Building a proper wardrobe is like building a home. Indeed, you should think of it like a home, because it is something you’re going to live in. It must be comfortable and suit all your needs.
Edith Head
Ten Ways to a More Ethical Wardrobe
Most of us would like to have a more ethical wardrobe. Most of us don’t. It’s not a case of active ill will, or even apathy – it’s a matter of not knowing where to start. Or what to do.
After all, clothes don’t come with labels saying how many toxic chemicals were used in their manufacture, or how many hours of unsafe, underpaid or even forced labour went into their production.
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Which makes it hard to know whether the item you are buying is supporting people who desperately need the work, or taking advantage of their desperation to effectively transform them into your outsourced slaves.
Which is why it was not only informative but invigorating to read Lucy Siegle’s book To Die For: Is Fashion Wearing Out the World? Because she not only points out the problems, but suggests a few solutions. I’ve collated ten of them here for your consideration.
1: choose your fibres carefully. Production, useful life, disposal. Some man-made fibres are actually less unfriendly to the environment in production than, say, cotton; but on the flip side your grandchildren’s grandchildren will be cold in their graves and the stuff still won’t have rotted down. I recommend Siegle’s book for a more in-depth analysis of the pros and cons of various fibres. Organic cotton and wool are two of the better options.
2: mend. Siegle suggests putting aside 10% of your clothing budget for mending; you get more Little Old Lady points if you do the mending yourself. Personally, I take my shoes to a cobbler for resoling and mends (considerably cheaper than a new pair of good shoes), but I try to do other mending myself – buttons, hems, darning…
3: buy second hand. Alas, the nature of fast-fashion means that the quality of second-hand clothing is considerably lower than it once was: if you expect people to move on to something new after two or three wearings, there’s no need to make the item durable. Not to mention that if you’re a sweatshop worker paid by the item, there’s a lot of pressure to construct the garment quickly, not well. Still, good items can be found, they just take a bit more finding than they used to.
4: swap. Either casually, among friends (it helps to have friends of similar taste and/or size) or at an organized swap. As with buying second-hand, it gives the garment a useful second life, rather than consigning it to the dump.
5: make your own. I was delighted to read Siegle’s line, “In many ways knitting is the perfect cornerstone for the burgeoning ethical fashion movement.” I can knit my own socks, hats, gloves and so forth; my next big batch of skills to be acquired is learning how to sew my own clothes. Obviously, this is a long-term, take-it-a-step-at-a-time proposition. Still, the freedom inherent in being able to decide for yourself what cloth, cut and colour you want, instead of being forced to choose from a limited number of options, is very alluring.
6: launder carefully. We tend to forget that some of a garment’s eco-impact is neither in its birth nor in its death, but in its life with us. Wash your clothes in cold water, air-dry where possible, and don’t wash your clothes unless they actually need it. (You don’t need to launder a garment just because it’s touched your body. Unless you have some sort of oozing skin disease…) Avoid dry-cleaning too, if you can – the ‘perc‘ which is most commonly used in dry-cleaning is not only carcinogenic but neurotoxic. And in any case, most things marked ‘dry clean only’ do not explode in a ball of flames if you gently hand-wash them.
7: re-use materials. One garment can be refashioned into another. A sheet can become a dress. A pair of jeans can embark on a second life as a skirt. A hideous knitted monstrosity from the op-shop can be unravelled for the wool and reknitted into something much more appealing. (Unless it’s glittery mohair. Not much can be done about that.)
8: buy from ethical brands. This takes a fair bit of digging, as nothing pleases the corporate pocket-book more than marketing to the fair-minded without actually putting their money where their mouth is, but happily there are those who will do some of the digging for you. Baptist World Aid’s Ethical Fashion Guide is compiled for the Australian market, but globalization being what it is, people from all over will find it useful.
9: move slowly. Don’t allow yourself to be rushed into purchases, either by lack of planning (hole in the last good pair of socks!) or by cunning marketing ploys. Do your due diligence. Plan ahead. Savour the pleasures of anticipation. Don’t buy anything unless you’re sure that you’re making a good decision, one that you’ll be happy with tomorrow (and all the years to come).
10: consume less. As Dame Vivienne Westwood says, “Buy less. Choose well. Make it last. Quality, not quantity. Everybody’s buying far too many clothes.” Wearing the same things over and over again is not a penance when each item is something you love, something which tells the world a bit about who you are, something that is a pleasure to wear.
Lucy Siegle writes at the end of To Die For, “Free of the constraints of endless consumption, you can have a wardrobe that is more sustainable, more valuable, more enduring and more you.”
Doesn’t that sound wonderful? If you’re anything like me, there’s a fair way to go yet, but we can get there – one step at a time.
Dresses, Whole Dresses, and Nothing But Dresses
I made the decision: I’m moving to a dress-only wardrobe. Separates: farewell.
This isn’t due to some profound philosophical or metaphysical principle, it just makes simple sense. Over half of my wardrobe is dresses anyway, and I find myself increasingly irritated the other half of the time by the fuss of finding skirt, top, and more than likely under- and over-layers which will all work with each other.
I could, of course, have just formed them into regimented ‘outfits’: this top always with this skirt, etc etc, but frankly, that defeats the whole purpose of separates, viz: that you can mix and match. I always found there was rather more mixing than matching going on, and it was a sore trial to my overdeveloped sense of aesthetics. I had the eye for it, but I didn’t have the wardrobe for it.
For some time now I have been dreaming of a simplicity of wardrobe akin to that of the Caped Gooseberry: every day he wears a collared shirt, trousers, and as many warm layers as are required to reach the point marked x. Amount of thinking required: virtually nil. (At least until he married a woman who insisted that colour be taken into account. Maroon, for example, should not be worn with pale green. I do not think I am being unreasonable in this matter. After all, I have to look at him more often than he does.)
The problem is that dressing as a woman is not the same thing as dressing as a man. (I do not wish to dress as a man. I don’t have the figure for it, for a start.) Men can buy a pair of trousers which will quietly go along with every shirt they own, and do so for years at a time. Women’s garments seem intended to be attention-grabbers every one, each piece struggling to upstage the others. If you want something more neutral, it is pretty well guaranteed to be black, unless you luck out and find something grey. And even then, it is intended to be worn for a year or two at most, after which it will die the death of planned obsolescence, so you have to go and buy some more. I can’t be having with this.
Admittedly, part of the problem is that I am very choosy about my clothes. I want them to be of a colour that suits me, in a style that I like, and of a fabric that breathes. I don’t wear see-through clothing (defeats the point of getting dressed), or polyester (plastic has its uses, but clothing should not be one of them), or short skirts, or frills, and I definitely don’t subscribe to the view that if you wear a long skirt you’ve got to ‘balance’ it by showing more skin up top, as though women owe the world a certain proportion of their surface area.
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Imagine what the world would look like if men who wore ankle-length trousers had to wear shirts which only buttoned half-way up. (Sorry. Would you like some bleach for your mind’s eye?) And if they chose to rebel and wear a shirt which buttoned all the way up, people would assume they suffered from low self-esteem…
Back to the dresses, however. Having all these criteria does make it rather hard to find clothes, particularly on a budget. I can’t remember the last time I bought anything in a shop, other than an underlayer. It simply doesn’t seem worth looking any more, since everything I find is either of poor quality, a colour or style I don’t like, or too expensive. Or all of the above. I have long been a fan of second-hand shopping, but it’s getting harder to find what I’m looking for there, too. I try to shop like a tiger, but all too often these days I shop like a tiger in a tofu warehouse.
As much as I like the idea of wearing, say, an elegant Thirties-style suit, such things are not to be had for the asking. They Don’t Make Them Like They Used To. And people would be more likely to notice that I was wearing basically the same clothes every day, than they would if a man did it. (This man, for example.)
Elsa Schiaparelli said a woman should never be afraid to be seen in her suit too often, but then, that was eighty years ago. Anyway, do I really want to take clothing advice from a woman famous for the shoe hat and the lobster dress, whose signature colour was shocking pink, a colour I would walk over hot coals to avoid wearing?
So, the dresses. As Hoda Kotb said, “I usually go for a dress. No matching involved. I am bad at matching! I like easy and when you’re done, it looks like a second skin. I wear dresses every day for that reason. It’s easy!” Easy is simple. Dresses still allow for plenty of variety, of course. A light, flowy summer dress; a dress of tailored wool for winter… And of course you can add warm layers, which only have to go with the dress, rather than two or more other pieces.
Mistake me not: this is not to say that I’m going through my wardrobe and chucking out everything that isn’t a dress. In the first place, I tend to wear my clothes until they die of extreme old age, and in the second place, I don’t have sufficient dresses to manage year round. Yet. As always, it’s a work in progress. But at least now I have an idea of what I’m aiming for.
Have you been hankering for greater simplicity in your wardrobe? What steps are you taking? I’d love to hear!