Historically, I have a bad relationship with clothes. After many years in New York City, Switzerland, and other bastions of the well dressed, I moved to China, to a city at the pulsing heart of the world’s textile industry. When I began frequenting a street-market stall—where I dug through enormous heaps of ludicrously ugly garments while the proprietress, a thin woman from Sichuan Province, hollered, “You’re too fat! They’re all too small for you!”—it didn’t really feel like much of a departure from normal. If anything, it was refreshingly honest. The shop where I tried on those laughable excuses for shoes years ago, when fast fashion was younger and more innocent, didn’t have the guts to say what was on its mind. It was hard to imagine love entering into the picture.
Elizabeth Cline feels, however, that when done right, owning clothes does involve a great deal of emotion. “What does it mean to create a functioning wardrobe you can get a lot of use out of?” she asks. This is a vastly important question for the future of sustainable fashion. Rather than focusing solely on buying clothes made ethically or with less waste, we should focus on transforming what we have into things that we actually want to wear for years into the future.
Repairing clothes that develop holes or lose buttons is a simple first step to take. Numerous studies have found that even very simple mending skills have fallen out of practice, and that many people today could not sew on a button or darn a sock. These skills are worth learning, not just because it’s satisfying to bring a beloved sweater back out of retirement, but because they can increase the number of times clothing is worn before being discarded. Presently, many items are worn only seven to ten times before being tossed, and the average person keeps clothing for half as long as they did 15 years ago. Companies such as Patagonia, who ask you to have a jacket repaired for free rather than throwing it away, are on the right track, says Cline. Even if only a portion of our belongings gets this treatment, from professionals or from ourselves, it would make a difference.
For people who truly love fashion, joining a rental service—Rent the Runway and Le Tote are two well-known options—that mails you things fitted to your taste and that you send back when you’re through, can be a way to keep the thrill of the new. And of course, shopping at second-hand stores is an important part of the solution. (There are even subscription boxes filled with stylist-selected secondhand clothes, such as thredUP Goody Boxes.) Cline says that in the years since she wrote her book, she’s stopped buying new clothes entirely. “I watched a global sustainable fashion movement emerge since the book came out,” she says. “I think that we can trust consumers to care about the fashion issue. People in their everyday lives do have a lot of power.”
Along those lines, getting a garment custom-made sounds like insanity to most of us, the kind of conspicuous consumption that’s totally out of reach. But many of us, though not all, do in fact shell out for high-end or hand-made products: a top-of-the-line laptop, local eggs, a good mattress. Why not, in light of the devastation wreaked by heedless production of a sub-par product, clothes? The idea is to build a garment that fits you like a glove and that you purchase instead of impulse-buying ten lesser ones. Cline says that if a new custom garment seems improbable right now, consider asking a local seamstress or tailor how much it would cost to alter a find from a thrift store so that it fits you well. It may be surprisingly inexpensive.
Reining in consumption by buying better quality and keeping it for longer can cost more money upfront. But unlike buying organic food, say, it is within the reach of almost anyone with a mind for a good deal and the patience to repair. Organic milk will be consumed just as quickly as conventional milk, but it’s not an option for everyone: many budgets cannot accommodate a more expensive product that lasts exactly as long as a cheaper one. Clothes, however, last a very, very, long time, even though many people forget that. If you a buy good-quality wool skirt at a thrift store for five dollars, you could pass it on to your granddaughter.
Doing clothes right takes planning, some resources, and some ingenuity, and it isn’t always simple. Still, it can be worth it. After two years of making do with the handful of clothes I’d brought from the US—ironically, many of them made in China or Bangladesh—I had run out of options. I did mend things. But holes opened up next to them as the cheap fabric unraveled. It was stupid: I needed to look like a reasonable human being, and my clothes—to which I had always paid little or no attention—were getting in the way.
Riding a wave of irritation, I went into the fabric market across the street from my home. I found a stall selling a striking brocade unlike anything I had ever seen, a rich blue woven with a scene of mountains above a lake. I bought three meters of it. I took it to a woman who made me first a dress, then a coat. It was more affordable than it would have been in the US, but still more than I had ever spent on any item of clothing before. And it wasn’t nearly as easy as buying something off the rack. There were arguments with the tailor, a last-minute restructuring of the coat collar, time ticking away.
But the coat! I described it to Cline: how for the first time in my life, a coat fit my shoulders as well as my waist. It also—and this was something that shocked me—covered my wrists. I had gotten so used to half-exposed wrists and to thinking of myself as someone who crept around in a shapeless down sack, that wearing this new thing was a revelation. I can throw it on with no preparation and look not just reasonable, but actually good. It feels like something I could keep for a long, long time.
There was a pause on the other end of the line. “So you do love clothes,” she said, and a smile crept into her voice. “That’s the lesson of the story.”
