Sustainable clothing workshop

At the start of this month I attended a sustainable styling workshop at Edinburgh University's Appleton Tower, presented by Kaiza Barbour of Simplify Your Closet with R Sustainable. Kaiza works with clients to help them style the items in their wardrobes, and R Sustainable is a social enterprise looking at how the fashion industry can work in a more sustainable way. 

Kaiza explained that the most sustainable clothing items are those we already have in our wardrobes – even the most sustainable brands still have to use some resources to make their clothing! So we need to find ways that we can have fun with the clothes already in our wardrobes, styling them together in different ways, so that boredom never sets in. 

She showed how you can create a capsule wardrobe starting from one guide piece (e.g. a patterned top) and building various blocks of other items that will co-ordinate with it. With just three of these blocks you have enough unique outfits that you don’t have to repeat one for two-thirds of the year! 

There are also other ways of staving off boredom with your wardrobe, by upcycling, dyeing, and creating new items from old ones. For example, you could make leg warmers and a hat from an old jumper.

At the end of the workshop we were encouraged to bring out the items of clothing we were having problems styling. I had brought along a thin gauzy top with flowers on it that I'd got for £1 at a car boot sale and hadn't worn, and it turned out that the best advice was the simplest - wear it over a white t-shirt! Now I'm looking forward to warmer weather so I can try it out.

I made some notes at the workshop, then used them to create some pages in both my Moleskine sketchbook and my bullet journal, so that I would remember the workshop and all the good tips I'd picked up there!