You can tell a lot about the state of a nation from its shopping habits. In the 1980s, we were characterised by greedy power spending, while the blingfest 1990s will be remembered as an era when people believed that the brands they bought defined who they were. No surprise, then, that in the compassionate noughties, the antimaterialist backlash has begun. This decade may well be remembered as the one when our voracious appetite for buying suddenly started to look uncool.

Recently, I found myself at my first “swishing party” – a fashion soiree with a difference. Organised by Futerra, a sustainable-development company, the name of the game was clothes swapping, a bring-and-don’t-buy sale with a designer twist. Rails of clothes and tables of scuffed shoes and dented handbags filled a whole room. There were doomy posters all over the walls bearing legends such as, “What will the world be like in 2031?” and in a corner, there was a wooden “eco-sin” confession box.

“The point is to encourage people to stop shopping, reduce waste and recycle in the most glam way possible,” explained Elizabeth Laskar, of the Ethical Fashion Forum, who, in her high heels and tight-cut jersey dress, was the most glamorous person in the room. Every year, she proclaimed from the podium, 1m tons of old clothes are dumped in landfill sites in Britain. While she was speaking, a woman in a bobbly jumper gasped at me, “You mean you don’t know what the ethical trading initiative is?” It was enough to make a less virtuous woman head straight to Bond Street and max out her credit card.

But the swishing event is by no means a one-off. Ever since the postwar prosperity of the 1950s, meaningless shopping – as a leisure activity – has been part of our cultural programming. Now, it seems, enough is finally enough. Credit-card debt, environmental meltdown, spiritual emptiness – even among the status-obsessed middle classes, a spot of light anti-materialism is starting to make sense.

Among the many groups riding this anti boom are the Church of Stop Shopping, whose leader, the performance artist Reverend Billy, will even do an exorcism on your credit card; the Couch Surfers, a network that encourages people to stay for free on strangers’ floors instead of paying for hotels; and, worthiest of the lot, the Freegans. Freegans are notorious for their attempts to subsist entirely on food reclaimed from restaurant and supermarket rubbish bins. The movement is international, and although its followers purport to live a vegan lifestyle, Freegans will eat meat, too, but only to prevent the food going to waste. Now their campaign is more wide-ranging. According to their website, “Freegans ... employ alternative strategies for living, based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources.”

Some take a more pragmatic approach. The web-based Freecycle network works like a giant, virtual multicoloured Swap Shop. The London branch alone has more than 36,000 members, and it is growing so quickly that it is now split into boroughs. There is seemingly no end to the stuff Freecyclers are willing to give away, from cement mixers to wallpaper, garden sheds to laptops.

But you don’t have to be a budding eco-warrior to boycott consumerism. Meet the Swaparamists, whose motivation, to quote the founder, Eloise Markwell-Butler, is “to f*** fashion”. Her monthly night, Swap-a-rama Razzmatazz, is a cross between a jumble sale and a game of strip-musical statues, the ultimate aim being to offload all the clothes you bought on impulse but have never actually worn. You turn up at Favela Chic, the Brazilian restaurant in Shoreditch, east London, you have a few drinks, and every time a bell rings, you have to swap an item of clothing with the person next to you. “It’s a reaction to that whole Hoxton trendier-than-thou thing,” says Markwell-Butler, a music PR. “There’s an innocence to the parties. You don’t have to worry about what you’re going to wear and, by the end of the evening, by looking silly, everyone ends up looking cool.” She will be taking the Swap-a-rama party to Paris on Wednesday and hopefully to Glastonbury and Bestival on the Isle of Wight in the summer. Just watch who you’re standing next to when the bell rings.

Kalle Lasn, the head of the Canada-based organisation Adbusters, which he describes as “a bunch of culture jammers fighting back against consumer culture”, has been anticipating this consumer ennui for the past 15 years. In 1992, he came up with Buy Nothing Day, a concept that was first taken up in Britain. At the end of last year, groups in Manchester, Oxford and London performed a variety of prankster zaps, including entering shops and putting warning stickers on products such as “Put me down, I won’t bring you happiness” and “Why bother? I’ll be obsolete in six months.”

Lasn says that there are three kinds of modern antimaterialists: the greens, the reds and the blues. The greens buy less for obvious reasons. The reds are “radical political types who realise that the never-ending war on terror is about the gulf between the rich and the poor”. Then there are the blues, who “might be on anti-depressants, finally realise they are stressed out by hyperactive consumer culture and stop for their own self-preservation”.

But are any of them having an effect? The answer is – sort of. Even if retail figures show no signs of slowing down, people are becoming more savvy about what they buy. Even fashion insiders are starting to admit the outrageous spending that goes into keeping up appearances is, well, slightly vulgar. Entre nous, they’ll tell you they still favour the Chloé satchel bag that came out more than five seasons ago over the latest model. To say nothing of the frenzy surrounding Anya Hindmarch’s limited-edition I’m Not a Plastic Bag bag, a £5 eco-friendly tote that she designed to encourage people against using plastic carriers.

“The marketing for bags is getting more and more cynical,” says one fashion magazine editor. “There never used to be two new bags per season. I don’t know many people who own Balenciaga clothes, but I know lots of people who have a Balenciaga bag.”

She still finds it “a bit strange that people will spend £2,000 on a bag”. A pair of vintage Terry de Havilland platforms, or a second-hand Yves Saint Laurent dress, is far more likely to excite fashionable ladies such as Sienna Miller or Chloë Sevigny than a bit of new froth from a designer store.

You know you’re in the vanguard of a zeitgeist shift when even the professional trend forecasters are muscling in on the act. Trendwatching.com has identified a new consumer tribe, the “transumer”, a pleasure-seeker who spends money in a totally different way from previous generations. Transumers, say the consumer visionaries, have a short attention span, get bored easily, favour experiences over possessions and worry that permanent ownership might become synonymous with hassle and boredom. They aspire to live as though they were constantly on holiday by dropping formality, escaping commitment and renting rather than buying, whether it’s a home, a car or even a new outfit. They’re catered to by the likes of www.bagborroworsteal.com and www.be-a-fashionista.co.uk, where, for a monthly fee, you can hire the latest handbag without having to buy it.

A transumer’s fantasy day would be to fly to Singapore or Japan to experience the latest “pop-up” shop – Comme des Garçons recently had a temporary Play Box store outside their shop in Aoyama, Japan – followed by lunch in a guerrilla restaurant that is open for only a few weeks, a spin in a rented Ferrari, sex with a casual fling, then a tapas dinner (one suspects that transumers pick at their food).

Transumerism is the ultimate commitment-free lifestyle – and its followers are opting out of the conventional consumer rat race just as much as the Freegans, the Swaparamists, the Freecyclers and the Church of Stop Shopping. The only downside is, now they’ve been officially identified as a marketing demographic, people will be queuing up to try and sell them something.

Times recommends

• Ask me about sex, not pay
• Culture clubbing
• Honor Blackman: Words from the wise