5 Best Practices for Building a Sustainable Wardrobe (that feels like YOU!)
This pandemic started right as we were putting away our big winter coats, and now the pendulum of the seasons is swinging back in the other direction. This time of year always encourages me to take a look at my closet and give it a good going-over, and despite the circumstances, this year is no different.
In September, I took on a project where I intentionally Got Dressed everyday, and tried to not re-wear the same item of clothing more than once a week. This was an idea sparked by Lizzy Hadfield over at Shot From The Street, and it has certainly helped me appreciate the depth and breadth of my wardrobe. Then I documented these daily outfits in my Instagram stories. Zoomed out, I am quite pleased with what I see:
A person who has developed a sense of what makes her feel good when she gets dressed.
My core guideline when putting together an outfit is to have one element vintage, one element masculine, and one element feminine. These can double up - for instance, a vintage mechanics jumpsuit with a pair of heeled clogs. And they can be subtle - oversized button-down, Chucks, and a pair of high waisted jeans that subtly accentuate my curves. I have found that I just feel most like myself when I have all of these boxes checked. This androgyny feels like an anomaly within the slow fashion community. So many beautiful accounts feature almost entirely flowy linen dresses, voluminous silhouettes, or fairytale-inspired outfits. I respect the hell outta anyone who has dialed in their aesthetic and stuck to it - but that twirly stuff ain’t for me most days. Give me selvedge or give me death.
The other thing that I noticed is that I really freaking love my clothes. Most of them.
Last week, as the temperatures started to shift out of the mid-80s, I took everything out of my closet and dresser drawers, threw them in piles on my bed, and wrote out, by hand, every item that I own. Including workout wear, pajamas, socks and underwear. I do these full inventories at least once a year so that I can take stock of the condition of pieces that get worn more, or do a gut-check on an item that hasn’t been worn since the last inventory. Why has it stayed in the drawer? Does it not fit right? Does it not suit my lifestyle anymore? Does it just make me feel icky? If for any of those reasons I choose to let go of a piece, I then decide whether it’s worth the effort to try and resell it, or donate it. The pile this season was epic. As the seasons have changed, so has my understanding of what I want to do with my life, how I want to shape my career, and what sorts of clothes will help me best do that. My office intern outfits? In the pile. My business-casual pants? In the pile. Basically, if it’s not a job I can do in jeans and a blazer, I probably am not in the right room.
What I am most proud of during this inventory process and the documentation of my outfits is the abundance of vintage, secondhand, and sustainable fashion. With a very, very few exceptions, my entire wardrobe is comprised of pieces I have found in thrift stores, on resale apps, or saved up for to purchase directly from a slow fashion company. The ability to see something I desire and then scour the internet for exactly what I want for sale secondhand may be one of my favorite super-powers. If you have your heart set on something, chances are, somebody else is already tired of it. The exception here, is of course the big names in slow fashion. Which is, of course, the point of slow fashion: buy something beautifully made and keep it forever and ever. That being said, there are plenty of resources for finding those niche brand pieces at a discount because they lived at someone else’s house first.
Here are my top tips for building a sustainable and secondhand wardrobe that isn’t all linen dresses:
Find your style archetype
I use Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, and even movies and TV to figure out who it is that I want to dress like. It’s rarely a tooth-to-toe replication of a look, but rather identifying elements that appeal to me for a particular season or mood. For instance, this autumn, Yorkshire farmers are a huge part of my autumn aesthetic. Does this mean I’m going to wear a shredded Macintosh, trousers covered in cow poo, and my giant field-tromping boots everyday? No of course not! But it does mean that I am inspired by functional, sturdy, well-constructed clothing that is designed to be worn outdoors. I’m moving to the front of my closet lots of tweed, wool, and waxed cotton.
Do your research
Once you know what you want to look like, you get to do a bit of shopping. Put your wallet away, though, because the first step in shopping is figuring out who makes what you want. If you decide that the pieces you are looking for must be purchased new, it is essential to identify the designers and brands that are going to be worth your money. Everybody has their own metrics for value, and I recommend you spend some time thinking about all the things that create value for you in a garment, and then picking maybe the top two or three that you want to underpin your shopping list. For me, I insist that my new pieces be purchased from brands that are transparent and committed to sustainable sourcing, ethical production, and environmentally conscious packaging. (There are so few brands that meet all of these standards that I find myself purchasing secondhand most of the time. The most sustainable item of clothing is the one that already exists!) In the last few years, more and more brands have put these values at the core of their branding in response to consumer pressure to be more transparent. Don’t let anybody ever tell you that your actions don’t matter - fashion is dramatically shifting and it’s because you give a damn. If in your research you discover that the item you’re most drawn to happens to be from a brand with a less-than-stellar record, now it’s time to go to the mattresses - er, resell apps - and find it secondhand. Vote with your dollars!
Identify your search keywords
Since we’re not doing much thrifting these days, it’s important to have these stylistic elements sort of imprinted in your retinas so that you can scroll through the internet without having to click on every single listing to find that one sweater. Having a set of search terms can narrow that field dramatically. For instance, if you’re looking for a particular camel-colored coat, entering a specific brand and style name will certainly keep you from scrolling through 400,000 listings under “Coats & Jackets” on eBay. But also search for brand + color, brand + “coat”, or color + coat, coat + color + material. And get creatively simplistic. Imagine you’re a reseller who gets bulk lots and just lists what they find without doing much research on the individual brands or pieces. If you didn’t know that this particular brand and style of coat was highly coveted, how would you list it? “Heavy tan coat?” “Tan winter trench?” I’ve scored some major deals because somebody didn’t know what they were holding. (Thank you and I’m so sorry for taking advantage of you!)
Watch it and save for later
In the last few years, most reselling sites have incorporated the ability for sellers to make offers of lower prices or reduced shipping rates to individual buyers. If they see you’re interested but haven’t clicked “buy,” they might sweeten the pot for you. These sites also make it possible for the buyer to send the seller an offer, but I very rarely find that my offers are accepted. Maybe 2 out of 5. If you do make an offer, DO NOT LOW-BALL. It is so rude to offer $20 for a $100 listing, it wastes everybody’s time, and is so skeezy. Don’t do it. This step also puts the breaks on impulse purchasing! By forcing yourself to wait for a moment before adding to cart, you’re short-circuiting your brain’s urge to satisfy cravings immediately to get that rush of dopamine that we get from instant gratification. It’s not sustainable - neither the feeling nor the rate of consumption.
Double check that this is really a necessary purchase
This is why we do inventories. When you know what you have, you’re less likely to buy something you don’t need. Having a simplified, capsule wardrobe obviously makes this a lot more straightforward because you have so few items in your closet. But even if you have a slightly fuller wardrobe, it is important to know why you feel like you need Another Sweater. My outfit documenting project helped me understand this, too. I learned just how many white t-shirts I really do have, and got to ask myself whether that was too many. And I could clearly see as I made my list and took the daily pictures that there were items that I reached for simply because I didn’t have what I really wanted. There were certain looks where the effect I was trying to achieve was missed because I didn’t have a particular shape or color to meet the need. Obviously, I don’t need one of everything, but when I have so streamlined what it is that I like to wear, I can pretty much say that it is a good idea to have a particular item in (at the very least) both black and white. In my sweater drawer, I’ve got black, black, grey, grey, fair isle, and tan, but I discovered that the white/cream sweater just doesn’t fit me. So I identified a secondhand alternative that is, as it turns out, the off-white version of one of my black sweaters. If it ain’t broke…
Knowing your closet is a powerful feeling!
Knowing that it is sustainable, ethical, slow, and secondhand is supercharged.
Knowing that you can reach into your closet every day and Feel Like Yourself is absolutely magic.
See what’s inspiring me this season or shop my closet!
