Ethical Clothes Shopping; a quick guide to finding information, inspiration and wardrobe essentials

I've been so encouraged by friends asking me for ethical fashion recommendations recently that I thought I'd write a quick post, more of an FAQ than a fully formed directory, to speed up the searching process for anyone interested in doing some ethical shopping.

I quite like the research process I'm going through before I make clothing purchases; I'm learning about innovative fabrics, international supply chains and discovering fashion's Next Big Things, but I realise that doesn't work as a shopping strategy for most people.

We all want good quality, wearable clothing at a price we can afford, and I'd like to think that if you're reading my blog you probably want the clothes you buy to do more good than harm. So here are some suggestions to set you on the path towards a more sustainable wardrobe.

Let's get back to basics:
Plain, stretchy vest tops, t-shirts, leggings and tights form an all-important base layer for our wardrobes at this time of year. We want them to keep us cosy, save outer layers like shirts or dresses from constant washing or dry-cleaning, and look good as an outer layer by themselves when summer comes around.
Rapanui sells vests and t-shirts for a great price, and it works out even cheaper if you buy several items at once. They also sell hoodies and sweatshirts, and partner with Teemill, so if you buy from them you know you are still supporting an ethical business!
Thought sell bamboo tops, leggings and tights which make great base layers, as well as a range of organic cotton and bamboo clothing.
People Tree are probably one of the best-known ethical brands, and as well as classic and fashion-forward pieces, they do an Essentials range of multi seasonal clothes in organic cotton.

I couldn't mention Teemills without giving a shout-out to my friends at The Suffragette City who are making the most of their moment of fame (a photo of them dressed as Suffragettes at the Women's March went viral) by selling T shirts and bags, and donating all profits to the charity Abortion Rights! 

Ethical Brand Directories: the excellent women who searched the whole of Google so you don't have to!

The Ethical Brand Directory was set up by stylist Roberta Lee because she was tired of the endless Googling it took to find great ethical brands. Some of the businesses she showcases specialise in a specific product, others, like Sheer Apparel and Birdsong London, feature multiple small brands. All the brands do a great job of demonstrating how stylish and exciting the world of sustainable fashion is!

Roberta is running a live event, the Conscious Christmas Showcase, on Wednesday 15th November, so pop along if you want to check out some of the brands from the Ethical Business Directory in person,  and hear from some amazing speakers! Tickets available here.

Ethical Fashion blogger Tolly Dolly Posh has compiled her own Ethical Fashion Directory; her list of brands was such a useful resource for me when I first started looking for ethical alternatives to the high street. One of my favourite things (there are a lot of them!) is how supportive and encouraging the online sustainable fashion community is; everyone is happy to share their knowledge. There is an understanding that everyone has a different financial situation, shopping habits and personal style, so the emphasis is on encouraging people to do what they can, rather than criticising for appearing to not do enough.

Conscious Consumerism on the High Street

If it's impossible to find what you are looking for from an ethical brand (sadly that's still possible; a lot of ethical brands are small start-ups that can't produce a vast amount of stock, in every size, for a low price), not all high street brands are equally unethical! Most big companies are much less transparent about their supply chains than smaller ethical brands, but fortunately there are people to do the detective work so you don't have to. If you want to reward good behaviour by high street chains (or avoid financially supporting bad behaviour), these resources will only take minutes to use:

Ethical Consumer Magazine grades brands who produce a range of consumer goods as well as clothes, so you can see at a glance which companies score high (or low) on their chart. You can also subscribe to the magazine which gives you access to more detailed content.

Not My Style is an app developed to rate high-street clothing brands according to their ethics and transparency. Download it for instant access to important ethical info when you're out window-shopping!

The other thing I think we all forget is that we can ask brands to be better! Multinationals might not improve their practices out of the goodness of their hearts, but they will have to if they see a drop in sales, or come under pressure from concerned customers.

"I'm saving it for best" - the hierarchy within our wardrobes and how to dismantle it

A couple of weeks ago I went to a birthday do for two friends, with the following dress code:

1. Clothes, mostly, damn decency laws
2. Your own clothes? (tbf this is optional)
3. Clothes you like wearing, want an excuse to wear, bought and haven't worn yet, or want an excuse to buy. 

Given permission to put their glad rags on without worrying about looking overdressed, everyone looked fabulous and some people even brought a change of outfit for partway through the evening! I was limited by my Six Items Challenge restrictions but managed to find a fancy necklace I hadn't had an excuse to wear for a while.

While some of us enjoy an opportunity to dress up, everyone enjoys an opportunity to wear something that will make them feel great without the fear of falling foul of a dress code. Being required to wear a specific type of clothing for certain occasions, we often end up with a strange hierarchy of clothes in our wardrobes, where the clothes we feel obliged to buy 'for best' might be expensive but rarely worn, or our ideal outfit might be considered inappropriate for everyday wear.

Most of us will wear the same small selection of things over and over again; our trusty jeans and jumpers, comfy leggings and jersey t shirts, easy-to-accessorise dresses. As these pieces get old and worn, they might be relegated from smart work-wear to casual weekend wear, then to household chores or gardening, and finally to painting/DIY, and after this they will languish at the bottom of our wardrobes, crusty with grime and dust, because we are reluctant to put them in the washing machine with any other clothes. Meanwhile, the outfits we felt compelled to buy for formal occasions hang about, rarely worn, reminding us that most of the time we just don't get the opportunity to be very fancy.

Having the ideal wardrobe for you, where everything gets worn but not worn out too fast, isn't going to be achieved by throwing everything out and starting again, but by slowly weeding out the things that aren't working for you and finding excuses to wear the things you really like more often.

I wouldn't endorse buying something for the sake of it, but I can't argue with buying something you love and can't wait to wear. So many of our shopping 'habits' are based around grudgingly buying things we are obliged to own to comply with a dress code, hastily replacing basics with whatever is easiest and quickest to purchase, or desperately searching for a new version of a well-worn and beloved garment when trends have changed. Buying something we can imagine being our best selves in should be the rule when we're clothes shopping, not the exception!

Whatever your version of 'for best' is, it might not be possible to wear it every day, but you'd probably be able to wear it more often. The key is your personal comfort: if you enjoy wearing your best clothes, there's no reason you should conform to an 'off duty' dress code as well as the one you might have to follow for work. Your friends won't judge you for looking more 'you', so liberate your rarely worn clothes and see how much more wear you can get from the contents of your wardrobe.

"Your Fave Is Problematic" - is my enduring love of feminine vintage clothing quirkily subversive or depressingly traditionalist?

I discovered the appeal of vintage clothes as soon as I was allowed out on my own with a monthly clothing allowance (supplemented with my meagre wages from scrubbing pots in the local pub). I went to school in Brighton and would meet up with friends to shop there on Saturdays; there were probably more vintage shops in the North Lanes than there were high street stores in the Churchill Square shopping centre before its redevelopment in the late 90s. Vintage clothes were similar in price to what was on offer on the high street and enough of my schoolfriends had a similar eye for a bargain so I wasn't afraid of taking a few fashion risks and standing out a bit. For my 18th birthday, I wore a 50s cocktail dress made from red organza with a flocked pattern of white flowers. I had the requisite LBD with spaghetti straps too, for clubbing, but my vintage clothes felt special and precious in a way that high street clothes never did. As other friends got into labels, my love of vintage persisted, even when one of my uni flatmates described a favourite pair of fleece-lined 80s pixie boots as my "dead person shoes". I found I was more attached to these clothes; they existed outside whatever the current micro-trends were and they reminded me of good times, or the fun I'd had searching for and finding them.

Until recently, I hadn't thought about vintage as anything other than a reasonably priced way to stand out from the crowd, until I realised that people joking that I "wished I'd been born in another era" really bothered me, because I really, really don't. I am a big fan of 21st Century technology and medicine, and of all the (albeit imperfect) advances we’ve made towards gender equality. I realise that feeling nostalgic about an idealised past is a privilege; for many people, it's impossible to separate the past from some form of oppression. If I had been born in a different era I wouldn't enjoy many of the rights and freedoms I take for granted, and even mid-20th century vintage clothes tell this story. I have several 50s dresses that I really love because they are beautifully cut, but I can only really wear them at formal events; they were designed to be decorative but not practical, so if I want to preserve them as they are it's all but impossible to change their function. It's no coincidence that the more liberated 'Swinging Sixties' youth uniform of choice, the tunic dress worn with tights and boots, is my preference for everyday workwear. It's easy to be nostalgic about the beauty and elegance of trends past when viewing them in the microcosm of a well-curated vintage shop; the dresses I have bought to wear 'for best' probably had other owners who were similarly blessed with well-stocked wardrobes and didn't have to wear their clothes until they wore out. For every lightly-worn fancy frock, there would have been plenty of 'ordinary' clothes that were repurposed into newer trends, childrenswear, patchwork pieces, and finally ended their useful lives as household rags.

In an ideal world, of course, we'd take what I (and, I suspect, many other vintage fashion fans) admire most about our treasured finds from yesteryear- the good quality, long-lasting fabrics, flattering design and durable craftsmanship, and improve on them for the 21st century. Now that we have the technology to create high performance fabrics that won’t irreparably damage the environment, and to design innovative clothes that don’t have to conform to outdated ideals of ‘acceptable’ bodies, shouldn’t we be working on creating the clothes of the future? Each decade has evolved bold new trends in response to the political climate and technological innovations, it feels like we’ve dropped the ball on both fronts.

As a cis woman, dressing in a stereotypically feminine way to attend a function is the opposite of a radical act, but I can’t help feeling that seeing the beauty in, and proudly wearing, something old and pre-loved in a world that insists on the constant acquisition of new stuff is subverting this a little bit. Recycling should be our way of life, not something we only do occasionally when it’s convenient for us, but every time I get complimented on a vintage or second hand outfit, I like to think that I might be changing people’s perceptions and encourage them to think about the way they shop. At least, that’s my adult justification for the way my inner teenager shows off about what a bargain it invariably was. Some things never change.

Starting my personal fashion revolution

My dissatisfaction with ‘fast fashion’ began several years ago, but I hadn’t thought to blog about it because I didn’t think I was doing anything special or noteworthy, and I certainly don’t have the perfect ecologically sound, sustainably sourced wardrobe. I wanted to make more positive, thoughtful choices, but the more I read about the problems with the fashion industry (waste, pollution, destruction of the environment, exploitation of garment workers, the list goes on…), the more I began to wonder how my personal buying habits could possibly affect such a vast global industry. I worried that even making ‘good’ purchases could be full of hidden pitfalls- would organically sourced cotton clothing be made by workers who were paid a fair wage? If I buy from the ‘Eco' range of a fast fashion retailer have I just been hoodwinked by their marketing? Tansy Hoskins, the author of ‘Stitched Up- the anti-capitalist book of fashion’ describes this as ‘ethical calculus’ and argues that it doesn’t address the underlying problem of overconsumption.

It seemed like there was no perfect solution, and I have definitely been part of the problem: for years I was one of those people who viewed shopping as a hobby, and bought far more clothes than I really needed. In fact, I owned so many clothes that I didn’t really wear most of them all that often, and I was washing items carefully and mending things I really liked, so nothing was wearing out. With my clothes storage at bursting point, and new financial responsibilities to take into consideration, something had to give.

I don’t think I made a deliberate decision to scale down my clothes purchasing, I just stopped enjoying a certain kind of shopping. I’d browse ‘must have’ lists in magazines and do some window shopping, but fast fashion had suddenly become uninspiring. By contrast, finding something unique and unusual in a charity shop or vintage market felt fun and exciting, and removed the stress and inevitable disappointment I’d sometimes feel trying to track down a particular trend on the high street.

Taking part in Labour Behind the Label's Six Items Challenge in 2014 was a big turning point for me, as it made me really think about what makes a piece of clothing a ‘must have’ item for me, and how important it is to appreciate and care for the clothes I already have. As a dressmaker myself, I thought about the disrespect I had shown to my fellow garment workers (working harder, faster and in far more dangerous conditions than I would ever be forced to) by viewing the clothes they made as disposable, while I expected the things I made to be cherished and valued.

Finding different ways to rock a jumpsuit during my Six Items Challenge made me realise how much I'd undervalued my accessories in the past! 

My focus for my wardrobe this year is to make sure I am enjoying my extensive clothing collection to its full potential- altering things to fit better, mending things before they wear out beyond repair, washing and storing everything carefully. As and when things wear out, I’ll think carefully about how best to replace them, and how to recycle or responsibly give away items I no longer use.