Are you wearing or consuming clothes?
When reading or writing about sustainable fashion and consumerism, I sometimes find myself confound on the usage of the notion of “wearing” versus “consuming” clothes and how its usage can change both the context and message being conveyed. What baffles me is whether we primarily consume or wear clothes? How do we really view and use our garments today?
The Cambridge dictionary’s definition of consumption is:
“the process of buying and using goods, or the amount that is bought and used.”
while “to wear” is defined as:
“to have clothing, jewellery, etc. on your body. “
Ultimately, we would buy clothes to put them on our bodies, we consume to wear — or at least that should be the logic behind our actions.
Yet, today we often find ourselves consuming garments rather than wearing them; we buy them, we put them in our wardrobes, we might wear them for a little while until we discard them. Some of our garments might never even leave our wardrobes.
We’ve ended up with a culture where we consume clothes, just like food, toilet paper, or toothpaste. The main difference is that we don’t use up or wear out most of our garments as we normally do with food or toilet paper. Frankly speaking, buying clothes, or “shopping”, has become a family activity on weekends and a (bad) habit which can be explained as a structural behavioral error in the way we view, buy, value, and use our clothes (among other things). Only once we’ve managed to point or attention to the garments that we actually end up wearing, we can start to adopt a more sustainable consumption and clothing behavior.
Are you consuming clothes?
Is your focus primarily set to consume or to wear clothes? Scrutinize your relationship with your wardrobe and how you acquire new garments — be honest! When buying a new garment, do you take time to evaluate the investment before adding it to your life-long collection of garments — or — are your purchases unplanned and impulse-driven? Do you keep the same garments for years and years or do you discard them as trends come and go?
If you find yourself consuming rather than wearing clothes — it’s time to take responsibility for your clothing habits. But don’t despair, understanding, and acknowledging this pattern is hopefully the first step to sustainable and healthy clothing habits.
How — Wearing doesn’t equal owning
So how do you change this mindset? The answer is short: stop consuming and acknowledge what you already have. Organize your wardrobe to rediscover forgotten garments, style them in a new way, get used to wearing your garments more regularly, maybe during two consecutive days, or rotate between wearing a few garments week after week. Take better care of your garments, look for second-hand, quality, and view your purchases as investments that should last through many wears, season after season.
Also, if you find it challenging to stay away from trends and slow down the never-ending “renewal” of yourself, technology is now making it easier than ever to rent, borrow, lend, or swap your clothes with someone else. Simply reach out to your friends and family, or take advantage of one of many online services and applications such as HURR, RE-NT, Rent the Runway, nuuly, infinityloft, Fashion to Figure, gwynnie bee, Vince Unfold, StyleLend, myLIST, Vinted, Swopped, or Swancy.
I’d like to finish with a kind reminder that; shifting mindset is easier said than done. It may take 21 days to break, create or change a habit, but when it comes to consumerism, it’s so much more than just a bad habit. In fact, it’s a structural behavior and mindset built on the foundations of the capitalistic system of which the; social, economic, and financial structures in our societies are built upon. A system programmed to boost growth through increased consumption. So, stop to shop — together we can impact leaders and influential stakeholders with the mandate to make changes from within the fashion industry.
