Transparency for Sustainability bloggers

In the personal sustainability space, there are the priests and the monks. The monks live simply. Priests seem to re-interpret the lives lead by the monks and give advice to citizens trying to do better. The priests put Buddha statues all over their mansion. The monks live simply and don’t collect statues. The priests have their place in the world. However, as a blogger, becoming a priestess is my recurring nightmare. I have deleted 2 blogs so far, as I have realized that I have been preaching what I don’t practice. However, I think it’s alright to keep trying and go as far as I can go (without deleting blogs). Eventually becoming a monk, is a personal goal. Mindfulness training and journalling can help. Sustainability without metrics and lived experience, is meaningless and in danger of becoming overrun by green-washing. In the context of personal closets, I am trying to set some benchmarks for myself. This is an exploratory post.

On keeping a journal

There is no store/Pinterest board/Instagram page /Instagram feed/ runway/fashion museum/… that is as interesting as the spreadsheet of my own closet. This statement would have sounded ridiculous to me, before I started keeping a journal. It was a project I thought I would abandon in a hour or a few days. 2 years later, 99% of the time I would have spent thinking about fashion has been redirected to spending time with my journal. Gratitude and contentment have increased. It’s become easier to switch from explore mode, to exploit mode. From inspiration in shops to perspiration in my own clothes. It’s become easier to talk myself out of purchases because I can not figure out when to wear them, without kicking the elder garments in the face. I have the problem of buying the same thing over and over again with the intent of having abundance of what I like. It’s become easier to find a ceiling on the abundance. One body. 365 days a year. One body shape per decade. My desire to wear favorites, too many times, is strong. There is only so much I can wear. The ceiling is visible now. The fables have become harder to create. The reality has become a place worth living in. Making this one decision to journal, helped making the subsequent 100 everyday decisions easier. It’s nudged from surface level thinking towards system level solutions. This process, has made me very happy.

Tools I used to create the spread sheets : Google image search for photos since my garments are generic enough, email search for purchase confirmation since I do all my shopping online, RealReal search to find similar images, website for background removal. Five hours on a weekend to create the spreadsheet. One minute per day to update the spreadsheet. ( 8 hours making this post. ) I prefer Google spreadsheets because having it online made it easier to update than on a local disk.

Snapshot stats :

74 garments.

28 tops : 8 t-shirts, 11 blouses, 9 shirts

14 dresses : 4 short, 10 midi/maxi.

10 bottons : 5 pants, 5 jeans

13 sweaters. 5 coats. 3 jackets.

4 seasons.

Slow fashion consumed in excess == fast fashion.

In my book of ethics, not reducing consumption and curating the excesses, are in line with the root cause of problems related to sustainability in the wealthier communities. This need for excess made us misunderstand minimalism. Instead of consuming less and needing less, we started throwing out more in the name of decluttering. …… I would have needed a lot more, if I didn’t narrow my gaze with uniform dressing. I would have wanted to try all kinds of trends and cool garments. In my 20s, I wanted a handbag collection, a walk in closet with shoe racks, a large house to store all this stuff, …… the American suburban dream ? I would have found a way to procure them at the cheapest cost to me. The desire was strong, the highs were very high, the subsequent lows were very low. Uniform dressing saved me from the fashion rat race. It helped me calm down and take deeper breaths. Without it, I would have had no success in reducing my needs. Wearing only your most favorite clothes all the time, is the only remedy that I could rationalize. I often get advised to venture outside my style safety zones. I say : I found joy in a slower approach. However, there is a lot of behavioral change I need to work upon. I do not intent to throw away my beautiful garments that I adore and wear, to own less or to make space for the new. It took me years and a lot of resources to build this closet. If I can manage to taper off the new consumption in the years ahead of me, I would be proud of myself. If I am wearing these same garments for the next decade, I will claim the title of sustainable style blogger. The women/men who inspire me are the planet’s great-grand-mothers, grand-mothers and mothers.

Age and lifecycles.

When I buy something, I want to think of how it will serve me over the decade. Lots of these garments don’t make sense or only make sense in the short term, but they should work in the long term. The questions I ask myself when considering a new purchase :

For the sake of sustainability : ” On a scale of 1-300 years of environmental impact, how badly do you want it ? “

For the sake of community : “Am I supporting companies/systems that helps my community? “

For the sake of myself : ” On a scale of 1-10 years, how badly do you need it? “

By journalling, I am making it easier for myself to answer these questions. Humans don’t intuitively do quantitative and long term thinking. It’s possibly why speaking in tonnes of CO2 and 1.5 degrees is often met with blank stares outside climate circles. I am creating the tools I need, to make it possible for me to understand and represent my behavior over the decade. This is transparency, the kind we expect from fashion brands who can easily greenwash their behavior. Buying or not buying is the first step. Keeping for the long haul and continuing to wear it, is rewarded in this process of journaling. If you own as much as I do, I assume there may be similarities in our wear patterns. Maybe we could learn what not to do from my mistakes ? Or use my time spent on making these graphs to think about your own closet stats ?

Wear

Most articles I read on minimalism start with the authors realizing that they wear 20% of their closet 80% of the time. They go on to declutter. In my case, 53% of my closet gets worn 83% of the time. This one chart explains everything about my need, want and greed. The ones I need, get worn a lot and it shows. The black denim. The two navy sweaters. The two blue t-shirts. The one denim dress. The one jacket. The two coats. The ones I want, exist on the graph someplace far behind my needs. The greed shows in the unworn. When I want something new, it’s gotten easier to understand why I don’t need it. The questions to ask :

1. how many wears do you anticipate this garment to get in 1 year, 5 years, 10 years ?
2. Do you notice the chunk of clothes that got worn 10 times only ? It would take me about 10 years to get them all into the 100 wears category at my current wear routines and preferences. These are technically new clothes. These are what I need to tap into to shop my closet.
3. Wears, is a zero sum game in a closet of my size. Any wear I give to this new garment, would come from an older garment getting ignored. What do you intend to wear less of, for the sake of this new garment ?
4. It’s natural to wear newer garments a lot, as soon as they are purchased. It’s the lust of newness. Do not greenwash your purchases in your mind, by saying “I have been wearing it non stop since I bought it. It was a good purchase”. Unlearn this method of reasoning. Purchases should make sense in the long term. Let’s create new mental models to think about abundance and joy.
5. Before I started tracking wear, I genuinely thought I was wearing everything all the time. “Hundreds of times”, is something I will never utter frivolously ever again.
6. A pandemic year is not the time to draw big conclusions. It’s no surprise that the not-so-casual garments have gone untouched and that the t-shirts are raking in the numbers. Let’s do this exercise again after some level of normal has been regained.
7. I want to aim for wearing 80% of my closet 80% of the time. The 20% accent pieces can wait their turn and stay in my closet for years.
8. If you are a blogger who writes reviews, I need to know that you really wear your clothes into the ground. The number of years owned is a poor substitute to wear count, because it’s easy to hoard unused goods in wealthier communities. When I see new looking garments being held up and labeled as “feels like good quality”, I don’t trust the review at all. Would you expect me to know intimate details of a garment I wore a few times and then trust me with your money ? I want to review goods I buy. I need to do this exercise of recording wear.
9. If you are of this world, you probably are attuned to the world of incentives and rewards. Novel things come with their set of rewards : people gushing over your purchase, hormone spikes, more outfits, more choices, more distraction, …. Wearing the old things for the 100th time don’t often come with rewards. If you brag about it on your blog, they will call you out for virtue signaling. There are not many incentive systems in place for sustainable behavior. It’s often a tree in a forest you never visited growing unharmed, people you have never met having tad cleaner water, children who aren’t your own breathing less pollutants, farmers who can count on the rains to irrigate their fields, ….. so abstract, too little to take credit for, too little to believe you had an impact, and impossible to pin point. Probably why environmental justice is such a hard to talk about. A wear journal is the one place you get rewarded. You get to add plus one and smile. The garment stayed loyal to you once more. You stayed loyal to the garment once more. Reward yourself. Be proud. Make art about it.
10. When the measure, becomes the target, it ceases to be a good measure. (The Cobra Effect). I do not think the number of clothes owned, should be the sole metric that measures a mind-in-training to want less. How I react to stress, loneliness, boredom, sorrow, happiness, desire, creative expression, need for dopamine hits, need for adrenaline highs, ability to understand delayed gratification, etc should also be measured. The internal metrics are harder for me to talk about on the internet. The external metrics like consumption/purging are a result of the internal metrics. I hope they will do, for now. However inadequate, a measure must exist.

Future subsections to expand into :

Clothes & their mends.

Ecological footprint of my clothing. ( Each garment should come with a label like how food has nutrition values.)

Brands I repurchase from and admire.

Circularity of my garments. ( 8 years away from this post.)

Number of garments getting culled every year.

Define incentive/reward for behaving responsibly.

Philosophy of Money / Home economics.

Mindfulness training. ( External metrics are easier to record. Internal metrics are above my pay grade to write about. )

More reading : Lin’s post on her logs. M Get’s Dressed wrote a post on Wardrobe Tracking.