Picture this: the sun is streaming through your open windows, the sky is an unspoiled blue and all you can hear is the sweet singing of birds as they greet the day. Everything is perfect – except, you can only experience this beauty from the confines of your own four walls. You have already used up your allotted one-exercise-per-day and you can feel the boredom trickling in (despite trying to distract yourself with 20 different new hobbies). I’m sure over the past two months this has been a very familiar situation for a lot of people and, if you are anything like me, an easy solution to the creeping boredom is online shopping.
11.8 billion kilos of clothing end up in American landfills every year
‘This is a Good Guide’ (Marieke Eyskoot)
However, with 11.8 billion kilos of clothes ending up in (American) landfills every year, we all need to be aware of how much we are buying, and to do this we first need to know our wardrobe. This is why sorting out your wardrobe – until you are left with only the outfits you love and wear often – can be the best initial step away from fast fashion and towards shopping habits that care for the planet.
Having a big wardrobe clear out can often be a time-consuming and mildly painful task (this is one of the reasons why I missed a blog post last week – all my time was spent sorting and folding) but it is worth it for the end result. After turning my dining room into a new bedroom and moving everything downstairs, I realised that I was actually down-sizing in terms of wardrobe space. This was the perfect motivator, though, for being ruthless with throwing items of clothing away. In true Marie Kondo style, I thanked each item of clothing for its service before getting rid of it, and never threw items in the bin – instead selling them on Depop or donating them.
Most people wear only 20% of their wardrobe 80% of the time
‘This is a Good Guide’ (Marieke Eyskoot)
If you do decide to sort out your wardrobe, at the end you should know exactly what clothes you have in your wardrobe and what items combine to make the best outfits. This is quite a feat, given that most people wear only 20% of their wardrobe 80% of the time. You could even take this level of organisation further and create your own capsule wardrobe – there are lots of great videos on YouTube about how to do this, with YouTuber Miss Louie being my personal favourite for capsules that are both stylish and ethical. Other WordPress bloggers have also inspired me with their capsule wardrobe tips – such as Ordinarily Extraordinary Mom and That Chic Fashion – and I might even create my own capsule wardrobe post in the future.
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