It is predicted that 80% of all new year’s resolutions fail, with some falling apart just days or weeks into the new year and others lasting a year before being abandoned; replaced by other more enticing goals. Some of the toughest new year’s resolutions to stick to are those that involve changing consumer habits. This can mean vowing to ditch shopping at plastic-intensive supermarkets, purchasing less meat products, switching to rental and sharing models – rather than outright ownership of products – and substituting polluting fast fashion with sustainable, slow fashion.
The issue with these resolutions is that they often take great effort to maintain, requiring a complete rewiring of long-held habits and time-saving routines. Here are some sustainable fashion new year’s resolutions that are realistic to achieve and which will have a huge positive impact on your enjoyment of the sustainable clothes you wear as well as on the planet we all inhabit.
1. Ditch On-Demand, Shop PRE-ORDER Instead
The modern consumer experience is typified by instant, short-term gratification. One of the main drivers of this is the next-day-delivery business model, which now has people expecting the product they’ve bought to land on their doorstep within a matter of hours instead of days or weeks.
This trend has led to big problems in the fashion industry, as brands build up huge quantities of stock so they can meet expected demand, only to then send much of the stock to waste if it goes unsold or is deemed surplus to requirements. Brands like Shein and H&M have been known to send between 20%-30% of their stock to landfill or incinerators, with huge environmental repercussions.
The best new year’s resolution to counter this worrying trend is to shop in a more eco-conscious way, with help from our PRE-ORDER system. When you order sustainable pants, eco-friendly jackets, or ethical sweaters using PRE-ORDER you accept that it may take some weeks for your sustainable clothing order to arrive, because we only buy the raw materials we need once a product’s PRE-ORDER period has ended.
In this way, your new sustainable knits, eco-friendly underwear and ethical shirts will have been sourced in a manner that completely eliminates overproduction. Your patience will be rewarded by eco apparel that’s lovingly designed in Barcelona and handcrafted in Portugal; delivered to you in recycled paper packaging. This Christmas and new year you may even have spotted our special festive packaging, designed by our very own in-house artist, Emil Kozak.
2. Choose Timeless Outfits Over Fleeting Trends
Fast fashion marketing departments relentlessly bombard their customers with campaigns that portray past collections as passé, and new ones as crucial for maintaining social status, up-to-date artistic taste, etc. etc. All this is driven by the desire to sell more and more clothing, year on year. It’s easy to get wrapped up in this doom loop, as your wardrobe overflows with clothes and the environment creaks under the pressure of so much unnecessary production.
Choosing to shop slow fashion brands in 2024 will open your eyes to a new idea of what’s fashionable. Slowly but surely sustainable jackets, ethical sweaters and eco socks are becoming the hottest trends in fashion, their popularity driven by how long they last and how timeless their style is, rather than whatever the latest gimmick may be. Silence the notifications, switch off the endless marketing drone, and focus on what truly will fulfil you (hint: it’s not consumer goods!)
3. Wear Organic, Botanic & Recycled Materials
Another great way to move the sustainable fashion dial in the right direction in 2024 is to learn about which fabrics and yarns are the best for the environment. Organic materials have far lower impacts on the environment than their non-organic counterparts. Take organic cotton for example, the sort we use to create our sustainable t-shirts and corduroy sustainable shirts, which is estimated to reduce global warming potential by 46% versus normal cotton.
Because the cotton we use is organic, that’s also a guarantee that no hazardous pesticides, artificial fertilisers, or genetically modified seeds were used to produce it. That’s a win for people with sensitive skin who wear sustainable trousers or eco-friendly sweatpants, as well as being a win for rivers and oceans, many of which suffer from pollution caused by such synthetic substances leaching into them.
Botanic fibres can be found in innovative materials like lyocell and viscose, both of which are at least partially derived from tree pulp. The varieties we use are sourced right here in Europe and are called TENCEL™ Lyocell and LENZING™ ECOVERO™ Viscose. Both these materials are perfect for creating silky smooth sustainable dresses, eco-friendly pants, and ethical shirts.
The trees used to create these fabrics are all grown in sustainably managed European forests, so you can rest assured that no rainforests were felled to make them. LENZING™ ECOVERO™ Viscose is also manufactured as part of a closed loop process, whereby chemicals and water are reused again and again, thus massively reducing water pollution, not something that can be said of all viscose manufacturing processes.
Opting for clothes made of recycled materials is also a great way of ensuring you wear sustainable outfits with the smallest ecological footprints as possible. An easy way to do this is to shun the use of swimwear and beach towels made from virgin plastics, choosing instead to sport our sustainable swimwear and eco-friendly beachwear, much of which is made from fabrics like SEAQUAL®️, whose fibres are partly derived from salvaged ocean plastic waste. There are also recycled options in the form of sustainable sweatshirts and sustainable t-shirts, many of which are made from RECOVER™, a fabric produced from recycled post consumer clothing waste.
These days, there is rarely a good excuse for buying clothing which isn’t predominantly organic, botanic, or recycled, because in many instances the sustainable fashion pieces those fabrics produce are far superior to those created by fast fashion houses.
4. Buy Local
In such a globalised world it’s feasible that even a sustainable t-shirt or sustainable skirt will have touched all four corners of the globe. Its raw materials may have been sourced in one corner of the world, its fabric or yarn made in another, and the clothing production phase taking place in another, before finally the clothing is flown or shipped to you, the customer.
Buying your sustainable knit or ethical jacket from a brand that designs and crafts all its products locally in Europe is key to cutting down on the airmiles that your wardrobe will have picked up over the years.
5. Only Buy What You Need
By far the best and most effective new year’s resolution you can undertake in 2024 is to buy only the sustainable fashion pieces you truly need, and to otherwise resist buying products (sustainable or otherwise) if at all possible. Such are the high environmental impacts of producing clothing of any kind, that even the most sustainable jacket or eco-friendly knit will still have a huge carbon and water footprint.