Sentimental Sustainable Fashion
Treating clothing as a means to an end has become the norm in Western society, especially amongst our generation.
The speed at which we can buy something we see on somebody else online, whether it be a celebrity or a friend, is astonishing – it has its merits, but it’s not without its major drawbacks.
The specific drawback I want to hone in on is our relationship with our clothes, our attitude towards wearing them, how we wear them and how we make our purchasing decisions when it comes to buying something new. I think we can all confidently say we have bought clothes at a point in time where we thought we would like them, and then in reality, they don’t live up to that imagined view of them in our heads; they don’t look as good on you as they do on that Instagram influencer. The reality is we need to take a step back from this consumerist approach to clothes; it generates a sphere where no one has a sense of personal style anymore[NJ1] , and it leaves rooms with people looking the same. Our style should be the first grand demonstration of who we are as a person when someone meets us, not a mimicry of what we see around us.
This is not even getting into the fact that much of this stuff is poor quality[NJ2] , fast fashion clothing, which adds to the convenience but cannot be ignored as a major environmental problem.
A somewhat corny but true statement kept resurfacing as I looked into the issue: “Don’t let your outfit destroy the planet”, and it is the truth. As a Western first world society our purchasing decisions, specifically when it comes to fashion, have critical results in the environment.
An attitude I have found myself adopting sees clothes as more than just a means to an end (cheeky Kant reference) but as the end itself. When we buy something new it should be because it calls to us like nothing else in the store, something we can genuinely envision ourselves wearing in 10 years, something that if you tore a hole in it while drunk at the club you would actively go to get it repaired and mended rather than tossing it in the back of your closet, or worse, in the bin .
Building on this, I think our clothes grow and develop with us, this is most obvious when it comes to denim. Anyone who has been consumed by the trend for Japanese selvedge denim will understand that the character of denim changes the more you wear it, and often, for the better – that distressed look is so much more suave than a crisp new pair of jeans. The satisfaction you get from wearing denim that has been aged by either yourself (through years of consistent wear) or maybe from a family member as they passed it onto you is something to be proud of, it is an active dedication and commitment to a garment, that you adopt into your wardrobe and your wider stylistic identity.
This extends to more than just a pair of jeans, though; this can be applied to anything you wear, anything that you have chosen to incorporate into your daily wardrobe and, as a result, into your personality. That hole in your favourite t-shirt isn’t a necessarily bad thing; it’s a sign that you have fully worn that garment, and if anything, it often adds character.
In fact, there is a big resale scene in LA with distressed vintage t-shirts being resold for hundreds of dollars purely because of how thrashed they are, @pinup.rags and @twofold_la on Instagram being an example of this, though their stuff is typically more affordable.
Getting clothes damaged, whilst sometimes beyond repair, can often be a new opportunity to get creative with ways of mending the garment and turning it into something completely new and beautiful.
For instance, my good friend Ben (@ben_smith_tangerine on Instagram) hand repairs clothes using a Japanese mending technique called Sashiko, taking old thrashed up pieces, and adding colour throughout where moth holes and rips were before, turning the garment into something else entirely – hit him up if you need something repaired, he is super talented.