Sustainable Fashion

Lately its fair to say that the fashion industry until very recently hasn’t been vey sustainable. The world is drowning with clothes and textiles. I want y’all to take a moment to imagine how your closet looks, how many t-shirts do you have? Well few months back when I looked into mine, I had more than 100 t-shirts- yes they were of different style, colours but yet I struggled every morning putting on an outfit. I’m sure most of y’all can relate to “I have nothing to wear.”

Compared to our parents, we have four times more clothes in our closet. The problem in the fashion industry starts from the fact that its based on a linear fashion model, so today about 75% of garment wastage go into landfills due to the fact that there isn’t a lot of ways of reusing the fabrics we are currently working with. 

73% of the linear model is based on Take, Make, Waste economy which means that we take from our environment with no second thoughts, we make new fabrics and we don’t appreciate those who manually make it and then we wear it for max five times and throw it. 

There are basic 5 R’s of sustainable- Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Recycle

1. Refuse- Learning to say no to impulsive buying. Learning to say no to buying things only because they are cheap. Learning to buy things because they are in style. 

1. Reduce- Reducing the amount of clothes you buy. Ask yourself do I “need" it “Do I have something similar to this?” 

1. Reuse- Wear the clothes more often. For the environmental cost of that one item of clothing took, you need to wear it at least 30 times.

1. Repairing- This basically means up cycling the clothes that you have in your closet. Or if a particular item doesn’t fit you- alter the item. Instead of keeping it in the closet and buying another one. There are many ways to creatively up cycle the clothing. 

1. Recycle- Recycling your clothes should be the last option. Instead what you can do is try finding a home for the clothes, have closet clearances or try reselling it. Make sure that, that clothing item gets used because once you donate those clothes there is no guarantee that, that item is not going to end up in the landfill. As the donation centre gets a lot of clothes huge amount of clothing, they end up sending a lot of it to the landfill. 

Buying second hand is the most environmentally friendly way as you are to contributing to the production of new item. There are so many thrift stores online in India now a days.

“Buy less. Choose well. Make it last.”