choosing mindful shopping, I fell in love with fashion itself as a medium of artistic expression too.

I thought my parents would disapprove of my reformed purchasing habits, my growing love of designer clothes and craftsmanship. While I was living with them in the early days of the pandemic, I would have my shopping packages sent to my empty apartment (for which I was still paying the monthly rent) because I didn’t want to face their judgment. It took me much longer, over a year after I got vaccinated, to wear my treasured pieces around them.

But to my surprise, I didn’t receive pushback or judgment. They didn’t call me pelit. It turned out they were listening to me the whole time. When I excitedly blathered on about how I was reforming my purchase habits to become more sustainable or how happy I was to score the 1998 spring/summer runway Vivienne Tam look for over one thousand dollars cheaper than it was last sold on The RealReal, my parents recognized that I, as their daughter, was forging my path, and they accepted who I was becoming.

In 2022, I am trying to save what I can, which often feels daunting with global inflation, especially in a city as expensive as Los Angeles. But while I try to do my best, I don’t think of myself as pelit. During the Labor Day heatwave, as temperatures were in the hundreds, I opted to pay for garage parking at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (price: twenty dollars) instead of going to my usual street-parking spots that were a half mile away. I couldn’t bear the heat, and I wanted to take care of myself.

Perhaps it was an obvious decision, but it still felt momentous. While I knew I had made the right decision for myself—that the extra twenty dollars was worth my health—I told my parents, just to hear what they thought. And they agreed. Perhaps they are becoming less pelit too.