Sustainability: Slow Fashion

Since being minimalist I have also (inadvertently) been following ‘Slow Fashion’, but what actually is Slow Fashion and why should you look at trying to incorporate it into your shopping habits?

20-30 years ago most clothes were made locally and only had two seasons; autumn/winter and spring/summer. Fast fashion is the term used for the speeding up of this schedule, where now new clothes and trends are being added as often as every two weeks. If you add that to the fact that clothing is being sold so cheaply, many people are starting to see clothing as disposable and short term. This means that in many factories the priority is who can make the clothing the fastest and the cheapest, not about the workers’ rights, wages or working conditions. There is always someone paying the price for that cheap item of clothing.

This also leads to huge environmental pollution too. With that much material being made and disposed of (more than 300,000 tonnes of clothing goes to landfill every year in the UK alone according to Wrap, the waste charity) we are harming our planet. As it stands fashion is the third-highest polluting industry in the world and according to a 2016 McKinsey report, three-fifths of all clothing items will end up in an incinerator or landfill within one year of them having been produced.

To put the environmental impact of fast fashion further into perspective, it takes 700 gallons of water to make one t-shirt – just one! And then there are also all the toxins in the pesticides used when growing the fabric as well as the ones in the dye that’s used. Approximately 2,000 different chemicals are used in textile processing, yet only 16 have been approved by the Environmental Protection Agency. Once you then add in the fact that it has been shipped halfway around the world to get to the store you’re in you start to see that one t-shirt has a huge footprint, so you need to ask yourself; do you really need that item?

Now, I’m not here to judge! Neither am I claiming to be a perfect individual, as I am definitely not.

Sustainable clothing from sustainable brands are out of my price range, especially the children’s clothes as they grow so quickly. If you’ve been around here a while then you’ll know I do my best to get all our family’s clothes secondhand but sometimes there are things I cannot find or get ‘preloved’ and as I cannot afford to buy them sustainably I get what we really need first hand, from supermarkets mostly (underwear, socks, plain ladies t-shirts and leggings are the most common culprits).

This post is meant to inspire you to start looking at your clothing, make you aware of where your clothes come from, and encourage you to make better, more mindful decisions in the future. I really recommend watching the documentary The True Cost on Netflix for more information and facts on the cost of the fashion industry.

Steps to Slow Fashion

1. Buy less. Obvious, but it can be hard to change lifelong habits.
2. Take care of the clothes you already have. Learning how to wash and dry them in order to keep them in the best condition is a simple yet effective tool.
3. Repair or mend an item when you can, don’t just bin it.
4. If you need a new item work out exactly what you need (size, style, colour, etc) and look secondhand first.
5. Consider getting a colour palette for your wardrobe so that all of your clothes match and can be worn in many different ways, reducing the number of clothing items you need.
6. Shop your wardrobe. Take all your clothes out of your wardrobe regularly and make sure you wear them all. You don’t want great pieces getting lost in a crazy big wardrobe.

I do hope that this post has given you an insight into what Slow Fashion is and why it’s important.

Where are your favourite places to buy preloved items? We regularly use Facebook Marketplace, the Vinted app and visit charity shops.

Livvy and Summer