In this article by Donna Gilbert, we look at how making your own clothes can lead you to rethink your relationship with fast fashion. Whether you wish to expand your wardrobe with hand-sewn garments or continue buying ready-to-wear, even elementary sewing skills can teach you much about fabric, construction, longevity, etc. This knowledge may help you to implement a slow fashion lifestyle, make wiser choices when buying ready-to-wear, become a more discerning fashion consumer, and have the confidence to carry out simple alterations and repairs to increase the life of your clothes.
The history behind repairing clothes
Historically, clothing was expensive and not readily available, and as a result, women learned how to make and repair their own. Young girls learned to sew from their mothers or during home economics classes taught in school. However, as a woman’s role switched from the home to the workplace, shopping for clothes became more common. By the 1980s, clothing was increasingly affordable and produced overseas in countries with lower labour costs. Low-cost fast fashion shaped the industry and its ready availability reduced the necessity for needlework lessons in school. Sadly, the home dressmaking market went on a downward spiral.
Things began to change in the 2000s. According to the Craft Industry Alliance, from 2014 to 2017, one million people – nearly all women – took up sewing, bringing the number of those who enjoyed making their clothes to 7.7 million. The market has continued to grow, thanks largely to the availability of online tuition, and independent pattern designers creating on-trend designs and crafts, attracting a younger market. In addition to this, the resurgence of home dressmaking as a protest against the garments offered by fast fashion brands has increased its appeal, given consumers are now questioning both choice and quality. On Fields in Fields website, Carolyn Denham, owner of the fabric store Merchant & Mills, describes sewing as ‘an alternative to the sameness of fashion, the quest for something better, more bespoke and personal.’ It’s a wonderful summing up of the emotions which may be experienced when you can make your own clothes.
On this article we talk about:
- making your own clothes
- your relationship with fast fashion
- elementary sewing skills
- slow fashion lifestyle
Using fashion for inspiration
The ability to sew garments makes you look at fashion in a new light. You begin to analyze ready-to-wear clothing seeking creative inspiration, whether it’s a whole garment to recreate or a specific design feature to incorporate into something else. It’s very rewarding to look at an existing garment and think, ‘I could make that’, particularly if it’s a designer piece with interesting design features that may well be unaffordable in a store. Just imagine the satisfaction of being able to make high-end clothing which you know will fit you and last!
Underpaid, Undervalued
Making your clothes is, by its very nature, slow fashion. Finding a design or sewing pattern you like, sourcing fabric, perfecting the fit, constructing the garment, pressing, and finishing can take many, many hours. A standard crew neck T-shirt would very likely take a home seamstress at least two hours to cut and sew. Based on the current UK minimum wage, the production of this T-shirt would earn the seamstress around £20. However, some fast fashion brands sell T-shirts for as little as £5.00. That sum doesn’t only have to cover construction, it also needs to include additional costs for transportation, packaging, advertising and marketing, and its retail markup.
Reflecting on garment workers’ wages, Fashion Revolution states that there are millions of people across the world working in textile, clothing, and footwear production who are not paid enough to meet their basic needs, yet the big fashion companies continue to profit from their hard work. According to Oxfam Australia’s 2019 report Made in Poverty – The True Price of Fashion, Shima, an operator making T-shirts for global brands from a factory in Bangladesh, only earned a monthly maximum of AUD 169.30 (equivalent to GBP 88.45, about less than nine hours work on UK’s minimum wage). Her take-home pay was also dependent upon the unrealistic production targets that forced her to work unpaid overtime. Shima frequently worked six days a week, 16-hour days. Oxfam’s research found that 100% of surveyed workers in Bangladesh, and 74% of workers in Vietnam are paid below the living wage. To add insult to injury, management frequently calculates wages and overtime hours incorrectly and deducts workers’ salaries for not meeting production targets.
Finding fabrics
As you become more experienced at making your clothes, you also become increasingly adept at recognizing a quality fabric and finish. You will undoubtedly spend many hours analyzing fabrics to ascertain whether they are suitable for what you want to make, what they will be like to sew, whether they are of high enough quality to ensure longevity, and whether you can wash them. Making your clothes gives you a degree of control over the fabric, texture, and color of the garment, rather than settling for what’s available from fashion brands.
However, there is always a danger that one will replace the consumption of fast fashion with a fabric-buying habit instead. To avoid this, it’s a good idea to plan your sewing projects based on your lifestyle and wardrobe needs. Ideally, try and buy fabric for a specific project. Admittedly, it’s hard to resist the allure of a really special fabric, but by planning, hopefully, such purchases can become an occasional extravagance rather than the norm. Also, consider buying fabric already in circulation, such as vintage, secondhand, or deadstock fabric, which is left over from production and will be discarded if not used. However, proceed with caution as deadstock fabric may have flaws or may be ‘overstock’. This is when fabric is produced intentionally to be sold within other markets, making it less sustainable than it seems.
The team at Seamwork is on a mission to help the sewing community to sew more sustainably. Its weekly podcast includes a lot of valuable information including how to find more sustainable fabric. Its podcast episode ‘Where to Find Vintage and Deadstock Fabric’ clarifies the differences between deadstock, vintage and secondhand fabric. They suggest that vintage fabric is at least twenty years old, whereas deadstock may have been produced either recently, or some time ago. Secondhand is pre-owned fabric and is a sustainable choice as its re-use ensures that it remains in circulation and therefore, out of landfill. Second-hand curtains and bed linen provide a huge amount of fabric to work with. Fabric stores, whether bricks and mortar or online, often offer deadstock fabric labeled as deadstock or ex-designer. The latter is a popular choice with sewists as it’s usually high quality, available in limited quantities, and enables you to make something unique. Fabric stores also stock fabric, which is produced and sold specifically for the home sewing market, or have designs originally manufactured for retail apparel but were made available to fabric stores in limited supply.
Construction matters
Another thing you will quickly learn to recognize through making your clothes is whether a garment has been put together well and whether it’ll likely stand the test of time. When constructing a garment, you are often working from the inside out and there’s a certain pride in ensuring that it looks as neat on the inside as the outside so that it looks more high-end. To minimize timescales and production costs, this is something you will rarely find with ready-to-wear clothing. A well-finished garment is also a sign that it will last beyond a few wears. However, remember that what ‘you get what you pay for’ is not always the case; quality doesn’t necessarily equate to price. Some signs indicating inferior quality may include loosely sewn, messy or uneven stitching and loose threads, uneven collars, cuffs, etc. that look as if they are about to fall off, flimsy fabric, pilling on new items, bubbling between fabric and lining and shoddy finishing. It’s always worth looking inside a garment if you want it to last for more than a few wears.
Why our clothes don’t fit
Rather than settling for limited and misleading standard sizing, the ability to achieve a good fit is another advantage. For example, if you are either long or short-waisted, with a bit of experience, it’s not too difficult to alter a paper pattern to allow for this. If you have ever wondered why fast fashion rarely fits well, it’s all down to speed and cost of production. For a Fashion Studies Journal article entitled The Results are in …Our Clothes Don’t Fit, Andrea Kennedy, decided to lead a study on how the fashion industry now deals with fit present-day and sent out a survey to garment professionals. Of 467 respondents, 94% agreed that garment fit is a problem in manufacturing and retail. Respondents were asked on a scale of one to ten, how much poor fit contributes to returns, markdowns, and chargebacks; the average response was 7.4, meaning that fashion executives believe that 74% of their garments are returned due to poor fit. Most agreed that fit had been sacrificed for speed to market, and 21% of companies stated that they no longer fit garments on actual people during the design and manufacturing process.
To satisfy shorter lead times, fit samples had been taken out of the production cycle. Traditionally, fit samples are produced by clothing manufacturers to allow the company purchasing the product to check that it fits either the human body or, at the very least, an artificial form called a mannequin. Andrea Kennedy’s survey found that 21% of companies did not fit garments on human people at all during the design and manufacturing process. Instead, samples were checked on dress forms, via CAD programs, or by measuring garment styles flat. Without fitting on a human body, Kennedy points out that it is impossible to know how the garment will hang and whether a person will have a full range of motion while wearing it.
Slow Fashion Movement is not suggesting for one moment that making your own clothes is the answer to the myriad of problems that fast fashion creates. This is especially so when making your own clothes remains a niche market – and an expensive one. Many of us have no desire to sew our own clothes, can’t afford to, or don’t have access to the education or tools to do so. However, cultivating even elementary sewing skills can change your shopping habits, enabling you to become a more discerning shopper, and to develop a wardrobe made ethically and sustainably. As your sewing skills and confidence improve, you can begin to save money by making quality garments that are expensive to buy, such as a tailored coat, waterproof outerwear, denim jeans, or lingerie.
Yet, one thing is certain, we cannot continue to consume fast fashion at our current pace without causing irreversible environmental damage. With fast fashion brands adopting a ‘buy cheap, buy more’ philosophy and the fashion industry encouraging us to buy into seasonal trends to sell more, they are doing little to create a transition towards slow fashion. Meanwhile, the individual must take a stand to make a difference. We can start by reducing our consumption of clothing. The UN Alliance for Sustainable Fashion reports that the average consumer buys 60% more clothing than fifteen years ago. The Berlin-based Hot or Cool Institute suggests that reducing the purchase of new clothes is the most effective way to reduce the carbon footprint of clothing consumption, leading to reductions that are four times higher than the next best solution, which is to increase the use time of garments.
Of course, increasing the use time of garments could be achieved more easily if they were constructed better in the first place but, at the very least, it would be nice to see basic sewing skills taught in schools once again. The ability to carry out even small repairs or alterations would save a lot of clothing heading to landfills and would provide people with the skills to refashion or repurpose garments they have fallen out of love with.
By Donna Gilbert
