Achieving a 'Sustainable Wardrobe'

(the nautical knot dress that now resides in the 'to refashion' pile)

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about, and working towards, a better functioning and more sustainable wardrobe. I once read a statistic that women generally wear 80% of their clothing 20% of the time, and 20% of their clothing 80% of the time. I reckon that many of us can relate to finding a large selection of clothes when we open our cupboards and drawers, but still we tend to put on the same handful of things again and again. I also read (possibly in this book) that women today own on average twice as many items of clothing as women did in the 1980s. Do women nowadays need twice as many clothes? I can't imagine so. I can't see that we have double the social or familial roles, for example, that may require so many more outfit options. I don't think that owning twice as many tops as our mums did at our age makes us happier, or makes it easier for us to get dressed in the morning.

These two statistics I mentioned above come to my mind a lot and feature greatly in the my personal definition of a 'sustainable wardrobe'. I want to reach a point where I wear 80% of my clothes 80% of the time! And for that to be possible, I'll probably need to pare down to an amount of garments that a 1980s lady would be more used to having (but NOT the styles!). So here's what a 'sustainable wardrobe' means to me, and how I plan to achieve these goals:

• Clearing out clothing that I definitely won't wear again

• Actually wearing the clothes that I like and that fits me

• Mending, altering and refitting the clothes that I like but I don't currently wear

• Choosing future sewing projects that will be worn regularly

(the nautical sundress that also now awaits the refashioning treatment)

Clearing out clothing that I definitely won't wear again:

This always sounds like it's going to be easy, doesn't it?! But it's amazing the emotional attachments we develop with our clothing, especially if we made the damn thing ourselves. When you've chosen the fabric, painstakingly cut everything out and stitched every single stitch yourself, the investment of time and money you put into that garment can make the ties very strong, even if we know that we're not going to wear it again. However, I've managed to be pretty brutal in this area recently. Admittedly, some of the stuff has gone to the half-way house of the refashioning/remaking pile if I think that the fabric can be salvaged for something else. 

I know that for some people, being surrounded by lots of stuff makes them feel secure, but for me it can feel claustrophobic. Having less stuff makes me feel unencumbered and freer to take advantage of whatever life may offer me, including on the very practical level of being able to move house/city/country easier if that is what I choose to do. 

I must also admit, that the concept of owning lots of 'stuff', including clothing, that you rarely use feels really uncomfortably 'hoard-y' and selfish to me. I can't help but associate a greedy, childish 'mine' kind of mentality to this behaviour that I feel is really damaging to society, as well as to the environment which cannot support the accelerated levels of manufacture required for the excessive acquisition of products. To donate my unworn, me-made clothing to charity shops (whether they are then deemed appropriate for resale so that others can buy and enjoy them, or if they then get sold on as rag to be shredded, processed and recycled), can be hard but also cleansing.

Actually wearing the clothes that I like and that fits me:

Thinking about going through what garments I have, finding new outfit combination to wear it in, and then actually wearing it, as part of sustainable approach to clothing dawned on me embarrassingly recently. I was getting caught up in what I didn't wear and what I might make to wear, and had somehow forgot to concentrate some attention to what I already have to wear. Wow, did I feel stupid!

I don't expect to able to wear 100% of my wardrobe 100% of the time. There is my wedding dress, some special occasion/fancy clothes, and some very seasonally-specific clothes that realistically have very limited usage. But everything else needs to worn semi-regularly to earn its keep. I recently started wearing my corazones rockabilly blouse (pictured above) more often, and it has received an insane amount of compliments at the playgroups! Not that my aim was to garner compliments, but of course it is nice!

Challenges like Me-Made-May are great for prodding us into wearing the (specifically, self-stitched) clothes that we have but often forget about. Bringing those practices into the rest of the year is what I'm trying to do now.

(the Mimi blouse that I recently made a little looser around the upper arms)

Mending, altering and refitting the clothes that I like but I don't currently wear:

This usually the most boring one, isn't it? My personal trick is to do one altering or mending task in between every 'started from scratch' sewing project. That's the only way I can rev up the motivation. Oh, that and by telling myself that I'm pleasing the Sewing Gods by fixing something that's a bit off. Then hopefully they will, in turn, bless me with a successful subsequent 'from scratch' sewing project!

It sounds perverse, doesn't it, to prefer to start a new sewing project, and invest all the time and effort that that will entail, rather than setting aside half an hour to fix something that I've already invested heaps of time and effort into? Tell me I'm not alone! It reminds me of a friend we had called Max back when we lived in Barcelona. She hated the flat she lived in and was always moaning about her flatmates. But she admitted that she would rather moved countries than find somewhere the other side of town and go to the effort of moving in to it.  

(the recently completed sailboat raincoat which I wore every day last week)

Choosing future sewing projects that will be worn regularly:

Possibly the most fun of all the aspects of creating a 'sustainable wardrobe', as I see it. I've already talked about my own personal sewing projects that I have a good idea will actually get worn in my nippy weather sewing plans post. As we get older, (hopefully) we get more of a sense of who we are and how we want to present ourselves to the world. And specifically to clothing, what we like to wear and what suits us (colours, silhouettes, fits, fabrics, textures, fibres) tends to 'stabilise' and not swing violently from one trend to another, or perhaps one subcultural identity to another. Obviously, people's taste continue to evolve, often in response to if not a reflection of popular culture. But slowly and occasionally adding to and updating a wardrobe with new pieces (shop-bought or self-made, or both) has got to be a more sustainable way to go about dressing than reinventing yourself every year or few months, as many teenagers (myself included!) are prone to do.

This isn't meant to come across as an attack on the youth, however! Learning who you are through the prism of how you dress is an essential phase that everyone must and should go through, I would argue. But having come out the other side of that experimental period, it makes planning sewing projects that are likely to get worn regularly much easier.


I would LOVE to know what your thoughts are on creating a 'sustainable wardrobe'. What would be your ideal selection of clothing? What motivations effect what you make/buy? How often do you purge the things you don't wear? Do you enjoy a large selection of clothes, or does it annoy you?