Minimalist Fashion – A Strategy for an Ethical & Sustainable Wardrobe

What is minimalist fashion?

 

Minimalist fashion is about keeping a simple wardrobe, where less is more! A small variety of colours with streamlined clothes which complement each other and the bare minimum amount of clothes in your wardrobe are all aspects of minimalist fashion.

 

A capsule wardrobe embraces minimalist fashion. It enables a collection of classic pieces that work together with the versatility to be assembled, allowing you to create look after look with just a few items

 

Some saddening fashion industry statistics

 

Here are some saddening statistics from 2020 courtesy of the World Economic Forum:

 

• Carbon emissions – the fashion industry accounts for 10% of all carbon emissions, this % share is growing every year
• Fashion consumption:
  • there was a 60% rise in the amount of clothing bought between 2000 and 2014
  • people keep clothes half as long in 2014 as they did in 2000
• Waste – approximately 85% of all textiles produced end up in landfill
• Water consumption:
  • the industry is the second largest industry for water consumption worldwide
  • Cotton is a water-intensive plant and consumes massive amounts of water:
    • one cotton shirt consumes about 700 gallons of water
    • one pair of jeans consumes about 2,000 gallons of water
  • Water pollution – textile dyeing is the second largest polluter of water with clothing manufacturers dumping water contaminated with dyes into local water sources

Advantages of a minimalist wardrobe

 

Here are just some of the advantages to consider of a minimalist wardrobe:

 

• Anxiety reduction – keeping up with the last seasonal trends and fast fashion can be exhausting and for some people can create anxiety
• Environmentally-friendly – a range of environmental benefits are achieved, see the statistics above for some examples
• Higher quality – invest in higher quality clothes, which you can wear for years to come. This is opposed to investing in low quality fast fashion items, which will be discarded quickly and end up in a landfill site
• Lower costs – ultimately having fewer clothes of a higher quality reduces total costs
• Less waste – a major ethical reason for a minimal wardrobe is to reduce clothing waste
• More wardrobe space – actually see your wardrobe (for once) as you’ll not be hoarding as much as you possibly can inside. Instead, your wardrobe will hold timeless essentials

 

Moving towards a minimalist ethical and sustainable wardrobe

 

Here is an approach to moving towards a minimalist wardrobe from where you are today:

 

• Tidy your wardrobe:
  1. Keep – try to only keep clothes you know you will wear, be ruthless in your pursuit of minimalism!
  2. Sell – some lightly worn clothes will be saleable and could earn you some extra cash. You could also arrange a night where you sell your clothes to friends and family, possibly donating some/all of the money raised to charity. You could also sell your second hand clothes on an app like GoEthical!
  3. Give to friends – why not give some of your clothes away to friends, if you know they would like them?
  4. Donate – for clothes you know you won’t wear, donate them to a charity of deposit them in a clothing bank. The over-riding aim is to ensure they don’t end up in landfill
• Discover your style – learn about yourself. Look through all the clothes you have left and mix and match to discover your style and also whether you have all the clothes you need
• Buy missing items – you will undoubtedly have some missing items. Identify these and try wherever possible to buy these from second hand shops and apps like GoEthical! If you can’t find any second hand, then buy top-quality hard-wearing sustainably made fashion, which will last for many years
• Look after your clothes – take care when wearing and cleaning your clothes. A little care will help your clothes to last much longer, in many cases 10+ years
• Swapping and rental – for special occasions or one-off events where your wardrobe doesn’t have that special item considering swapping clothes with friends and/or renting an item. It’s better to swap/rent than buy an item, which you will hardly ever wear – this is not the intention of a minimalist wardrobe!

 

Download the GoEthical App today to find some great ethical and sustainable fashion

 

Why not invest 2-3 minutes, that’s all it takes to download the GoEthical app from the following links:

• Apple 
• Google Play 

Call us on 020 8337 2175 or contact us via email.

 

 

 

 

Image Credits: Sonia Sanmartin and Victoria Strukovskaya