Four Ways to Make Fashion Sustainable and Environmental-friendly!

The fashion industry is coming up with one trend after another, and frankly, we aren’t complaining. But did you know the world is using more than eight billion pieces of new clothing every year? This fact was shared by the documentary The True Cost. Yup! That’s a whopping amount, and it’s a four hundred percent spike just twenty years back.

The point is what you wear is polluting the world, and there is no better way to put it out. The clothing industry is the second highest polluter globally, and it’s just trailing behind oil-based industries.

So, how can we, as consumers, reduce their carbon footprint? Follow these hacks to show some love to the environment and make environment-friendly fashion choices.

Swop your clothes

Raye Pandit, a fashion entrepreneur, found out that most people, especially in the age group of 25 – 34, did not use half of the clothes they buy. They used only twenty percent. Thus, Raye founded a platform where this particular issue can be resolved. Inaugurated in 2016, Swapaholic is a shopper’s haven where people trade their old clothes for somebody else’s unused clothing. This reduces the need for fresh new clothes. This sees a drop in demand for new clothes and saves many clothes from finding their way to landfills. This trend caught on, and the number of attendees jumped from thirty to thirteen hundred!

 Choose sustainable fashion

Instead of embracing (fast) fashion, people can opt for sustainable fashion, a popular term coined by retailers describing something low in cost and quality that finds its way from runways to stores — basically, this is clothing uses durable fabrics. If you think sustainable and bio-degradable fashion is boring and uncool, think again. A case in point is a biotech startup based in the USA that is spinning clothes out of the spider yarn.

What do you think of outfits made of micro-bugs? We think it’s cool! The silk fibers are as strong as Teflon, if not more, and yet they are soft as a cloud. The fiber undergoes the process of using a combination of sugar, yeast, and water from plants that are replanted. These and many other innovations in sustainable fashion are becoming more and more popular, and it won’t be too long before people will start catching up with this trend.

Rent or Repeat

Do you wish to wear the season’s latest fashion without it impacting your planet? Well, don’t worry, you could get a drool-worthy wardrobe from rental clothing services that are crowding the local fashion space. You can get the clothes from companies where all you need to do is pay a monthly subscription fee that sometimes also offers alteration services.

All you have to do is pay a rental fee and not for each clothes you wear. Okay, they come dry-cleaned and ironed ready for use. So, every time you have to attend an event, you do not have to spend dollars over an absurdly-priced designer dress. Instead, you could look fabulous and steal the show without burning a hole in your pocket!

Vegan leather

Have you heard of leather that can be made without hurting animals and causing undue damage to the environment? Le Qara, based in Peru, came up with a concept of Lab Leather, and they developed a method where microorganisms can alter their texture after being fed a variety of plants and fruits, and that too coming from the biotech lab. The process can mimic the texture of leather, and what’s more, it is a hundred percent bio-degradable.

With ’90s fashion making a big comeback, you can also start to up-cycle old apparel that have been gathering dust in your wardrobe.  You can take a leaf out of some of the YouTubers who can give you ideas on up-cycling old clothes at a minimum price. Also, fashion influencers are teaching a thing or two on how you can wear a piece of clothing in different ways. For instance, you can wear a slit skirt and change it to a one-sleeved top or use a scarf to create a trendy, classy top.

Clothes are the simplest ways of making a fashion statement, and what better way of making a statement than making a fashion-conscious one? Yeah, you get to look good and make an informed decision about your environment. Go green in more ways than one, and save the planet in one easy flourish!