I carried on with my life, but
then the pocket got caught on something and a bit of it came loose, leaving a
hole behind it. I’m going to patch that up too at the next opportunity and in the meantime I’m wearing skirts and jeans that usually don’t see the light of day.

I could go and buy some more jeans, but it’s much more fun to see how long I can make these ones last and I’m sticking with a challenge to buy no new clothes for a year (you can join the Facebook group here)! Plus ripped paint splattered jeans are very fashionable don’t you know –  Ralph Lauren currently has a pair for the bargain price of £200 (don’t believe me – take a look here)!

I didn’t have a clue why shabby looking jeans are so in fashion until I read Orsola De Castro’s blog on the Fashion Revolution site (read more here) and I finally understood what boyfriend jeans were all about. They are meant to be your boyfriends jeans and your boyfriend is supposed to have got up to all kinds of strange activities to have worn the jeans as described hilariously in Orsola’s post :). Orsola points out that these jeans symbolise a pretense of living a real life – one where we get messy and dirty and rip our jeans, which is pretty sad really. I think that people do mess up their jeans though, but just not necessarily in regulation ways i.e. not exactly like the ones on sale.

I think the current fashion is totally ridiculous. Not ridiculous because I don’t think it looks good (although I would prefer not to have great big gaping holes in my jeans partly because it would be a bit chilly and partly because they would be easy to damage further and would last less long) or ridiculous because it means if you make a mess of your jeans you can carry on wearing them without embarrassment. I think it is ridiculous because people are paying good money for someone else to ruin their jeans for them, or not enough money (if they buy them at a crazily low price in somewhere like Primark). Also whether you pay over or under the odds for these jeans there is no guarantee that any great care is paid to the environment or the workers in the production processes. I prefer to buy my jeans secondhand in good(ish) condition and ruin and mend them myself thank you very much – it’s so much more personal, bespoke and original. It also has the added benefits that it is a lot less expensive and better for the environment.

So what are you waiting for – get yourself a pair of secondhand jeans in decent condition and wait to see how they evolve into your very own bespoke haute couture ruined and repaired jeans that tell your personal story rather than a story that has been imposed upon you!

Also while you are at it join in with Fashion Revolution Week which started on Monday. It is a campaign which was started after the Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh with the aim of convincing the fashion industry to take better care of the workers in it. The idea behind the week is that you take a picture of the label of an item of clothing you are wearing and get in touch with the brand on social media asking them who made your clothes. It’s a great campaign which deserves all the support it can get!

It was Brighton Fashion Week last weekend and every single event had sustainability at it’s core. There were talks, upcycling workshops, debates, a competition to see who could create the best piece of clothing out of rubbish, catwalks and a clothes swap.

I would have loved to go to all the events, but I couldn’t make most of them unfortunately. I did make it to see Orsola de Castro talk though and she was brilliant.

Orsola is a fashion designer who started upcycling clothes before anyone knew what upcycling was. She said it all started by accident. She was going out somewhere and wanted to wear a particular jumper, but it had holes in it and she decided to fill the holes by crocheting. Then she took it to a shop where her designs were being sold and her upcycled jumper idea took off, even becoming popular with the rich and famous! In 1997 her label From Somewhere was born and she upcycled mountains of pre-loved clothes. It was all going really well, but there were problems with not being able to provide a standard product as they had to rely on what was available on the secondhand market. Then Orsola had the idea of taking the scraps from the cutting room floor of high end clothing manufacturers and her label still follows that model today.

Orsola has been involved in keeping sustainable and ethical fashion high on the agenda and most recently helped to co-found Fashion Revolution  – a campaign to get people asking the question ‘Who made my clothes’. In particular on one day a year they ask people to tweet a picture of the label on their clothes to the brand who made them and ask them who made them. To find out more visit the website here.

In connection with that Orsola was also involved in encouraging people to show their #haulternative ‘s. Apparently lots of people share their shopping ‘hauls’ on YouTube. Some of those people have thousands or millions of followers. So the idea was to get in touch with some of them, tell them about the problems of cheap labour and fast fashion and to get them to show their #haulternatives (searchable on Twitter) instead as part of Fashion Revolution Day.

This lady is local to me so I’m sharing her #haulternative as an example:

I’m loving the whole #haulternative thing, although on a slight tangent I am a member of a Facebook Group – No New Clothes For a Year set up by Jen Gale of  Make Do and Mendable (join it here), where the challenge is to not buy any clothes for a year. It started in September and I joined it and went out and bought some clothes from a charity shop pretty much straight away, but I haven’t bought anything since and I’m going to try and stick to the challenge (barring underwear).  Anyway some people in the group are posting what they are wearing each day, so I wonder what a no new clothes #haulternative would look like :). Maybe a video showing outfits that people have worked out how to wear in new ways e.g. new combinations or with accessories they hadn’t paired with them before or adjustments they had made to them???

Orsola isn’t just passionate about upcycling, she is also passionate about the factory workers who make the clothes having good working conditions and fair pay and one of the things that stuck with me about her speech is that she said something along the lines of this:

In the same way many of us don’t want to eat food that has been soaked in pesticides and fertilisers, I don’t want to wear clothes soaked in other people’s misery. 

Whether or not misery can actually direct infect us through the clothes we wear, it can be just as damaging to us in the long term as pesticides are. Workers in poor conditions, being paid low wages are not in a good position to protect the environment, but often they are on the front lines in places where the environment needs protecting the most. These workers may be suffering alongside the environment from the hazardous chemicals being used in the clothing industry, but they are fighting to live, to feed and shelter their families and can’t make their health and safety their priority let alone anyone or anything else’s.

There is no doubt the fashion industry needs to change and it’s so great that Brighton Fashion Week decided to address the challenges facing the industry head on. I’m looking forward to next years event! If you want to know more about Brighton Fashion Week take a look at their website here!

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Giving to charity:

Originally I was planning to give the lot to charity, but having realised that most of the clothes given to charity end up being sold for a small amount and then shipped overseas by private companies who sell them on for up to 1000% mark up, I went off that idea (read more here). I’m not so keen on the idea of a charity only getting £5 for clothes that may have cost £525 originally (rough estimate for a bin bag full of clothes) and for a private company to then sell them on to vendors in a developing country for £50. If I had 35 items in the bag and sold each item in the bag for £1 online or at a car boot sale I would make more money for the charity. Plus I want to promote the wearing of secondhand clothes in this country. The more use we get out of the clothes we bought in the first place (whether we bought them new or someone else did), the less new clothes we are buying in general and the less strain we are putting on factory workers and the environment. Also if I did give the clothes to charity, I would just go to my nearest charity shop and to be honest they are not charities that I am passionate about supporting, they are just easy to get to.

So I could sell the clothes:

I get the feeling that I would probably make the most money by selling the clothes online.  I have a mental block about doing it though.  I haven’t ever sold any clothes online before and in my mind it seems like a major hassle. Each one would need a photo, then I would have to list it and price it and then I would have to post it to whoever bought it.  

I could give it to someone to sell online, but I am not too keen on this idea as they will want to take a large percentage of the sale. I looked up Ebay sellers online and after their fees and Ebay fees you end up only getting around 50% of the money. It is low on hassle though once I have found someone who I knew would do a good job.

I could take them to a car boot sale and see what I can get for them, which I might do in the summer if I haven’t done anything else with them first.

What should I do with the money though?  What would be the right thing to do factoring in the facts that I got the clothes for free, but I went to an effort to collect and sell them?

Or I could give them away:

I could split them into sizes and give them away via Freecyle or Freegle or a Facebook group.  I would prefer to give them to people I know first though.

So what is my plan?

I think what I am going to do is this:

• Hang on to the clothes for now.  
• Host a few clothes swaps like the one I did and reintroduce any left over clothes into my new clothes swap parties.
• In the summer go to a car boot sale and sell as many clothes as I can.
• Donate some of the money made to charity (possibly this one: Labour Behind the Label)  and keep some for my efforts (and to go towards my goal of making £10,000 in a year – read more here)
• Give away via online sites any that I couldn’t give away at my clothes swaps parties or sell at a car boot sale.

What do you think of the plan?  What would you do?

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Going to a charity shop is an easy way to get hold of inexpensive secondhand clothes, but there are other options. We are currently drowning in a surplus of unwanted clothes. According to Wrap ‘More than 60% of householders in the UK say they have unwanted clothes and textiles stored in their homes’.  Plus each year ‘around £140 million worth (350,000 tonnes) of used clothing goes to landfill in the UK’ and this only accounts for over 30% of our unwanted clothes!

To my mind it makes absolutely no sense to go out and buy new clothes, when I can just shop in my friends and neighbours wardrobes. They don’t even want to charge me for the pleasure of it and they might also do me the favour of taking some of my unwanted clothes off my hands! How does this work?  The answer is clothes swapping.

Hosting a clothes swapping party

Clothes swapping is such an easy thing to do.  In the past as I have lost or gained weight I have asked around my friends if they had any clothes that fitted my size that they weren’t using and I have been given a lot of clothes in exchange for my clothes that no longer fitted me. I much prefer this to trawling the shops for clothes that I like/ fit me and found it a whole load less stressful. Plus every time I wear the clothes I think about the kind friend who gave them to me.

I haven’t swapped clothes in a little while though and recently decided that it would be fun to have a clothes swapping party to give my wardrobe a bit of a refresh, so I invited a whole load of people round.

The first time I did it, it wasn’t a success – although quite a few people seemed interested in the end everyone cancelled on me. It is winter and lots of people weren’t well, but I wondered if people just weren’t up for clothes swapping.  I am so used to the idea of it that I forgot it might seem a bit strange to people who haven’t done it before.

Some people did seem really up for the idea though and they encouraged me to have another go, so I did and I created a Facebook event, which I kept updating with information about the clothes swap mainly to remind people that it was happening, but also to widen it to an anything swap (within reason, there were a few jokes about husband swapping and kid swapping going on ), because lots of people told me they didn’t have any clothes to swap. I didn’t want to make it tit for tat, so I just told people to bring things they would have given to a charity shop anyway and to take whatever they like.

It did go ahead this time in the end and I had a lovely evening with friends who brought loads of clothes, some bags, jewellery, books, toys and other bits and pieces to swap. Someone even gave me a bag of clothes to share out at the party.  She couldn’t come herself but was happy to just give me her unwanted clothes. I think everyone took something home and they left me with the bulk of it to do whatever I wanted with.

So if you want more clothes than you know what to do with entirely for free – host a clothes swap party! If you are thinking of doing this my advice would be:

• to host it on the weekend (especially if your friends have kids as lots of my friends couldn’t go out until their other halves got home), 
• give people plenty of notice so they have time to have a clear out, 
• entice people with drinks and nibbles, 
• talk to people about the swap in person – this will help you  to get an idea of how your friends feel about swapping and then you can adjust the swap rules to suit your friends needs. 
• expect to end up with more clothes than you started with (unless you make it a rule that people have to take back things that didn’t get swapped or that for everything they give they have to take something).

I am going to make it a regular event and try and do a swap party every few months. Next time I am going to extend it to a clothes, toy, plant (I’m thinking veg seedlings) and food swap.  I think it is a great way to get some new to me clothes, new to the kids toys and have a nice evening with friends! Plus I think it is a good reminder to have a clear out of the cupboards to see what food we aren’t going to eat. If I end up with more food than I can use I can always give it away on my foodsharing Facebook group (read more about that here).

I have a lot more clothes than I started with now. I really like quite a few of them which I will keep.  I don’t want them all though, so watch out for my next post on what I will be doing with the rest of them!

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Last months challenge to myself and to anyone else who wanted to join me was to slow down fashion! Some brilliant people joined me in this and I want to say a big thank you to all of them and to tell you how they helped to slow down fashion this month!  

My Zero Waste got mending and repeat wearing

Rachelle Strauss a.k.a. Mrs Green of My Zero Waste was quite up for the challenge in theory but wasn’t too sure about getting creative (read more here) . She started off by getting her other half a.k.a. Mr Green involved – you have to watch the video clip of what he did here! Then she had a couple of trips where she didn’t take any changes of clothes – apparently she still packed the kitchen sink, but no changes of clothes (talked about on Twitter).  Thanks so much to Mr and Mrs Green for joining in!

Mommy Emu got very creative with her sewing machine

Emma from Mommy Emu was also up for the challenge, which she combined with another challenge to buy nothing new and blogged about it here and here (and probably in more blog posts as well – have a read through her great blog!). Emma made some amazing things including denim flip flops (as pictured above), a tie wallet, shirt pyjamas and jumper into a cardigan! I am so inspired by all Emma’s creativity this month!

Westywrites has slowed fashion down to a crawl for a whole year!

Westywrites has been on the slow fashion bandwagon for quite a while now and hasn’t bought any new clothes for herself since the beginning of the year.  She doesn’t plan to buy any for the rest of 2014 either! Think that is a step too far or easy peasy? Have a read of how it is going here!  Thanks loads for joining in Westy and keep up the good work!!!

Second-Hand Tales made three pledges and charted her progress throughout the month

Kathryn from Second-Hand Tales really embraced the challenge and decided to buy no new or secondhand clothes for the month, do some mending and have a go at being vaguely in fashion with the things she already has in her wardrobe – read the reasons why she wanted to take on the challenge and her original pledge here. As the month progressed she wrote weekly updates on how it was going (very organised, much more organised than I was!). In week 2 and week 3 Kathryn showed us what she had been wearing a lot of the time plus there was a bit of mending I think and in week 4 Kathryn was starting to feel the need to add more range to her wardrobe, but still hadn’t bought any clothes (read more here). I love the conclusions Kathryn comes to in her final post about her month of slow fashion and I couldn’t agree more with them (read more here)! Well done Kathryn – it was great to have you onboard and you did a great job!

@sathlondonshona

Over on Twitter @sathlondonshona joined in with the challenge too.  Shona pledged to only wear 5 items of clothing throughout the month – that is hardcore!  On the 28th June (i.e. a couple of days ago) Shona tweeted this about her challenge: 

‘I’ve seen off two of my 5 items since we started. Jeans have gone through in two places & one of my tops also too holey. Also the trainers I’ve worn all month are finally wearing out. Jeans 1 year old worn most days. Tops 3 years old. Shoes 2. I’d say that’s some pretty good innings. #slowfashion’

I asked Shona if anyone commented on the fact she was wearing the same clothes all the time, but she said no-one did.  I also asked if she was upset about the clothes wearing out, but Shona said she wasn’t as she doesn’t buy a lot of clothes.

I’m so impressed with this – although I have considered it, I’m not sure I could stick to as small a wardrobe as Shona did for a whole month!

Mumra

Nancy from Mumra was instrumental in inspiring this month of slowing down fashion and wrote about her very talented mother-in-laws slow fashion triumphs here. If it wasn’t for Nancy, I would never have thought about making a dungarees dress!! So thanks for the inspiration and thanks for joining in Nancy!

What I got up to


At the beginning of the month, I got creative with some curtain edging (read more here) and for the Observer Ethical Awards (read more here) I decided that I had to make myself a dungarees dress as my attempt to be in fashion using things I already owned (really not sure if dungarees dresses actually are in fashion or not, but I quite like the dress). I’m quite tempted to make myself some of those denim flip flops to match if I get a chance!  I wasn’t planning on doing much more than that though as I didn’t have much time but towards the end of the month I wore the same dress for around 7 days in a row (not pictured). No-one commented or seemed to notice at all!  I also haven’t bought any new clothes for several months (since last November – read more here), having been mending things when they have broken and have been doing a bit of clothes swapping too.

What I learned from a month of slow fashion!

• Some people find not buying new clothes easy – I like it because I simply can’t be bothered to shop.
• A limited wardrobe makes getting up in the morning quicker and can mean you get to wear your favourite clothes over and over and over again!
• Clothes wear out when worn repeatedly.  I didn’t want to wear the same clothes too much as I didn’t want to wear them out and have another mending job on my hands!
• No-one noticed when I wore the same dress for days on end and no-one noticed when Shona limited her wardrobe to 5 items for a month.
• I was able to emulate one of the latest fashions with stuff I already owned – it did involve cutting and sewing though, which may not be for everyone
• I should have included clothes swapping in the challenge, as I think it is a great way to declutter and get new to you clothes without any shopping involved! 

I think it looks really nice, but may be a bit too close to the project to be entirely objective so I would love a second opinion here.  In my house full of boys, my older son tells me I look lovely all the time (he’ll go far) and my husband tells me whatever he thinks I want to hear and whatever he thinks will get me to stop asking him what I think of what I am wearing as quickly as possible…

In case you are wondering what is going on – this month I am trying to slow down fashion, by trying to create fashionable items from what I already have in my wardrobe (or even spark new fashion trends like my necklace above ).  I have challenged you all to join in with me and you don’t need to worry about the current fashion trends either.

You could:

• Wear the same pair of shoes every day for a month
• Thin out your wardrobe and choose a set number of clothes to wear for the month – how low can you go? Do you need 20 items or could you cope with 5 or even less?
• Get creative and embellish just one unloved item of clothing, shoes or accessories. You could even make an accessory like a brooch with scraps you find around your home..
• Mend something that wouldn’t otherwise
• Take on the Passion Fashion DoAction in support of my Year of Eco Challenges – see more info here
• Or join me and create a whole new outfit from what you already have – it doesn’t have to fit in with the latest fashion trends, it could just be a reflection of your own personal style!

I am currently undertaking a Year of Eco Challenges . If you have a moment I would really appreciate it if you would consider sponsoring me with an action (no money involved) on my DoNation page. Also if you liked this post please click like on Facebook and follow on Twitter – thanks so much!

Last weekend someone was giving away a folding caravan! I asked for it, but I was too late (you have to be quick off the mark). It was a doer upper, but I thought we could have a lot of fun with it and share it with all our friends. Oh well, I’ll just have to keep my eyes peeled for the next caravan being given away!

Then someone offered a bag of aged 6-7 boys clothes on Freegle, which I sent an email asking for as quickly as I could and we were very lucky to be given them. My son turns six within the next few months, so the timing was perfect! I couldn’t believe how many clothes the very kind lady gave us.

There were about 50 items, including t-shirts, shirts, shorts, jeans and more! We are totally sorted for t-shirts and shorts now for both my boys in that size (apart from school uniform).  In fact we can’t use all those t-shirts and will be giving some away to friends and family as we don’t want to keep more than we need.

£350 not spent!

By using Freegle we saved ourselves bucket loads of money – if I had to hazard a guess and priced each item at an average of £7 (most of it was branded stuff) this lot could have cost us around £350! The clothes were in really good condition and many looked as though they had been hardly worn. As I was sorting through all the clothes though I asked myself three questions:

Question 1: Is it fair that the family who gave us these clothes must have spent so much money on them and we just got them for free?

My answer to myself was this: just because I could go out and buy new clothes (if I really needed to) it doesn’t mean I should.  Getting pre-loved clothes for my kids is by far the most eco-friendly option (at the moment). It saves all the environmental impact of making, transporting and selling new clothes and saves them from landfill after being used. We will give away the ones we don’t need. My older son will wear these clothes, then his younger brother and then any that survive will be passed on to someone else.  Anything that doesn’t survive will get recycled. Nothing will go to waste.

Question 2: Is it fair that we got these clothes for free when there are probably families out there who need them more than we do?

This is a tricky one.  Those families could also get clothes for free (or very cheap) via sites like freegle, freecycle and in charity shops. I guess you could argue that if I hadn’t snapped them up someone else would have had a chance to.  However there would have been no guarantees that they would have gone to people who needed them more than us.  Plus if we had bought the clothes really cheaply at a charity shop I probably wouldn’t have thought twice about taking the opportunity away for someone else to buy those clothes so cheaply – why does their being free make a difference?

Thinking of those families who are in need, we could give money to charity each time we get clothes for free, or we could just keep doing what we are doing and keep giving away the things we don’t need (read more here) so that someone else can use them (whether they can afford to buy them or not) as the more people that give to each other, the more it is likely to encourage other people to give (well that is my theory anyway – see more in the answer to question 3 about this).

There is another element to this as well.  If people who can afford to buy new clothes start routinely wearing second hand clothes and proudly advertise that, it can help to change societies attitude to clothes and help to slow down the relentless production and purchase of new cheap clothes.

Question 3: Does it need to be fair?

The best type of gift is one that is given with nothing expected in return. Things given away on Freegle and Freecycle are gifts from one stranger to another.  To take it further, the argument in favour of a moneyless society as put forward by the Moneyless Manifesto (you can read it for free here),  is roughly this:

• In nature a tree doesn’t charge you for eating it’s fruit, the worm doesn’t charge the plants for churning up the soil and making it easier for them to spread their roots, things are given with no expectation of return and that is what makes everything i.e. whole eco-systems work.  Every part of the system gives and receives, but none of the creatures keep track of, or any kind of account of what they are giving and receiving.  
• In contrast human beings like to keep track of who owes who what, in order to make exchanges equal and ‘fair’. However by putting a monetary value next to things e.g. this tree is worth £60 if I chop it down and turn it into paper and that one is worth £300 if I chop it down and turn it into a table, it seems to imply that swapping a tree for money is fair and equal.  However that money cannot even begin to account for the impact taking that tree out of that vastly interconnected eco-system will have upon the environment as a whole and on us collectively and as individuals. Plus once all the trees are gone, all the money in the world can’t bring those trees back. 
• The other argument that the Moneyless Manifesto gives against monetary exchange is that it severs relationships.  Once I have paid you my money I owe you and everyone else nothing.  If I receive something as a gift though, I feel a variety of emotions including gratitude and a desire to reciprocate in some way – this system builds relationships.

So I fully and wholeheartedly support sites like Freegle, Freecycle and Streetbank, which are helping to move us towards a society where people give and receive freely.  A society where we can replace a system of exchange and transaction and the ensuing environmental degradation with intricate networks of good relationships and a culture of sharing and I highly recommend signing up to them!

P.S nearly forgot to mention the plastic free element of this – the lady did put all the clothes in a plastic bag, but if I had bought these new or secondhand, they would have all come with price tags on them most likely held together with plastic and some may have even come in disposable plastic packaging, so getting clothes for free is a good way to get them without excess plastic packaging!

I am currently undertaking a Year of Eco Challenges . If you have a moment I would really appreciate it if you would consider sponsoring me with an action on my DoNation page. Also if you liked this post please click like on Facebook and follow on Twitter – thanks so much!

Anyway, so the jeans were no good as they were a) too big and b) going at the inner leg seams, plus there was a hole in them.

1. I decided mending them wouldn’t be practical or useful to me, so instead I got scissor happy and started chopping them up.  I chopped them down both the inner and outer leg seams. Once I had chopped them up I realised that actually I needed another pair of jeans to complete the bottom part of the skirt and chopped up the other pair of size 16 jeans that I had that was also going at the seams. I left the top part of the jeans including the zip and just chopped off the legs. Then I cut the legs of the second pair of jeans down both the inner and outer seams.

2, 3 &4.I then laid a size 10 skirt that I already had in my wardrobe over the first pair of jeans and drew the outline of it in chalk (and continued the chalk line to the bottom of the legs). I then cut down the legs of the jeans down the chalk lines (after pinning them in place to make sure the legs didn’t move while I was cutting them) to make them thinner to match the skirt (with a little leeway for sewing them together).

5. I laid the cut up jeans down wrong way up and pinned the extra legs into the gap in the middle.  I then cut the excess fabric off the central parts to shape them.

6. I laid the two sides of the ‘skirt’ back to back and pinned the sides together.  I zigzagged and straight stitched the sides together.  I used the zigzag stitch as it helps to stop the edges from fraying and will make the skirt last longer.  I then tried on the skirt and realised I had made the central panels too wide, so made them smaller.

Since having my burst of inspiration I haven’t had a chance to finish the skirt (it all ground to a halt when I broke the needle on my sewing machine and found it seemed to be stuck in the machine – not ideal!).  When I get a chance I will fix the sewing machine, finish the skirt and blog about it! Plus I have an idea of what to do with the leftover pieces of the jeans…

I am currently undertaking a Year of Eco Challenges . If you have a moment I would really appreciate it if you would consider sponsoring me with an action on my DoNation page. Also if you liked this post please click like on Facebook and follow on Twitter – thanks so much!