Charity shop clothes challenge returns 10 years on

A woman who 10 years ago wore charity clothes for a year to raise money for Cancer Research UK is doing it again in 2025.

Caroline Jones, 56, from Harpenden, Hertfordshire, began Knickers Model's Own, in 2015 in memory of her mother Mary Benson, who died from breast cancer.

She wore clothes from the charity's shops for 365 days and posted her outfits on social media.

Marking 10 years is the "obvious next step" for her, she said, and she will post her 2025 pictures alongside the corresponding image from 2015.

Mrs Jones' mother, who died in October 2014, had been a volunteer at the charity's Harpenden shop for 13 years.

Mother-of-three Ms Jones started volunteering as a window dresser soon after her mother died, and on New Year's Eve 2014 decided on a campaign to honour her memory.

She hoped to raise £1,000 in a year, but her daily posts became so popular she increased her fundraising target and raised about £70,000.

She has since called that year "life-changing".

In the past 10 years she has not only continued giving style inspiration using second hand clothes but has written a book about her "year of frugal fashion".

She has advised numerous charity fundraising teams on how to connect with their donors and recorded a podcast that digs deeper into inspirational fundraising stories to discover what it takes to see a challenge through.

This year she said her reasons for doing the new campaign were "slightly different".

"This time I'm not in my early stages of grief," she said.

"I will never lose the grief I have for the loss of my mum and she's with me all the time but it's different."

She said although she might have looked confident in 2015, there was "a whole load of stuff going on".

"I was going through perimenopause, I was going through grief, I had a young family," she said.

Posting pictures 10 years apart was "about showing that we change", she said, and it also showed that if you are not feeling great now, you can come out the other side.

"I feel different, I feel more confident, but I've got the same anxieties that lots of women have," she said.

"I'm menopausal my body shape has changed, I put things on and they don't fit me quite as well so I've had to learn to work around that and find clothes that fit me differently.

"It would be easy for me to perhaps disappear, but I really want this to be a space that other women and men look at and go she's still here, she's still creating outfits, she's living her life.

"I also want women to see how fantastic charity shop clothes can be, how you can put a look together, and how it gives me my confidence."

Ms Jones said she very rarely buys new clothes now, apart of course from her underwear.

She hoped her new campaign would also reflect how conversations around second hand clothes were now more normalised.

"I like to think that my content champions the wearing of charity clothes," she said.

"I like good quality new but my heart is never really fully in it, and the love is nowhere near it is when I find something so beautiful and it's second hand and I can style it my way.

"I'm a huge fan of the charity shop on the high street, it's so important to me that these shops stay there and we don't all run off to the apps."

Ultimately she said she felt a bit more organised this time round as she knows what to expect.

"Who knows where it's going to go this time," she said.

"But I think it's a brilliant way of being creative, that makes me feel alive.

"I hope that my content inspires people to think 'I can still wear a denim jacket in my 50s and I can still put on a red lip'."

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