It is no secret that the fashion industry, along with fast fashion trends, is a large issue, negatively contributing to global warming, pollution, and ever-growing landfills. Deciding that you want to make a change to your wardrobe to make it more sustainable is a great first step!
The difficulty comes with trying to figure out how to build a sustainable wardrobe that’ll not only help the environment, but also still allow you to express yourself how you want to. This guide will provide some useful tips and advice on building a sustainable wardrobe, covering the core concepts, and highlighting sustainable practices.
What is a Sustainable Wardrobe?
A sustainable wardrobe is when your selection of clothes, shoes, and other wearable items minimises the impact on the environment. There are several ways of making a wardrobe be more sustainable, such as investing in high-quality, properly caring for your clothes, and making use of your entire wardrobe instead of just a small portion.
By implementing just a few small changes, you’ll be well on your way to creating a more sustainable wardrobe. It doesn’t have to be complicated.
Tips to Building a Sustainable Wardrobe
Buy High-Quality Clothing Items
One of the easiest ways to create a more sustainable wardrobe is by only buying higher-quality clothes. While higher quality clothing can be a lot pricier than the cheap alternatives, the increased quality of materials and how it is produced, makes high-quality clothing much more durable, and last for a longer time.
So in the long-run, buying one piece of clothing at a higher quality is likely to save you money, compared to buying several cheaper, less robust, items of clothing.
An added benefit of this is that if you spend more money on a high-quality piece of clothing that you really like, you will be able to wear and enjoy that item for longer.
Finding High-Quality Clothing
One of the easiest ways to start finding higher-quality clothing to build out your sustainable wardrobe with is to pay more attention to clothing labels. The labels on clothes will contain a large amount of information, such as where they were produced and the materials it is made from.
A good rule of thumb is if a piece of clothing is made from materials such as polyurethane, as opposed to natural materials such as wool or cotton, then it is likely to have been mass-produced cheaply.
Another easy way to find higher quality clothing is to look at a brand’s website, as it is usually easy to tell whether sustainable clothing is a priority for them or not.
Buy Trans-Seasonal Clothing
A sure fire way to reduce the number of clothes you buy, is to buy high-quality clothing that can be worn across multiple seasons. The core concept around this is to buy clothing that is versatile, and that can be combined and layered with other clothing to create new looks and match the weather and season.
Examples of trans-seasonal clothing items include:
- Jeans
- T-shirts
- Dresses
- Jackets
By implementing more trans-seasonal clothing, you can dramatically increase how sustainable your wardrobe is. If you’re struggling on how to combine trans-seasonal clothing together, there are plenty of guides you can follow online.
Take Care of Your Clothes
It sounds simple, but it is often the simple things that are the most-effective. While buying high-quality clothing will naturally make them last longer, taking a bit of care with your clothing can help to prolong its lifespan.
Some easy to implement tips to prolong the life of your clothes are:
- Use cold, eco-friendly wash cycles on your washing machine
- Quickly treat any stains while they’re fresh
- Iron your clothes when they’re damp
- Avoid drying your clothes in direct sunlight
- Don’t overwash your clothing
- Try to fix any small rips immediately, before they grow in size and become unfixable
Find Sustainable Brands You Like
Be on the lookout for sustainable clothing brands that create clothing that you like. By finding and sticking with brands that are proven to take sustainability seriously, you can build up a repertoire of places to buy new clothing from when the time comes.
When you first start out trying to build a more sustainable wardrobe, you are likely to not know many eco-friendly brands. But as you do more research and take note of brands you like, you’ll gradually build up a list of your go-to places.
Ask Yourself How Many Times You’ll Wear It
An easy way to help build a more sustainable wardrobe is to ask yourself how many times you’ll wear a piece of clothing before you buy it. According to The Wall Street Journal, on average, only 20% of our clothing is worn on a regular basis.
By asking yourselves how much you’ll wear an item of clothing before you buy it, you can reduce the amount of clothing that’ll exclusively be used for one-off occasions, and rarely see the light of day.The #30wears campaign is a campaign for driving more awareness around clothing sustainability. The main premise of the campaign is if you can say that you would wear an item of clothing more than 30 times, then it is a sustainable clothing purchase.
Teach Yourself How to Repair Your Clothes
Teaching yourself to repair small holes and tears in your own clothes is an easy way to contribute towards building a more sustainable wardrobe. While it can seem intimidating for those who have never used a thread and needle before, a basic stitch can be learnt quite quickly.
There is a vast amount of video guides online that you can use to learn, and doing so means you can prolong the life of some of your favourite items of clothing, rather than throwing them away.
Don’t Throw Away Unwanted Clothing
Even by trying to be more sustainable with your clothing, there will come a time when it is time to declutter your wardrobe and get rid of items of clothing that you no longer want. Instead of throwing these items away, you can bring them to charity shops, or services that exchange clothes for cash.
By doing so, your unwanted clothing can be sorted and shipped to struggling communities, creating a whole new lease on life for the clothing you no longer want or need. And in the case of cash for clothing businesses, you can also make a little extra money too, a win-win!
Support Sustainable Brands
When needing to shop for new items, buying from sustainable brands means you are supporting companies who care about the ethics and sustainability of their products. This discourages unethical practices, as fashion brands will feel more inclined to improve their practices in order to appeal to customers.
Take Care of Clothes Responsibly
We can all do our part to help fight fast fashion and promote sustainable and ethical practices, this can be done by:
Upcycle Your Unwanted Clothes For Cash Today
If you’re in the middle of decluttering your wardrobe from clothes or shoes you no longer want, then Worth Its Weight can help. We provide cash in-hand for your unwanted clothing, and pass it on to communities in need, where your old clothing will massively help someone who needs it.
All you need to do is bag up your unwanted clothes, and bring them to your nearest Worth Its Weight branch. Once you’re there, our friendly team will weigh and sort through your clothing, and give you cash based on the total weight.
