REMIX YOUR WARDROBE

A sustainable guide to upcycling old clothes.

- Aria Chand

On a rather pleasant day, cruising through my hometown on a bicycle, I made the mindless decision to wear my baggy jeans. Within the first fifteen minutes of riding the bicycle through the bumpy roads, I heard a rip. I looked down intuitively and realised that my jeans had gotten caught on the bottle-holder attached to the tube, and it had ripped up almost seven inches of my beloved jeans.

My heart sank; there goes my thrifted jeans. I came back home dejected, but soon, my mother gave me a brilliant idea. We took the scissors out and cut the jeans right above the knee. After a few sewing adjustments, I had salvaged the jeans and they were now my favourite pair of denim shorts.

Similarly, I remember when my brother patched on an embroidered piece of fabric onto his torn shirt pocket. That old white boring shirt instantly looked more colourful and fashionable.

In our house, we never discarded any of our old or damaged clothes before figuring out a way to fix it. After living on my brother's hand-me-downs, as I grew older and developed my own sense of style, I realised how so many bland or damaged items in our family's closet could be turned into something more wearable.

Fast fashion (i.e., due to high demand from consumers, fashion brands produce clothes in high volumes) has a lot of negative impact on the environment as most of the clothes are made to keep up with the trend. And as the trend dies, the clothes become useless and end up in landfills.

Every year, almost 92 million tons of textile waste is produced by the fashion industry. Most of these clothes take ages to decompose. A textile landfill in Chile's Atacama Desert is so humungous now that it's visible from space.

However, not all is lost yet.