According to a recent survey, the average American owns 160 items of clothing. Today, learn 5 effective methods for making space in your wardrobe.
Environmental watchdogs and social media accounts recently made a shocking discover about the fast fashion industry. It turns out that literal tons of clothing, rejected or unsold stock by huge fashion companies, aren’t recycled at all. Companies have instead begun dumping them in the middle of the Atacama Desert in Chile to keep prices up without shorting prices.
While the lion’s share of the environmental responsibility rightfully belongs to the companies, your own consumer behavior may be a contributing factor. According to a recent survey, the average American owns over 160 items of clothing. Limiting your wardrobe and ensuring you don’t throw anything before its time can help reduce your environmental impact.
Below are 5 ways you can use to make sure your wardrobe is of limited size.
Limit Seasonal Clothes
Sometimes people go overboard when buying seasonal clothes like winter jackets, summer dresses and the like. But how many items do you really need? Perhaps you can justify one really good Nordica ski jacket, but an entire rack of winter coats and jackets is excessive for one person.
Don’t buy more than a few pieces of seasonal and temperature modified clothing because you’re not likely to wear them for more than a few weeks out of the year. Unless you live in places where extreme temperatures are common, you probably won’t need a lot of them. Avoid cramping your wardrobe and buying unnecessary items of clothing.
Donate, Donate, Donate
Don’t just throw away your old or unwanted clothes because they are sometimes very hard to recycle. They can also cause no end of trouble for landfills. Because of the new materials used in making clothes, they can’t even decompose properly anymore without depositing microplastics into the soil, if they decompose at all. The best method for you to reduce your wardrobe without offloading clothes to the nearest garbage heap is by donating them to charity.
There are always charitable organizationslooking for clothes they can give to the homeless, to disaster victims or the poor. Just remember that you should never donate clothes are too damaged or inappropriate. Donating a faded pair of jeans is fine, but you shouldn’t donate prom gowns or dresses because they aren’t made for durable or everyday wear.
Vertical Hanging
In a more practical approach, you could want to physically reduce the space occupied by your clothing. You can clean things up in your wardrobe by using vertical storage methods. For example, if you have a bunch of travel purses you want to put away but no more room to do so, stop stacking them and instead clip them to wardrobe hangers.
There are also specialized hangers that hang multiple shirts on one hook to save space and compress storage. Vertical storage is very useful for keeping your clothes visible. This can help prevent you from buying clothes because you forgot you already owned a certain piece. It’s also very useful for preserving clothes and enhancing their lifespans.
Learn to Mend
One of the most understandable reasons you may want to buy new clothes is because the current ones are already damaged. Some damages do mean you have to buy an entirely new piece of clothing like a huge tear or stains that can’t be washed away. However, some damage might just seem unfixable.
For example, torn zippers can be easily sewn with some simple sewing skills. Learning how to fix your own clothes is an immensely helpful skill that can prevent you from spending money on new items. Beginner sewing skills like learning rudimentary stitches and the like can already save you a lot of money. If you really want to make your wardrobe as efficient as possible, you can explore more advanced sewing methods.
Read the Label
Perhaps the simplest method you can employ to make sure your clothes last their full lifespan is by reading the labels sewn inside. These tags may seem useless or incomprehensible, but they offer great insight on how to take care of your clothes properly.
For example, you may think that your delicates can be washed in either hot or cold water, but the temperature of the water can either preserve or destroy the fabrics of these clothes. Read the labels properly after you buy them, and you’d be surprised how long a single shirt can last.
Reducing the size of your wardrobe and making room in it benefits you as much as it benefits the environment. Take these tips into consideration and enjoy your eco-friendly and affordable wardrobe.