In a world brimming with excess, Patrick Grant’s Less: Stop Buying So Much Rubbish – How Having Fewer, Better Things Can Make Us Happier is a crisply tailored takedown of modern consumerism. Best known as a judge on The Great British Sewing Bee and the man behind the revival of Savile Row stalwart Norton & Sons, Grant has long used his public profile to thread together questions of style, sustainability and social value.

With Less, he cuts through the marketing noise of fast fashion and cheap convenience, arguing instead for a revival of dignity—in clothing, in craft, and in community. At the heart of his argument is a simple but deeply unfashionable truth: that owning fewer, better-made things is not a sacrifice but a route to personal and collective well-being.

I didn’t read Less in the traditional sense—I listened to it on the bus and on wet Auckland walks that reminded me of the rainy Pembrokeshire days when I first met Patrick at BFest, a three-day gathering of the then newly formed UK B Corp community back in 2016. It was there that I first heard him speak with passion about Community Clothing, the social enterprise he had just launched. What stuck with me wasn’t only the clarity of his argument about the need for a better way forward for his industry—it was the pride he clearly had in describing the people, processes and places behind every garment his fledgling business was making.

That sense of pride stayed with me when, on a trip back to my hometown of Burnley—just down the road from local football rivals Blackburn—I visited Community Clothing’s factory there. Cookson & Clegg, established in 1860, had seen better days before being revived under Patrick’s leadership. Touring the floor with Dave O’Kane, the factory’s Technical Development Manager, it was clear that this was more than a business—Patrick had created, or maybe reignited, a real sense of purpose—built on skill, history, and hope.

Community Clothing exemplifies a business with purpose stitched into its very DNA. It harnesses underused UK manufacturing capacity to create affordable, high-quality wardrobe staples—an antidote to fast fashion in every respect. It supports skilled jobs, revitalises local economies, and offers a deeply human counterpoint to the disposable culture that dominates modern retail.

What sets Less apart from the usual decluttering literature is its sheer ambition. This is not just a call to simplify but a call to rebalance. Backed with meticulous research, Grant takes aim at inequality, industrial decline, and the soul-sapping effects of algorithm-driven, faster-and-faster consumption. His voice—by turns exasperated, warm, and gently persuasive—echoes the quiet wisdom that doing less, but better, might just be the most radical act of all.

Less is not a branding exercise; it’s a deeply argued philosophy for living and working better—offering substance in a sector too often distracted by overpaid influencers and synthetic imagery.
The audio edition includes a PDF of a lecture Grant gave at the Royal Geographical Society. It’s well worth a read. In it, he outlines a radical reimagining of the clothing economy—redistributing value to makers, replacing high-volume consumption with local, circular models, and building more fulfilling jobs across the lifecycle of garments. It’s a compelling vision of a sector rebuilt around values, not just value.

The book is not without its seams. At times, its polemical tone flirts with nostalgia, and readers seeking detailed policy design may find the arguments more moral than material. But these are minor quibbles in an otherwise sharply observed and urgently necessary book.

In the end, Less is not just about buying fewer clothes. It’s about building a life and an economy that is more intentional, more inclusive, and more human. For those of us who believe—as I do—that business must do more than turn a profit and sprinkle charity on top, Grant’s message is a well-measured fit with the wider argument for purpose-led enterprise.

In CORE, I tell the story of walking that Blackburn factory floor with Dave, then phoning Patrick and his then-CEO Lucy Clayton that same evening to share an observation: it was pride, I felt, that seemed to drive everything. Patrick agreed. But perhaps—nine years on—it’s something even more elemental that has threaded all the parts of his enterprise together. Perhaps the more powerful unifying idea is, quite simply, less.