The burying and burning secrets are out. A culture shift is happening as individuals and groups respond in various ways to reducing fashion waste and creating a more sustainable clothing culture. We all have capacity to change and influence behaviours when we believe in something and are comfortable to defy convention and conditioning.
Evidence continues to mount that we are overusing resources, indulging in wasteful consumption, polluting our atmosphere and oceans with CO2 and plastic. As individuals we can influence change through more responsible purchasing decisions, while we wait (sometimes in vain) for national governments to adopt sensible policy.
Sustainable and slow clothing opportunities in three states: Jane Milburn with Ana at Parkes New South Wales workshop, speaking at Revive Brisbane in Queensland, and with La Vergne Lehmann in Victoria.
There are plenty of causes to join: National Recycling Week, National Op Shop Week, Buy Nothing New Month, War on Waste, Fashion Revolution, Curing Affluenza, Minimalism, 1 Million Women and Plastic-Free July. They all have in common changing behaviour and buying habits for the good of ourselves and the planet.
Through Textile Beat, I’ve been engaged in three states where local governments are responding from a waste minimisation perspective. Queensland’s capital city Brisbane hosted pop-up second-hand fashion festival Revive for the third year, Gympie Art Gallery hosted a Slow Garment Conversation and Tambo a Slow Fashion weekend. In Victoria, the Ballarat region hosted a Sustainable Fashion Week organised by Grampians Central West Waste and Resource Recovery Group as a can-do celebration of thrifting and creative reuse of textiles to keep them out of landfill. And in New South Wales, Parkes Shire hosted clothes transformation sessions using kitchen waste and simple sewing techniques, while waste company JJ Richards supported slow clothing sessions in Taree and Parkes. These sessions are all about upcycling as an environmental act to transform existing clothes or dormant fabric into garments to suit our needs. The rewards are changed thinking about your wardrobe needs, creative action through a sense of achievement, adventure and fun.
These actions reflect a move to indie personal style – individual and independent – that operates independent of fashion trends and conventional supply chains. It is based on careful collection over time, not buying on sales, enjoying thrifty preloved and reflecting the true you.
People get that the easy availability of cheap fashion made from synthetic fibres has led to increased consumption, exploitation, waste and pollution. It has also led to deskilling and loss of knowledge about how clothes are made.
Mending is now trending, even though it is often cheaper and easier to toss and replace rather than take the time and effort to repair. We mend as a visual statement about sustainable values and care for clothes and the environment. We are inspired by techniques from earlier times and places such as Boro in Japan, Kantha in India, and patch-quilting elsewhere. Then it was done from a place of lack, now it is often a response to excess.
Rethinking clothing culture is what my book Slow Clothing: finding meaning in what we wear is about. Our actions and choices in the way we dress reduce our material footprint. Slow Clothing is a holistic approach. It starts with think, natural, quality, local, few and moves to care, make, revive, adapt and salvage for those who have time and energy for more engaged actions. We can be part of the change to consciously living lightly, buying less (or nothing) and making more.
Garments that are classic, simple styles, made from local natural fibre will wear for years. We need to pay more for quality natural garments and therefore tend to have fewer of them. This is the complete opposite of synthetic fibre garments, cheaper to make (derived from petroleum), that harbour bacteria and therefore require more washing – and every time they are washed they shed microplastic into the ecosystem. Plastic is accumulating in the food chain and new research coming out of the University of California shows it impacts human health. If you are not wearing natural fibres, you are wearing plastic ones.
There’s certainly more scope to engage with young people around how we use and reuse resources because it is their future at stake. It was good visit two schools recently – a primary and a secondary school – to talk about slow clothing philosophy and the idea of being indie.