How To Be A Conscious Consumer Without Opening Your Wallet

This week (24th-30th April) is Fashion Revolution Week , marking four years since the collapse of the Rana Plaza factory building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in which 1129 workers lost their lives. When talking about conscious consumerism, there's often an emphasis on changing our buying habits, so I wanted to show that we can take meaningful action without spending any money. Here are my tips for taking a thoughtful approach towards your existing wardrobe and the fashion industry that supplies its contents.  

• Love your clothes!: Don't just see the contents of your wardrobe as irritating pieces of fabric you have to wear in an arbitrary order to avoid getting arrested on your way to work, try to see them as the contents of a fantastic dressing up box that will help you to be whoever you need to be today, or at the very least will help you to feel comfortable in your skin.  Your clothes can be armour, a comfort blanket, a disguise, an advert. Seeing my clothes as possibility rather than dreary, disposable items encourages me to look after them: wash them carefully, mend them where possible, wage war on moths that might try to eat them and look forward to wearing them again. 

My wardrobe is an adventure, and I love it! 

• If your clothes aren't 'you' any more, swap them! : With the best will in the world, we all have clothes that don't really fit with our current style, and might work much better in a friend's wardrobe rather than our own. At my recent clothes swap, two friends had put aside several items for one another and ended up having a swap-within-a-swap, both going away with some fabulous new outfits. I often swap clothes with my sister (I say 'swap', usually I take her unwanted clothes away and hoard them, I tend to get very attached to my clothes!) and we borrow clothes and accessories from one another too. As long as you trust one another and are careful with your clothes, this can be a great way to avoid spending money for certain occasions, or to get to wear something a bit different. I sometimes 'forget' to bring an extra jumper when I go to stay with my parents so I can borrow one of my mum's collection of amazing hand-spun, hand-knitted jumpers, made by my great aunt. I have to give it back at the end of the weekend though, the jumpers are amazing for country walking in the winter, but too warm to wear in a centrally heated house! 

Swap buddies! Your friend's unwanted clothes could be your new favourite outfit

• Ask 'Who Made My Clothes?':  Most of us own high street clothes, made in factories overseas. I have plenty myself, and although I may make different purchasing decisions now, I’m not going to get rid of perfectly good clothes, that just generates more waste! Big brands aren't going to change the manufacture and pricing strategies that have made their CEOs so incredibly wealthy unless consumers put pressure on them, so during Fashion Revolution Week  this week we can all ask Who Made My Clothes? Either write to your go-to high street brands asking for more transparency in their supply chain and a better wage for workers, or take a selfie in your favourite piece of clothing with the label showing, then contact the brand on Twitter with the hashtag #whomademyclothes to show your support for the garment workers who made the clothes we so often take for granted. 

On Monday morning I asked H&M Who Made My Clothes on Twitter

• Reuse and re-wear with pride: Incredibly, to me, there is still a stigma attached to wearing clothes over and over again. It's ridiculous, since we all do it with our workwear, and the comfortable clothes we wear around the house and to see friends at the weekend. Occasion wear is expensive, and shaming people (usually those who wear dresses, as suits seem to pass under the multiple-wear radar without comment) who wear the same outfit to different events is thoughtless and unkind at best, and at worst classist and deliberately exclusionary; dismissing people based on a dress code is the worst kind of old-fashioned, petty snobbery. We can all help by pushing back against this outdated attitude wherever we see it, and admiring outfits we've seen before. It's easy to change the appearance of an item of clothing by changing your hairstyle or accessories, but you don't even need to go that far if it's something you felt fabulous in the first time around. Your value as a guest should not lie in your disposable income, true friends will have invited you for your conversation, personality and because you're a pal, not a fancy prop!

Taking part in the Six Items Challenge meant I couldn't be fussy about wearing the same thing to several different events! 

• Spread the word, gently: If you're on a low income, you're following the 'new' rules of conscious consumerism without a second thought, and always have been. Planning purchases, shopping around, carefully considering what you spend your money on and wearing your clothes until they wear out is second nature, not a revelation. Those of us who currently have enough disposable income to splash out on the odd impulse purchase can probably remember a time in the not-too-distant past when we didn't. Conscious consumerism is about making choices, and sometimes, due to any number of factors in our lives, our choices are more limited. Talking to friends and colleagues since I started this blog, I've realised that most of us are making more eco-friendly and sustainable clothing decisions without really realising it. By exchanging or offering tips and advice about repairing, reusing or recycling our clothes we can reach out to people in a non-judgemental way. I'd far rather use my energy to convey my enthusiasm for the money-saving and creative aspects of sustainable fashion, than waste time condemning other people's purchasing decisions. Fashion is a complex and messy intersection of many issues and I am aware that I have the luxury of making choices that someone else may not be able to make. 

I firmly believe that everyone can be a conscious consumer even when we might feel we have a bare minimum of purchasing power. Putting pressure on brands can have a really positive effect. More brands have released details of their supply chains to the Fashion Transparency Index, thanks to the actions that Fashion Revolution has encouraged consumers to take over the last four years. There is always more we can do to help minimise the toll fast fashion takes on the environment and the people who make our clothes, and some of them really are as simple as signing a petition or sharing a photo.

Alternative Outfit Inspiration Part 1: The Personal (Style) Is Political

I've just come to the end of my  Six Items Challenge raising money for Labour Behind the Label, and over the Easter weekend I've gone from only being allowed six different items of clothing (five dresses, one cardigan) to having the entire contents of my wardrobe available to me again. The possibilities are endless! Except.... sometimes they feel like they aren't, and it would be all too easy fall back into wearing the same comfortable, familiar combinations of clothing, and the things I told myself I absolutely would make an effort to wear continue to languish at the back of the wardrobe. 

There are plenty of ways to get the most out of your wardrobe: regular tidying and sorting so you remember what's in there, swapping unwanted items with friends or taking them to a charity shop, trying to stop the endless cycle of buying new things that look a lot like a lot of the old things. One of the things I've always found brings out my most creative and thoughtful side is some sort of clothing challenge, whether it's to raise money for charity (like the Six Items Challenge) or just for my own amusement, to make me think about the contents of my wardrobe and how I can put them together in new and exciting ways. 

The 'Suffragette' themed outfit from 2015 I shared on Instagram as part of the Eco Fashion Challenge

I am currently participating in the #ecofashionchallenge on  Instagram , and Facebook started reminding me of a challenge I set myself in 2015; to wear outfits inspired by aspects of the British political system in the run up to the General Election. I joked that I was "cosplaying the election", but apart from putting together a 'femme' version of the eerily similar outfit all the party leaders wore to look 'casual', I didn't dress as any specific person. Instead my outfits (accompanied by a little bit of fairly impartial commentary when I put up photos on Facebook) were inspired by campaign talking points (the NHS, the Welfare State, the EU) and the idiosyncrasies of our political system, right down to the physical structure of Parliament itself (did you know they have falcons to keep the pigeons off the roof?). Some of the outfits worked better than others, some were a bit too silly ('Mer-people of the Firth of Clyde Against Trident' sadly didn't make it out of the house), but I wore and enjoyed some clothes that hadn't seen the light of day in a while, and having to write the captions helped me to consolidate my thoughts about certain political issues. 

Too much activism? Or too much glittery tail? 

At this point in the original draft of this post, I headed away from politics and started writing about the style inspiration I take from my favourite fictional heroes. But the day before I was planning to post this, a General Election was suddenly called, and a re-write was needed. I'll be singing the praises of 'closet cosplay' in part 2 of this series of posts, because right now I need to talk about rights, and how ours are more closely linked to those of the garment workers I have been raising money for over the last six weeks than perhaps we would like to think.

In the past I have tried to keep my posts and social media activity politically neutral, for fear of offending anyone who held different opinions, but the time for that is long gone. Our complacency over the rights and privileges we have (the right to vote, free healthcare, employment rights, paid holidays and sick pay for employees, beautiful countryside to enjoy on our days off) has led us to devalue them and take them for granted, assuming they will always be  here. The rights we enjoy now were hard-fought, hard-won and the things we value will only continue to exist if we fight for them. Politics affects everything in my life, worrying about it having an effect on my wellbeing is not overreacting. We have a Prime Minister, intent on increasing her majority in parliament, who doesn't care about employment rights, access to healthcare or the environment.

For someone who is passionately concerned about reducing my impact on the world by making choices that might not be the easiest but will benefit the world in the long run, politicians playing selfish, costly games for short-term gains is  horrifying to me. I truly believe we can find a balance where we can all learn to tread lightly on the face of the earth while dismantling the damaging dichotomy of "strivers vs skivers" that keep us divided and fighting amongst ourselves.

So I'll carry on fighting for eco-friendly, sustainable fashion. I'll fight alongside anyone who shares my values. But I might also be adding some new political-themed outfits to my Instagram feed, and this time, I'll say what I really think.

Spring Cleaning My Wardrobe: a thoughtful approach to repurposing, recycling and re-evaluating (and maybe downsizing a little bit)

My partner and I moved into our flat seven years ago; it's not a large place and we've both accumulated a lot of stuff, so over the last few weeks we've been having a bit of a clear out.  Since I've been taking part in Labour Behind the Label's Six Items Challenge at the same time, it seemed like a good opportunity to look over my wardrobe and think realistically about the things I never wear, and the best way to give them a new lease of life.

I've seen a lot of articles recently about the benefits of minimalism, and I can see how cathartic it would be to rid yourself of everything that doesn't make you feel like your best self in one fell swoop. But I think that approach addresses a symptom rather than a cause, and that getting rid of surplus possessions slowly and thoughtfully helps us to address some of the (possibly uncomfortable) reasons why we owned so much in the first place.

A barrage of adverts inform us every day that the acquisition of stuff (or rather, this stuff in particular) will make us attractive, successful, happy. If you're able to recognise that and change your mindset that's fantastic, but it's an ongoing task when ads are specifically targeted for you online. We also live in uncertain times, so our tendency is to hang on to things, 'just in case'. I have good sewing skills and can alter or mend my clothes, but I do need tools and haberdashery to to this, so living a truly minimalist lifestyle is never going to be an option for me. I don't think this is a bad thing; recognising that we can't just get rid of things when they are no longer pristine and learning to fix things reminds us that it's not just the item itself that has value; the raw materials it is made out of are not in infinite supply and we do not have an endless, bottomless landfill in which we can discard anything that isn't 'on trend'.

The idea that we could throw out all our clutter and replace it with a few sleek items that will revolutionise the way we live is appealing, but what happens when those items fall out of fashion in a few years? Do we just repeat the process over again? And what about all the things we reject?

I love shopping in charity shops; I'm grateful to everyone in my local area who has given away barely worn, good quality dresses! Charity shops do a great job, but they need to be able to function as businesses to make money for the charities they are part of, and can't just be a place for us to dump all our unwanted, threadbare or broken clothes without a second thought. If you wouldn't wear it yourself in that condition, the charity shop probably isn't the place for it.

I have an ongoing repairs/alterations pile, and I have recently discovered the joys of 'visible mending' from Tom of Holland. This creative approach to fixing clothes means that your mends don't have to be perfect, they can be part of the ongoing 'story' of your clothes. Agy  creates beautiful embroidered patches to embellish her clothes as she mends them, illustrating that mending can be an enjoyable and practical way to practice crafting skills rather than a chore.

Claire Louise Hardie, aka The Thrifty Stitcher, runs sewing classes online and in person at her studio, including alterations, and you can also find free 'how to' video tutorials on her website. All her handy hints are beginner friendly and will help you carry out professional standard alterations!

If your clothes really are at the end of their lives, your local council should have textile recycling facilities. Alternatively, you can carry on recycling them yourself; I use clean but threadbare socks, or t shirts and leggings cut into squares, to clean shoes and boots!

I am running a Clothes Swap and Alterations SOS on Saturday, to give friends a chance to find new homes for clothes that aren't right for them anymore, or to ask questions and get some help with sewing projects that could transform unwanted clothes into something they'd look forward to wearing again. Living with a big bag of 'unwanted' clothes in my hallway for a month has made me reflect on my buying habits, and has made me more determined to stick to my 'thoughtfully replacing' policy and avoid impulse buying on the high street. Funnily enough, nothing has made it out of the bag and back into my wardrobe, although I can't promise not to re-home a few pre-loved items on Saturday!

"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.

Six Items Challenge Week 3: A broken washing machine, my last pair of tights and endless accessories

I'm halfway through my Six Items Challenge now, and it's definitely making me think about how I use my (usually ample!) wardrobe; how much stuff is too much, and how having lots of clothes can make life both easier and more complicated.

Last Friday, my partner took a load of washing out of the machine, and with it came two of the three plastic 'blades' that help to tumble the garments around in the drum. I had no ideas these could come off; in my three years of doing multiple loads of laundry every day as a theatre wardrobe assistant I had never seen this happen! Fortunately for me, my partner is very practical, so ordered the parts and fixed the machine when they arrived on Tuesday after watching an online tutorial. Over the weekend, I hand-washed my six items in the bathroom sink and gradually depleted my stock of knickers, tights and socks.

I work full time and have a long commute, so I’ve found that having a large wardrobe makes life easier in some respects. It reduces the number of washes I have to put on in order to have a sensible outfit to wear; I can afford to wait a few extra days before putting a wash on to ensure I have a full load and  I'm not wasting water. Since my clothes get worn less frequently, they wear out slowly and I don't need to replace things very often.

I wouldn't deliberately amass the amount of clothes I have now if I had to start again from scratch, but it has meant that I haven't had to buy anything new for months, and that I can put some careful thought into if and how I replace items as they wear out; I won't have to panic-buy the first pair of leggings I see or risk having cold legs, I'll be able to choose a good quality, ethically made product.

In the meantime, while I'm only allowed six items, I'm really enjoying experimenting with my accessories, as well as making more of an effort with my hair and make-up. I’ll confess to often forgoing non-essential styling in favour of an extra few minutes in bed on a weekday, but when I only have a few different items to wear I feel like I have to get a bit more creative. This is no bad thing - since I own a huge number or accessories that don’t often see the light of day, and I enjoy doing a bit of personal grooming, it’s been a good excuse to organise my morning routine to be a bit more efficient.

Although I am still continuing with my usual habit of sorting out an outfit the night before on work days, only having a limited selection means I don’t experience the worry of not having the ‘perfect’ outfit for a specific occasion; I simply choose the one that seems the most appropriate (according to style or practicality) and accessorise accordingly! I think I made a pretty sensible selection of items overall; I haven’t come across a situation yet where I didn’t have anything suitable to wear, although I have a feeling I’ll be wearing anything but a black cardigan once the challenge ends!

Overall, it’s been rather like travelling; as long as you have some imagination and enough clean underwear, you can make an occasion-appropriate outfit from even the most limited resources!

If you want to support the good work done by Labour Behind the Label to help garment workers around the world, you can sponsor me here.

"Keep on going forwards" - why solidarity is essential to our personal activism

I’d hesitated about writing this post, let alone actually posting it, because it felt very personal (maybe too personal), but after reading several honest and thoughtful blog posts by friends, albeit on different topics, I have decided to be brave and post this.
It’s probably no secret to some of my close friends that I’ve felt no small amount of hopelessness at the state of the world recently, and also anger at the short-term-ism and selfishness that leads to people and resources being exploited to benefit the very wealthy, rather than being cared for to improve the world for the generations who will come after us.

Last Saturday, because I rather liked the idea of dragging International Women's Day out into a long weekend, I was thrilled to get a ticket from a friend to see Grace Petrie and her 'Coven' perform in a community run pub in London.
The gig left me feeling very emotional, not just because of the beautiful folk music performed by Grace, Lady Maisery and O'Hooley and Tiddow, but because the songs themselves carried a powerful message of hope. These talented musicians gently suggested that barriers to equality and fairness are not insurmountable, just obstacles we can all chip away at in our own way until they fall.

Some of the 'traditional' songs of solidarity and protest sung by the Coven were written over a century ago, but they seemed incredibly, worryingly relevant. I reflected on how we seem to have lost track of the concept of solidarity in a world that seems to require more and more from us, and gives us less and less in return. In these times it's easy to feel that we barely have the resources or time to improve our own circumstances, let alone the lives of others, but it's under these circumstances that we need to support, and be supported by, our friends and communities more than ever.
We need to seize on the things we have in common and use them as a way to build each other up, rather than using our differences as a way to push each other back down. When you start looking for common ground, it's easy to find, and when you listen to the concerns of others (while taking on board and learning from constructive criticism), you can start to provide the support they need.
For all the incredible innovations of the last century, we are still an incredibly unequal society, and I don't simply mean globally. The problem is right here in the UK, with London as a  microcosm of a wider problem.

I often feel overwhelmed by the challenges the world is facing at the moment, and sometimes it's hard to imagine how my attempts to generate less waste, or to make sustainable or ethical fashion choices, could possibly make an impact. But when I look around, I realise it's not just me. I can swap tips about mending clothes with work friends, or enthuse about my ethically sourced bamboo leggings, and no one rolls their eyes or thinks I'm odd. My mum and her pilates teacher were relieved to discover that darning walking-boot socks wasn't something that was unique to them (I have no idea how they got on to this topic) and as well as being involved in virtually every local ‘green’ venture, my dad was a poster-boy for re-usable water bottles on the community notice board by the village supermarket!

We are constantly being told to 'get outside our bubble' (one of my least favourite phrases of 2016!) but I think there is a more productive way to do this than arguing with strangers on the Internet. The support of our peers and communities can give us the courage to raise our voices and reach out to people beyond our immediate sphere of influence. People who might initially think that conscious or ethical consumption is virtue signalling, or boring, weird or just a waste of time, could change their minds when they see alternatives to the lifestyle we've all been sold presented in a practical and positive way.
Although we might not always agree on specifics, or see some campaigns for change as more 'lightweight' than others, it's important to remember that we have so much more in common, and can achieve much more when we work together and support one another.
So this post is really a ‘thank-you’ - to all my friends who read my blog and say nice things to me about it, to the supportive and positive community of eco-bloggers I’ve met on Twitter, and to musicians who take the time to remind their audience that they will always believe there is more good than bad in the world.

The Six Items Challenge, Week Two

Here's my update of what I wore for my second week taking part in Labour Behind the Label's Six Items Challenge (a few days late!)

I had to alter the sleeves on the cream silk dress as they were very tight and made it difficult to move my arms (it had clearly been designed for looking pretty at a party, not for working in!) but apart from that, I'm happy with all my items and they are turning out to be quite versatile. I'm going to be getting more creative with accessories as the weeks go on, so watch this space!

If you want to help Labour Behind the Label improve rights and working conditions for garment workers you can sponsor me here.