Growing up, I didn’t really care about the environment, let alone sustainable fashion. I cared about creativity and beauty, which led me to study fashion design at Parsons in New York. It’s only when I started studying and working in the industry that I noticed the problems behind the stage curtain. Fashion is the 2nd biggest industry most involved in modern slavery, and the environmental impact from excessive and inconsiderate production is appalling, to say the least.
I began my process of learning about it and eventually started changing my fashion habits. But even till today, information about the industry still shocks me when I talk to my friends who work closely in production or supply chain. If it’s hard for me to learn about this information, I always wonder – how does the average person who doesn’t work in the industry know about issues in it? And that everyone, as long as they wear clothes, has an impact on it?
If I, a recovered (recovering?) shopaholic and person of low self-discipline, can change my lifestyle habits and become more conscious of my fashion choices, many others can too. Some might not be in the position to do all these steps, but it is all about doing things at your own pace, in the context of your own circumstances. Here are some top tips on how to start dressing sustainably from my own personal experience – see if they might work for you too!
1. Learn about sustainable fashion
The first step to participating in sustainable fashion is learning about it. If you skip this step, it’s a bit like going on a hike without looking at a map, ever. You might be fine… but you might get lost? Making your closet more sustainable is about making conscious lifestyle decisions and pivoting the way you buy, keep and care for your clothes. If you don’t learn about why we should even care about sustainable fashion in the first place, it’d be very hard for you to participate effectively in a more sustainable way of dressing.
For a start, I have written another piece about what sustainable fashion means! I’ve tried to keep it simple and easy to understand. Check it out to learn more.
Next: watch The True Cost – this is like sustainable fashionista christening. If you don’t take away anything I write from this article – go check out this film! I remember when I first watched it, I made everyone I’m close to watch it, and I sat there and watched it with them. It is an engaging film that really tells you why the conversation about sustainable fashion is even important in the first place.
2. Buy secondhand!
After you’ve learned a bit more about why you should care about dressing sustainably, my first recommendation for you to ease into participating in sustainable dressing is choosing secondhand clothes.
Before we talk about secondhand, let’s talk about shiny new first-hand clothes. Even if it’s made of renewable materials, a new piece of clothing takes a lot of energy and resources to make. Just think about it, innocent-looking all-natural cotton t-shirt — boom, 2700 litres of water. That’s the amount of water needed to grow the cotton required for it, which is also how much one person drinks in two years. Cotton cultivation is also credited as the reason for the drying up of the Aral Sea.
This means when you really need a t-shirt, and you buy a secondhand instead of a firsthand – that’s the amount of water you’re saving.
Types of second hand fashion
There is a price point in secondhand for everyone, from thrift to designer consignment to costume vintage and luxury vintage. Secondhand garments come in many different forms. Personally, I love designer consignment stores and I hardly shop any other way for new clothes. I appreciate the design and quality of design clothing items, yet I wouldn’t be able to afford a lot of them at full price. By supporting secondhand, not only am I reducing my fashion footprint, I’m also saving money. Winning!
Maybe you are worried about bad luck in buying second clothing? A little bird told me if you hand wash your garment with soap and stroke it three times towards the left, bad luck goes away.
3. Support ethical and sustainable companies!
“Ethical” and “sustainable” are two words you will hear a lot of when learning about sustainable fashion. Ethical generally refers to people being treated fairly in the supply chain. Sustainable refers to the impact a garment or brand has on the environment.
Ideally you want to shop somewhere where the company’s impact on people and the planet are taken just as seriously. There are an increasing number of brands out there who are showing that doing that while creating stylish garments and making a profit is possible.
One of these brands is Veja – I have a pair of their shoes at home. Veja is a shoe brand started in 2003 by two French guys after they traveled around the world and saw the dark side of globalization – one incident they mentioned involved seeing a pretty clean and nice factory, but when they went to the workers’ living quarters, they see 30 or so people living in a 25m2 flat with a hole in the middle as a bathroom. They can’t believe what they saw. They started Veja after as they wanted to show an example of how a brand could operate successfully while employing dignified workers and using sustainable materials. So basically, Veja was started out of a quarter life crisis.
They had no fashion experience but with this mission in mind – they chose to use materials that are better for the planet and people and gave people dignified jobs for making their shoes. I love their website – a page titled “project”. It shows everything good they are doing as well as their limitations. See I think people aren’t looking for perfection, we just want brands to care and try.
One such material that Veja uses is natural rubber tapped in the amazon forests. Do you know that most rubber in our shoes are man made and are essentially made from the oil industry? By using natural rubber, they are using a natural renewable resource and also giving jobs to rubber tappers in the amazon. This is more expensive, but Veja spends very little on marketing and are able to price their shoes at a very reasonable and competitive pricing – similar to your regular big brand sneakers.
After growing their company for more than 15 years they’re now stocked at over 1800 retail outlets around the world! Veja is just one example of a sustainable fashion company – there are many other great ones.
4. Care for you garments well
Up to 82% of a garment’s energy use, 66% of its solid waste and over half of its emissions to air come from washing and drying clothes. Kate Fletcher, an amazing expert in the area of making fashion more sustainable, wrote this in her 2008 book Sustainable Fashion and Textiles.
There are three things you can do to reduce your impact through the way you care for them: 1) wash them less 2) wash them at low temperatures 3) avoid buying and washing synthetic materials that often
Obviously, items such as underwear and socks require washing after each wear, but clothes that don’t sit directly on our skin – such as jackets, coats and jeans – can be worn five or more times before needing a wash. Actually most times instead of following that rule I just do a smell test. That’s literally just smelling it. If it smells I throw it in the wash. So far I haven’t lost any boyfriends because of how I smell yet, probably because there are many other good reasons, so I think the smell test has been working fine for me so far.
Another thing is – wash on cold wash! Washing your clothes cold can reduce your energy use by up to 80%. When you wash your items in hot water, most energy used in the machine goes towards heating up water. Plus, washing clothes cold also reduces the damage done to your clothes.
Last but not least when it comes to washing plastic fiber items such as polyester or nylon, each time you do it 1,900 micro fibres are released into the ocean per item. So wash these less, choose handwash over machine wash, and also just buy less of them.
5. Wear what you already have and shop less
This is the easiest yet the hardest to do, and it is wearing what you have, people! You don’t have to spend extra money, you don’t have to do any research, you just need to do the brave thing of wearing the same thing twice to the office. Or three times, or ten times.
Have you ever stood in front of your overflowing closet and thought – I’ve got nothing to wear! I get it, and I am still baffled by the science behind it. How could someone look at a closet of over 100 items and say they have nothing to wear?
But the truth is, wearing what you have is actually the single best way to reduce your impact on the environment through your clothing choices.
Lots of sustainable brands will say they aren’t going to ask people to shop less as a way of participating in sustainable fashion. But I mean, of course they’re going to say that… They make money off you buying their clothes! It’s great that some brands are providing better fashion options, but ultimately, every fashion purchase, no matter how sustainable, has an impact. So the less you buy, the less impact you have. Simple math.
It’s not easy, it takes a mindset switch. You don’t need to stop all clothes shopping, but just chill out on it. And maybe next time when you really feel a buying itch, and you’ve already gone through tip #2 and #3, instead of buying clothes, buy a massage session or a book. Why not?
That’s all I have for now on 5 ways to get you started on your sustainable fashion journey. There are quite a few other ways but these are good places to start. Are you ready to come along? What else have you tried that worked? Let me know!
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