Despite a year of not shopping any clothing my wardrobe is still full. Very few things got worn out last year. And, miraculously, things we’re added to the wardrobe without shopping. Consequently, I was quite curious to know if I expanded or reduced my closet last year. Basically, did I go plus or minus wardrobe-wise.
So I counted all my clothes the other day. I even put them in an excel sheet. If you google ‘count your clothes’, you’ll see that I’m far from the first person on earth to do so. It seems that an average, non-minimalist, wardrobe contains between 200- 500 items. Needless to say, I’m in the upper range, ca 540, including outerwear, swimwear, formal wear i.e. basically all form of clothing but no accessories or shoes. I might include these too in the future though.
To my defense, I haven’t given away clothes to charity shops the last couple of years because of sustainability reasons. As Karen Templer defined slow fashion, it’s about “wearing each item (whatever it is, wherever it came from) for as long as it lasts, extending the lives of things through care and mending, and re-homing anything that doesn’t work for you.” I think the last term ‘re-homing’ is important, making sure the item gets a new home, which isn’t the case of charity shops these days.
Reviewing last year’s wardrobe outflows, I re-homed a silk shirt and tank top to family members. I threw away some underwear, socks, and nylon stockings (after already mending them several times, thrown in the trash). Two t-shirts torn beyond mending became rags to clean with (I remember my mom saving worn out clothes for rags when we were kids, when did we quit this habit?). A pair of jeans with broken zipper is stored away to use for second life sewing somehow, i.e. practically they’re no longer in the wardrobe (anyone knows how to mend such zippers?). In total, I parted with ca 10 items.
On the inflow side, I sewed a scout tee from silk scraps in my fabric stash. I knitted a dark blue wool sweater (a knitting project my mom started but had abandoned). I found a 70/80s Austrian wool jacket and skirt at my parents that joined my wardrobe as well as mom’s old 80s salt and pepper wool coat. My sister trusted me with a torn Marella blouse that I mended and made sleeveless (on the picture). Thus six items joined the wardrobe.
All in all, my wardrobe went minus four items last year.
At this pace, it will take a 135 years to wear out my wardrobe. Seen like this, it looks like my shopping days are over.
There were also a few items that neither added or subtracted but simply changed categories. A red wool jumper left the ‘wool sweater’ category and joined the ‘wool cardigan’ group. This refashioning of a sweater into a cardigan following Worn values tutorial was a success, I have been wearing the ‘new’ cardigan a lot, I never wore it as a sweater. And instead of 27 wool sweaters I now ‘only’ have 26. The wool cardigan category went from 17 to 18 accordingly.
As a knitter, it becomes quite obvious here that one might not need more than 26 wool sweaters. I so very much enjoy knitting sweaters and cardigans but will I wear them? There are, in my climate, maybe six months of wearing wool sweaters and cardigans, ca 180 days. Assuming that you wear either a cardigan or a sweater, not both at the same time, it means that I can wear each sweater/cardigan four times during the season. Basically, it will take many years to wear out a sweater when it gets worn maximum four times a year. Consequently, I have to rethink my knitting habits. While I can finish knitting my current projects, there is now a ban on starting new sweater/cardigan projects for myself. To tell the truth, I did not suspect I had such an abundance of knitwear in my wardrobe before I counted it.
While I was doing my wardrobe audit Worn values posted a review of her slow fashion year 2017. Interestingly, she calculates not only how many items joined her wardrobe but also at what cost. Since I had a year of no-shopping, I paid nothing for new items last year, the only cost was shortening the hem of a skirt (because I was too lazy to do it myself) to the cost of approximately 200 SEK. I also put new soles on few pair of shoes. It would have been very interesting to compare this amount to what I used to spend on my wardrobe. Of course, I never calculated what I spent on my wardrobe before (a passionate shopper doesn’t want to know) but I suspect I’m saving around 30 000 SEK a year.
During 2018, I would like to not only keep track of in- and outflows but also of how much mending I do. Sometimes I feel like mending is all I do, so quantifying it would be a way to highlight the effort I put into my wardrobe.
Previous posts about my quest for a sustainable wardrobe: “Is owning less more sustainable“, “2017, the year without shopping“, “A month without shopping“, “The health bonus of no-shopping: reduced chemical exposure“